If ever a compelling Fate set its grip upon a man and drove him to
an accomplishment beside his purpose and outside his thought, it
was when Henry Hudson--having headed his ship upon an ordered
course northeastward--directly traversed his orders by fetching
that compass to the southwestward which ended by bringing him into
what now is Hudson's River, and which led on quickly to the
founding of what now is New York.

Indeed, the late Thomas Aquinas, and the later Calvin, could have
made out from the few known facts in the life of this navigator so
pretty a case in favor of Predestination that the blessed St.
Augustine and the worthy Arminius--supposing the four come together
for a friendly dish of theological talk--would have had their work
cut out for them to formulate a countercase in favor of Free Will.
It is a curious truth that every important move in Hudson's life of
which we have record seems to have been a forced move: sometimes
with a look of chance about it--as when the directors of the Dutch
East India Company called him back and hastily renewed with him
their suspended agreement that he should search for a passage to
Cathay on a northeast course past Nova Zembla, and so sent him off
on the voyage that brought the "Half Moon" into Hudson's River;
sometimes with the fatalism very much in evidence--as when his own
government seized him out of the Dutch service, and so put him in
the way to go sailing to his death on that voyage through Hudson's
Strait that ended, for him, in his mutineering crew casting him
adrift to starve with cold and hunger in Hudson's Bay. And, being
dead, the same inconsequent Fate that harried him while alive has
preserved his name, and very nobly, by anchoring it fast to that