inference is a reasonable one that it produced no new discoveries.
But suppose that Hudson had commanded; and, so commanding, had not
sailed that unknown captain's useless course but had brought his
French ship into what now are our bay and our river; and that the
French, not the Dutch, had founded the city here that now is--but
by those hair-wide chances might not have been--New York?




V


Mr. Henry C. Murphy--to whose searchings in the archives of Holland
we owe so much--found at The Hague a manuscript history of the East
India Company, written by P. van Dam in the seventeenth century, in
which a copy of Hudson's contract with the Company is preserved.
The contract reads as follows:

"On this eighth of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand
six hundred and nine, the Directors of the East India Company of
the Chamber of Amsterdam of the ten years reckoning of the one
part, and Master Henry Hudson, Englishman, assisted by Jodocus
Hondius[1], of the other part, have agreed in manner following, to
wit: That the said Directors shall in the first place equip a small
vessel or yacht of about thirty lasts [60 tons] burden, well
provided with men, provisions and other necessaries, with which the
above named Hudson shall, about the first of April, sail in order
to search for a passage by the north, around the north side of Nova
Zembla, and shall continue thus along that parallel until he shall