On April 17, 1610, the sturdy little three-masted bark, Discovery, weighed anchor in St. Katherine's Pool, London, and floated down the Thames toward the sea.
She carried, besides her captain, a crew of twenty-one and provisions for a voyage of exploration of the Arctic waters of North America.

Seventeen months later, on September 6, 1611, an Irish fishing boat sighted the Discovery limping eastward outside Galway Bay.
When she reached port, she was found to have on board only eight men, all near starvation.
The captain was gone, and the mate was gone.
The man who now commanded her had started the voyage as an ordinary seaman.

What disaster struck the Discovery during those seventeen months?
What happened to the fourteen missing men?
These questions have remained one of the great sea mysteries of all time.
For hundreds of years, the evidence available consisted of (1) the captain's fragmentary journal, (2) a highly prejudiced account by one of the survivors, (3) a note found in a dead man's desk on board, and (4) several second-hand reports.
All told, they offered a highly confused picture.

But since 1927, researchers digging into ancient court records and legal files have been able to find illuminating pieces of information.
Not enough to do away with all doubts, but sufficient to give a fairly accurate picture of the events of the voyage.

Historians have had two reasons for persisting so long in their investigations.
First, they wanted to clarify a tantalizing, bizarre enigma.
Second, they believed it important to determine the fate of the captain -- a man whose name is permanently stamped on our maps, on American towns and counties, on a great American river, and on half a million square miles of Arctic seas.

The name: Henry Hudson.

This is the story of his last tragic voyage, as nearly as we are able -- or ever, probably, will be able -- to determine:

The sailing in the spring of 1610 was Hudson's fourth in four years.
Each time his objective had been the same -- a direct water passage from Western Europe to the Far East.
In 1607 and 1608, the English Muscovy Company had sent him northward to look for a route over the North Pole or across the top of Russia.
Twice he had failed, and the Muscovy Company indicated it would not back him again.

In 1609, the Dutch East India Company hired Hudson, gave him two learned geographers, fitted him out with a ship called the Half Moon, and supplied him with Dutch sailors.
This time he turned westward, to the middle Atlantic coast of North America.
His chief discovery was important -- the Great North (later, the Hudson) River -- but it produced no northwest passage.

When the Half Moon put in at Dartmouth, England, in the fall of 1609, word of Hudson's findings leaked out, and English interest in him revived.
The government forbade Hudson to return to Amsterdam with his ship.
He thereupon went to London and spent the winter talking to men of wealth.
By springtime, he was supported by a rich merchant syndicate under the patronage of Henry, Prince of Wales.
He had obtained and provisioned a veteran ship called the Discovery and had recruited a crew of twenty-one, the largest he had ever commanded.

The purpose of this fourth voyage was clear.
A century of exploration had established that a great land mass, North and South America, lay between Europe and the Indies.
One by one, the openings in the coast that promised a passage through had been explored and discarded.
In fact, Hudson's sail up the Great North River had disposed of one of the last hopes.

But there remained one mysterious, unexplored gap, far to the north.
Nearly twenty-five years before, Captain John Davis had noted, as he sailed near the Arctic Circle, "a very great gulf, the water whirling and roaring, as it were the meeting of tides".
He named this opening, between Baffin Island and Labrador, the "Furious Overfall".
(Later, it was to be called Hudson Strait.
)

In 1602, George Waymouth, in the same little Discovery that Hudson now commanded, had sailed 300 miles up the strait before his frightened men turned the ship back.
Hudson now proposed to sail all the way through and test the seas beyond for the long-sought waterway.

Even Hudson, experienced in Arctic sailing and determined as he was, must have had qualms as he slid down the Thames.
Ahead were perilous, ice-filled waters.
On previous voyages, it had been in precisely such dangerous situations that he had failed as a leader and captain.
On the second voyage, he had turned back at the frozen island of Novaya Zemlya and meekly given the crew a certificate stating that he did so of his own free will -- which was obviously not the case.
On the third voyage, a near-mutiny rising from a quarrel between Dutch and English crew members on the Half Moon had almost forced him to head the ship back to Amsterdam in Mid-Atlantic.

Worse, his present crew included five men who had sailed with him before.
Of only one could he be sure -- young John Hudson, his second son.
The mate, Robert Juet, who had kept the journal on the Half Moon, was experienced -- but he was a bitter old man, ready to complain or desert at any opportunity.
Philip Staffe, the ship's carpenter, was a good worker, but perversely independent.
Arnold Lodley and Michael Perse were like the rest -- lukewarm, ready to swing against Hudson in a crisis.

But men willing to sail at all into waters where wooden ships could be crushed like eggs were hard to find.
Hudson knew he had to use these men as long as he remained an explorer.
And he refused to be anything else.

It is believed that Hudson was related to other seafaring men of the Muscovy Company and was trained on company ships.
He was a Londoner, married, with three sons.
(The common misconception that he was Dutch and that his first name was Hendrik stem from Dutch documents of his third voyage.
) In 1610, Hudson was probably in his early forties, a good navigator, a stubborn voyager, but otherwise fatally unsuited to his chosen profession.

Hudson's first error of the fourth voyage occurred only a few miles down the Thames.
There at the river's edge waited one Henry Greene, whom Hudson listed as a "clerk".
Greene was in actuality a young ruffian from Kent, who had broken with his parents in order to keep the company he preferred -- pimps, panders and whores.
He was not the sort of sailor Hudson wanted his backers to see on board and he had Greene wait at Gravesend, where the Discovery picked him up.

For the first three weeks, the ship skirted up the east coast of Great Britain, then turned westward.
On May 11, she reached Iceland.
Poor winds and fog locked her up in a harbor the crew called "Lousie Bay".
The subsequent two-weeks wait made the crew quarrelsome.
With Hudson looking on, his protege Greene picked a fight with the ship's surgeon, Edward Wilson.
The issue was settled on shore, Greene winning and Wilson remaining ashore, determined to catch the next fishing boat back to England.
With difficulty, Hudson persuaded him to rejoin the ship, and they sailed from Iceland.

Early in June, the Discovery passed "Desolation" (southern Greenland) and in mid-June entered the "Furious Overfall".
Floating ice bore down from the north and west.
Fog hung over the route constantly.
Turbulent tides rose as much as fifty feet.
The ship's compass was useless because of the nearness of the magnetic North Pole.

As the bergs grew larger, Hudson was forced to turn south into what is now Ungava Bay, an inlet of the Great Strait.
After finding that its coasts led nowhere, however, he turned north again, toward the main, ice-filled passageway -- and the crew, at first uneasy, then frightened, rebelled.

The trouble was at least partly Juet's doing.
For weeks he had been saying that Hudson's idea of sailing through to Java was absurd.
The great, crushing ice masses coming into view made him sound like the voice of pure reason.
A group of sailors announced to Hudson that they would sail no farther.

Instead of quelling the dissension, as many captains of the era would have done (Sir Francis Drake lopped a man's head off under similar circumstances), Hudson decided to be reasonable.
He went to his cabin and emerged carrying a large chart, which he set up in view of the crew.
Patiently, he explained what he knew about their course and their objectives.

When Hudson had finished, the "town meeting" broke down into a general, wordy argument.
One man remarked that if he had a hundred pounds, he would give ninety of them to be back in England.
Up spoke carpenter Staffe, who said he wouldn't give ten pounds to be home.
The statement was effective.
The meeting broke up.
Hudson was free to sail on.

All through July the Discovery picked her way along the 450-mile-long strait, avoiding ice and rocky islands.
On August 3, two massive headlands reared out of the mists -- great gateways never before, so far as Hudson knew, seen by Europeans.
To starboard was a cape a thousand feet high, patched with ice and snow, populated by thousands of screaming sea birds.
To port was a point 200 feet high rising behind to a precipice of 2,000 feet.
Hudson named the capes Digges and Wolstenholme, for two of his backers.

Hudson pointed the Discovery down the east coast of the newly discovered sea (now called Hudson Bay), confident he was on his way to the warm waters of the Pacific.
After three weeks' swift sailing, however, the ship entered an area of shallow marshes and river deltas.
The ship halted.
The great "sea to the westwards" was a dead end.

This must have been Hudson's blackest discovery.
For he seemed to sense at once that before him was no South Sea, but the solid bulk of the North American continent.
This was the bitter end, and Hudson seemed to know he was destined to failure.

Feverishly, he tried to brush away this intuition.
North and south, east and west, back and forth he sailed in the land-locked bay, plowing furiously forward until land appeared, then turning to repeat the process, day after day, week after week.
Hundreds of miles to the north, the route back to England through the "Furious Overfall" was again filling with ice.

The men were at first puzzled, then angered by the aimless tacking.
Once more, Juet's complaints were the loudest.
Hudson's reply was to accuse the mate of disloyalty.
Juet demanded that Hudson prove his charges in an open trial.

The trial was held September 10.
Hudson, presiding, heard Juet's defense, then called for testimony from crew members.
Juet had made plentiful enemies, several men stepped forward.
Hands on Bible, seaman Lodley and carpenter Staffe swore that Juet had tried to persuade them to keep muskets and swords in their cabins.
Cook Bennett Mathues said Juet had predicted bloodshed on the ship.
Others added that Juet had wanted to turn the ship homeward.

Hudson deposed Juet and cut his pay.
The new mate was Robert Bylot, talented but inexperienced.
There were other shifts and pay cuts according to the way individuals had conducted themselves.
The important result, however, was that Juet and Francis Clemens, the deposed boatswain, became Hudson's sworn enemies.

As Hudson resumed his desperate criss-crossing of the little bay, every incident lessened the crew's respect for him.
Once, after the Discovery lay for a week in rough weather, Hudson ordered the anchor raised before the sea had calmed.
Just as it was being hauled inboard, a sea hit the ship.
Michael Butt and Adame Moore were thrown off the capstan and badly injured.
The anchor cable would have been lost overboard, but Philip Staffe was on hand to sever it with his axe.