mbassador, suggesting that his services would be welcome to a
proposed French East India Company. Hearing this, the Dutch hastened to
secure him, and on April 4, 1609, he sailed from Amsterdam in a yacht of
eighty tons called the _Half Moon_ and shaped rather like one, manned by
a crew of twenty, half English and half Netherlanders, and John as
cabin-boy.

John was in such a state of bliss as a boy can know when sailing on the
venture of his dreams. His father had told him in confidence that as his
sailing orders were almost the same as the year before, he did not
expect to find the northern route to India in that direction. Failing
this the _Half Moon_ would look for it in the western seas. Of this plan
he had said nothing in Holland.

He found, as he had expected, that the arctic waters were choked with
ice, and turning southward he headed for the Faroe Isles. While in
Holland he had had a letter from Captain John Smith, who had explored
the regions about Chesapeake Bay. No straits leading to the western
ocean had been discovered there, and no Sea of Verrazzano. Captain
Smith's opinion was that if such a passage existed it would be somewhere
about the fortieth parallel. Explorations had already been made farther
north. Davis Strait had been discovered some years before by John Davis,
now dead. Martin Frobisher had found another strait leading northwest.
Both of these were so far north that they were likely to be ice-bound by
the time the little _Half Moon_ could reach them. Hudson meant to look
along the coast further south, and see what could be found there.

The _Half Moon_ took in water at the Faroes and anchored some seven
weeks later, on July 18, in Penobscot Bay. Her foremast was gone and her
sails ripped and rent by the gales of the North Atlantic, and the
carpenter with a selected crew rowed ashore and chose a pine tree for a
new mast. While this was a-making and the sails were patched up, the
crew not otherwise engaged went fishing.

"I say," presently observed John Hudson, who knew Brereton's Relacion by
heart, "this must ha' been the place where they caught so many fish
that they were 'pestered with Cod' and threw numbers of 'em overboard.
This makes twenty-seven, Dad, so far."

During that week they caught fifty cod, a hundred lobsters and a halibut
which John declared to be half as big as the ship. Two French boats
appeared, full of Indians ready to trade beaver skins for red cloth. The
strawberry se