For three hundred years that statement of fact has ended Hudson's
story. The fragmentary documents which I have been so fortunate as
to obtain from the Record Office carry it a little, only a little,
farther. Unhappily they stop short--giving no assurance that the
mutineers got to the gallows that they deserved. All that they
prove is that the few survivors were brought to trial: charged with
having put the master of their ship, and others, "into a shallop,
without food, drink, fire, clothing, or any necessaries, and then
maliciously abandoning them: so that they came thereby to their
death, and miserably perished."

There, unfinished, the record ends. What penalty, or that any
penalty, was exacted of those who survived to be tried for Hudson's
murder remains unknown. Their ignoble fate is hidden in a sordid
darkness: fitly in contrast with his noble fate--that lies retired
within a glorious mystery.




XIV


Hudson has no cause to quarrel with the rating that has been fixed
for him in the eternal balances. All that he lost (or seemed to
lose) in life has been more than made good to him in the flowing of
the years since he fought out with Fate his last losing round.

In his River and Strait and Bay he has such monuments set up before
the whole world as have been awarded to only one other navigator.