zation, and was made up (though with little to
show for it) of picked men.

XII

The end came in the spring-time. Through the winter the party had
"such store of fowle," and later had for a while so good a supply
of fish, that starvation was staved off. When the ice broke up,
about the middle of June, Hudson sailed from his winter quarters
and went out a little way into Hudson's Bay. There they were caught
and held in the floating ice--with their stores almost exhausted,
and with no more fowl nor fish to be had. Then the nip of hunger
came; and with it came openly the mutiny that secretly had been
fermenting through those months of cold and gloom.

Prickett writes: "Being thus in the ice on Saturday, the one and
twentieth of June, at night, Wilson the boat swayne, and Henry
Greene, came to mee lying (in my cabbin) lame, and told mee that
they and the rest of their associates would shift the company and
turne the Master and all the sicke men into the shallop, and let
them shift for themselves. For there was not fourteen daies
victuall left for all the company, at that poore allowance they
were at, and that there they lay, the Master not caring to goe one
way or other: and that they had not eaten any thing these three
dayes, and therefore were resolute, either to mend or end, and what
they had begun they would goe through with it, or dye."

According to his own account, Prickett made answer to this precious
pair of scoundrels that he "marvelled to heare so much from them,
considering that they were married men, and had wives and
children, and that for their sakes they should not commit so foule
a thing in the sight of God and man as that would bee"; to which
Greene replied that "he knew the worst, which was, to be hanged
when hee came home, and therefore of the two he would rather be
hanged at home than starved abroad." With that deliverance "Henry
Greene went his way, and presently came Juet, who, because he was
an ancient man, I hoped to have found some reason in him. But hee
was worse than Henry Greene, for he sware plainly that he would
justifie this deed when he came home."

More of the conspirators came to Prickett to urge him to join them
in their intended crime. We have his weak word for it that he
refused, and that he tried to stay them; to which he weakly adds:
"I hoped that some one or other would give some notice, either to
the Carpenter [or to] John King or the Master." That he did not try
to