.

He set out from the port of Amsterdam,[1] in 1609, in a vessel named
the _Half Moon_. After he had gone quite a long distance, the sailors
got so tired of seeing nothing but fog and ice that they refused to
go any further.

Then Captain Hudson turned his ship about and sailed for the coast
of North America. He did that because his friend, Captain Smith of
Virginia, had sent him a letter, with a map, which made him think
that he could find such a passage as he wanted north of Chesapeake
Bay.

[Footnote 1: See map in paragraph 62.]

54. Captain Hudson reaches America and finds the "Great
River."--Hudson got to Chesapeake Bay, but the weather was so stormy
that he thought it would not be safe to enter it. He therefore sailed
northward along the coast. In September, 1609, he entered a beautiful
bay, formed by the spreading out of a noble river. At that point the
stream is more than a mile wide, and he called it the "Great River."
On the eastern side of it, not far from its mouth, there is a long
narrow island: the Indians of that day called it Manhattan Island.

55. The tides in the "Great River"; Captain Hudson begins to sail
up the stream.--One of the remarkable things about the river which
Hudson had discovered is that it has hardly any current, and the tide
from the ocean moves up for more than a hundred and fifty miles. If
no fresh water ran in from the hills, still the sea would fill the
channel for a long distance, and so make a kind of salt-water river
of it. Hudson noticed how salt it was, and that, perhaps, made him
think that he had at last actually found a passage which would lead
him through from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He was delighted with
all he saw, and said, "This is as beautiful a land as one can tread
upon." Soon he began to sail up the stream, wondering what he should
see and whether he should come out on an ocean which would take him
to Asia.

[Illustration: Map showing the Great River.]

56. Hudson's voyage on the "Great River"; his feast with the
Indians.--At first he drifted along, carried by the tide, under the
shadow of a great natural wall of rock. That wall, which we now call
the Palisades,[2] is from four hundred to six hundred feet high; it
extends for nearly twenty miles along the western shore of the river.

[Illustration: THE PALISADES.]

Then, some distance further up, Captain Hudson came to a place where
the river breaks through great forest-covered hills, called