easily went on from sullen anger into open mutiny. And equally did
it follow that the shipmasters who held those surly brutes to the
collar--driving them to their work with blows, and now and then
killing one of them by way of encouraging the others to
obedience--were as absolutely fearless and as absolutely strong of
will as men could be. All of these conditions we must recognize,
and must try to realize, if we would understand the work that was
cut out for Hudson, and for every master navigator, in that cruel
and harsh and yet ardently romantic time.




IV


It is Hudson's third voyage--the one that brought him into our own
river, and that led on directly to the founding of our own
city--that has the deepest interest to us of New York. He made it
in the service of the Dutch East India Company: but how he came to
enter that service is one of the unsolved problems in his career.

In itself, there was nothing out of the common in those days in an
English shipmaster going captain in a Dutch vessel. But Hudson--by
General Read's showing--was so strongly backed by family influence
in the Muscovy Company that it is not easy to understand why he
took service with a corporation that in a way was the Muscovy
Company's trade rival. Lacking any explanation of the matter, I am
inclined to link it with the action of the English Government--when
he returned from his voyage and made harbor at Dartmouth--in