The Island at the Center of the World (3 page)
Nothing is known of his early career, but the fact that he was a ship's captain indicates that he had had a lengthy one by the time we encounter him in 1608. It's reasonable to assume that he had served in the defeat of the Armada twenty years earlier, though we have no information on this. The Muscovy Company tended to start apprentices as boys and have them work through one or more aspects of the business: bureaucrat, “factor” (i.e., agent), or sailor. Thus, one Christopher Hudson, who rose to the position of governor of the company from 1601 to 1607 and whom some historians have thought was most likely Henry Hudson's uncle, had worked his way up in the sales and marketing line, serving as a company representative in Germany in his youth. Henry Hudson was in his forties when he stepped into the light of history, a seasoned mariner, a man with a strong and resourceful wife and three sons, a man born and raised not only to the sea but to the quest for a northern passage to Asia, who, weaned from infancy on the legends of his predecessors, probably couldn't help but be obsessed by it.
The fire of obsession was fanned, in him as it was in the country, by a compatriot named Richard Hakluyt. Hakluyt was a consultant to the Muscovy Company, but more importantly he was a unique figure in his day: part journalist, part popularizer, part lionizer, above all a zealot for the internationalist cause in England. In the 1580s he began gathering log books, journals, and other records of voyages, and he published the whole lot of them in repeated waves—the main body under the title
The Principle Navigations Voyages Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation,
which came out, with impeccable timing, shortly after the defeat of the Armada—creating a steadily building crescendo of popular enthusiasm for English adventures at sea. The result was to make England aware of itself in an international context, to see the European nations casting outward in a new age, an age of discovery. Hakluyt exhorted his countrymen to be proud that they were living in “an age wherein God hath raised so general a desire in the youth of this realm to discover all parts of the face of the earth.”
Thanks to Hakluyt, mariners now saw themselves in historical terms. Because of Hakluyt, Hudson—a determined and self-possessed man to begin with—openly hungered for a place on the list that included Columbus, Magellan, Cabot, Cortés, and Da Gama. And for Hudson there was only one brand of glory. He would be the one to locate at last—after the failures (glorious failures, but failures still) of Columbus, Cabot, Chancellor, Frobisher, Cartier, Verrazzano—the fabled ribbon of icy blue water, sail through it, emerge into the nutmeg-scented air of Cathay, and singlehandedly open the planet wide. He believed he would be the one.
He would be wrong in this. And yet, fate being what it is, his dream of achievement would come true—bounteously, far more strangely than he could have imagined. Fate would make him not just the somewhat ironic patron saint of a grand city that would rise in the future to the presumptuous title of capital of the world, but, along with it, of a society that would become a model for the world of a distant century. A wavering but unbroken chain would stretch from him to a far-off hodgepodge: of skyscrapers and bodegas, dim sum and hip-hop, supers and subways, limos and egg creams and finance and fashion—the messy catalogue of ingredients that, stewed together over time, would comprise a global capital, twenty-first-century style. To the extent any individual could, he would be a fulcrum on which history would turn: from a world of wood and steel to one of silicon and plastic.
H
IS FIRST VOYAGE
was pure madness. While geographers debated whether the elusive passage to Asia lay to the northwest, via Canada, or the northeast, around Russia, what Hudson attempted in his first command was something fantastically bolder and far more ridiculous than either of these, something that no human being had ever tried: to go straight up, over the top of the world. He was relying on an “established” theory, first proposed eighty years before by Robert Thorne, a merchant-adventurer who argued that in addition to finding the ice melt away as one neared the pole, that the lucky sailor who ventured across the top of the world would benefit from the “perpetual clearness of the day without any darkness of the night.” Daylight may be handy, but to purposely steer a seventy-foot wooden boat, manned by a crew of twelve and powered only by wind, straight north on a direct course for the top of the world, defying the six-million-square-mile Arctic ice shelf, proposing to slice straight across it and come careening down the other side of the planet—the nerve of it beggars the imagination. No wonder that on the morning of April 19, 1607, Hudson and his tiny crew, including his young son John, whom he was probably in the process of training just as he had been trained, stepped out of the weak spring sunlight, shuffled into the dark ancient interior of the Church of St. Ethelburga just inside Bishopsgate (apparently successfully ignoring the tap houses crowding around the door of the church: the Angel, the Four Swans, the Green Dragon, the Black Bull), took their places among the congregation, and beseeched the God of their forefathers to bless their endeavor.
Even more remarkable than Hudson's decision to attempt such a voyage was that he survived it. Slicing through fog and ice, living on bear and seal (at one point the crew fell sick from rotten bear meat), surviving vicious storms and the horror of a whale attempting to surface under the keel of their ship, they made it above eighty degrees latitude, within six hundred miles of the North Pole, before Hudson noted drily, “This morning we saw that we were compassed in with Ice in abundance. . . . And this I can assure at present . . . by this way there is no passage.”
By any normal measure the voyage would have been considered a failure, but normalcy was out the window—it was now the seventeenth century, a vast new world was out there. Entrepreneurs and ships' captains knew that crossing one false path off the list was a form of progress. Far from considering his attempt a failure (for one thing, Hudson's report of “many whales” off Spitzbergen Island led to a massive and lucrative whaling enterprise there in the following years, and, predictably, the decimation of the whale population), the company, immediately on his return in September 1607, signed him up to attack the problem again the next season.
Hudson spent the winter at his London home, plunging into his charts and letters from fellow mariners and geographers, warming himself at his own hearth and in the company of his family, laying plans, perhaps meeting with Hakluyt himself—the two had by now become friends—to discuss options. The following season sees him setting off straightaway—April 22, 1608—in the same Muscovy Company ship, the
Hopewell,
this time with a crew of fourteen, sitting in his closetlike captain's cabin, carefully putting pen to the page of his logbook as they pull away from the Thames-side docks, heart thrumming with the high adrenaline of setting-forth, as he records dutifully: “We set sayle at Saint Katherines, and fell downe to Blacke wall.”
He had a new course this time: northeast. It had been attempted by others, including his Muscovy Company predecessors, but the directors were still of the belief that to the north of Russia lay the best chance for reaching Asia. Hudson himself may have been doubtful—he had reason to believe the northwest was more likely—but he was willing to follow their wishes. Or so it seemed. The failure of his second voyage is less interesting than what happened on July 6, after he had concluded it was impossible to continue (on entering the strait that he had pinned his hopes on he writes with awe, “it is so full of ice that you will hardly thinke it”). Unable to find a way around the islands of Nova Zembla (today Novaya Zemlya in the Russian Arctic), he was now “out of hope to find passage by the North-east,” and so proposed to alter course completely, tear up the mission directive from the company, and have a go at the northwest. After slaving for ten weeks against the raw elements of the Arctic, his crew, with good sense, balked at the idea of taking a detour straight across the Atlantic and into a wholly new wilderness. A near mutiny ensued; Hudson was forced to remove his gaze from the distant horizon of his obsession and focus instead on the human beings in front of him on the deck. He backed down. They returned to London.
No sooner did he arrive than he was busy readying himself for his next foray. He had momentum now: two voyages in two successive seasons; two routes down, and one to go. He was convinced that he was zeroing in on the passage, that the puzzle that had occupied Europe for the length of the Renaissance was about to be solved. The answer, it now seemed certain, lay in the misty, all-but-unknown region that was only recently being labeled on maps as America.
At around this time—possibly before the 1608 voyage—he received letters from his friend and fellow explorer, the considerably larger-than-life John Smith, who had fought in Hungary against the Turks, was captured and sold into slavery in Istanbul, won the heart of his female captor, escaped to Transylvania via Russia, and trekked across North Africa—all before his twenty-fifth birthday. Not content with such a résumé, in 1607, Smith spearheaded the founding of a colony in Virginia—what would be the first permanent European settlement on the North American coast (Walter Raleigh's Roanoke colony, which broke ground in 1587, had vanished by the time relief forces arrived in 1590), where he and his comrades were now living out a hell on earth (only thirty-eight of the one hundred and fifty original colonists survived the first winter). Smith sent Hudson maps of the North American coast, together with certain theories he had been developing. These were precisely what Hudson wanted to hear; they conformed with his own theories: that a sea or river somewhere to the north of Virginia gave out onto the Sea of Cathay. (Smith's information seems to have come from Indians who talked of a great ocean accessible via the Hudson River—presumably the Great Lakes, reachable via portage through the Mohawk River valley.)
Thus we find Hudson where we met him at the beginning of this chapter, shortly after landfall in late August or early September 1608, about to step into Muscovy House—in starched ruff collar and embroidered jerkin, perhaps, clothing suitable for a formal interview—for his obligatory meeting with the company directors. His mind was apparently in a swirl. On the one hand, Smith's information buttressed his belief that he was homing in on his goal. Then again, Samuel Purchas, a director of the company and like Hakluyt a popularizer of England's sea ventures (it is from him that most of our knowledge of Hudson's voyages comes), on meeting up with Hudson one day immediately after his return, found him “sunk into the lowest depths of the Humour of Melancholy, from which no man could rouse him. It mattered not that his Perseverance and Industry had made England the richer by his maps of the North. I told him he had created Fame that would endure for all time, but he would not listen to me.” This was completely within character: Hudson seems to have typified the figure of the man of energy and obsession wracked by periods of despair. As he entered Muscovy House, the reality of recent failure and the possibility of imminent glory must have hammered at his brain from opposite sides. He seems to have thrived on such tensions, such contradictions: seeking to expand human civilization by immersing himself in the void of nature; strolling in the easy center of culture and society while the too-wild tang of rotten bear meat still lay on his tongue.
We can't follow him inside. The building itself, along with all the records of the Muscovy Company, was destroyed in the Great Fire. If there was a corporate record of the meeting, of who voted against funding him again and why, it is lost. We can only imagine his shock, then, when they rejected him, gave up on the great quest, and abandoned one of their own. Maybe they had grown leery of his monomania and propensity for sparking mutiny. Possibly the Muscovy Company was running out of steam (it would soon be subject to the seventeenth-century version of a corporate takeover by the younger and more vigorous East India Company).
But he had barely enough time to sink into the depression to which a psychologist might have diagnosed him as susceptible before a new, unexpected avenue stretched open before him. Shortly after stepping out of the company's mansion into the glare of a summer day, he found himself accosted by a courtly, discreet, seventy-two-year-old gentleman. Emanuel van Meteren had been born in Antwerp, but when he was fifteen his family moved to London, where he had lived ever since, acquiring an English education and an English sense of refinement, but remaining elementally Dutch. For the last thirty years he had served as the Dutch consul in London, and was on intimate terms with many of the prominent businessmen, aristocrats, and explorers in both countries. He had learned that the Muscovy Company was dropping Hudson—with his closeness to the directors of the company, he may have known before Hudson did.
The moment Van Meteren put his dignified presence before Hudson, he revealed the true scope of interest in the mariner's obsession. It wasn't a matter of one ship's captain and the company he worked for. Hudson's quest was tied into the historic current washing over the powers of Europe, the self-conscious need to blast out of the Mediterranean paradigm that had held them through the Middle Ages and to reach around the globe: to discover, exploit, expand, do business. Van Meteren spoke on behalf of certain Dutch merchants, who were desirous, seeing that his own countrymen had lost faith, of abetting Hudson's ambition. In short, they wanted to hire him.
The mariner apparently suffered no pangs of disloyalty, either to the country of his birth or the company that had nurtured him. Delaying only to attend the christening, in mid-September, of a granddaughter (Alice, child of his son Oliver), Hudson boarded a ship to cross the channel, having no idea that his contribution to history would come not from discovering the passage to the Orient but as a result of this very twist of fate, this kink in his chain of bold, brilliant, and majestically misguided voyages.