left that place on the 26th of July, and kept out at sea till the
3d of August, when they were again near the coast in 42 degrees of
latitude. Thence they sailed on till, on the 12th of August, they
reached the shore under 37° 45'. Thence they sailed along the shore
until we [sic] reached 40° 45', where they found a good entrance,
between two headlands, and thus entered on the 12th of September
into as fine a river as can be found, with good anchoring ground on
both sides."

That river, "as fine as can be found," was our own Hudson.

Van Meteren's account of the voyage, although not published until
the year 1614, was written very soon after Hudson's return--the
slip that he makes in using "we" points to the probability that he
copied directly from Hudson's log--and in it we have all that we
ever are likely to know about the causes which led to the change in
the "Half Moon's" course. For my own part, I believe that Hudson
did precisely what he had wanted to do from the start. The
prohibitory clause in his instructions, forbidding him to go upon
other than the course laid down for him, pointedly suggests that he
had expressed the desire--natural enough, since he twice had
searched vainly for a passage by Nova Zembla--to search westward
instead of eastward for a water-way to the Indies. As Van Meteren
states, authoritatively, he was encouraged to search in that
direction by the information given him by Captain John Smith
concerning a passage north of Virginia across the American
continent--a notion that Smith probably derived in the first
instance from Michael Lok's planisphere, which shows the continent
reduced to a mere strip in about the latitude of the river that
Hudson found; and that he very well might have conceived to be