After that, Prickett said, the mutineers brought up the shallop to the ship’s side and put the “poor, sick, and lame men” into it. Prickett’s account never explains how he could have been too lame to warn the captain the night before and yet healthy enough by morning that he wasn’t put into the shallop. However, Prickett did say:
I came out of my cabin as best I could to speak to the master at the hatchway when he called me; on my knees I begged them [the mutineers], for the love of God, to remember themselves and to do onto others as they would have others do onto them. They told me to take care, and get back into my cabin, not allowing the master to speak with me. But when I returned to my cabin, he called to me by the horn and told me that Juet would overthrow us all; no, I said, and not softly either, it is the villainy of Henry Greene.
Next, Prickett said, the carpenter, Staffe, decided on his own that he wanted to go with the captain in the shallop rather than stay on the ship with the mutineers. He asked only that he be given his chest “and all that’s in it,” and the mutineers complied.
Prickett said Staffe warned him that no one left on the ship was capable of sailing it back to England. He also said that Staffe took “a gun with powder and shot, some spears, an iron pot with some grain, and a few other things.” The mutineers sailed out of the ice with the shallop attached by a rope; when they were away from the ice, they cut the shallop adrift.
Afterward, Prickett said, the mutineers did find grain, butter, pork, peas, biscuits, and a cask of beer the captain had been hoarding.
The rest of the Discovery’s voyage was hardly easy. According to Prickett, a tragic encounter with natives on July 28 left four men dead. And as they sailed back toward England, the only food the survivors had to live on was the bones left over from birds they’d shot previously. The crew ate the bones fried in candle wax and doused in vinegar.
One more crew member died during this crossing, probably because of starvation: Prickett said that Robert Juet “died miserably for mere want.” After that the other men seemed to give up: “Some would just sit, watching the foresail or mainsail break free, the sheets either flying or broken, and not bother to do anything about it, or even call for help.”
And then they caught a glimpse of land: Ireland.
Even that was not exactly the salvation they expected, as the Irish they first encountered “had neither bread, drink, nor money amongst them.” Finally the crew members pawned an anchor and cable to get bread, beer, and beef, and then they were able to sail on to England.
Only eight of the original twenty-three men and boys on the Discovery made it back to England. They arrived in a ship with massive bloodstains on the deck—but the survivors said that was from the attack by the natives, not the mutiny. And, ever so conveniently, the survivors said that every one of the men who had truly been responsible for the mutiny had died during the rest of the voyage: Juet, Greene, and William Wilson.
Despite the dire predictions that returning to England would mean death by hanging, at first nothing happened. Prickett, Robert Bylot, and the ship’s surgeon, Edward Wilson, all gave reports or depositions, and one of the agencies that had power over the shipping industry gave the opinion that hanging was in order. But nobody seemed to be in a hurry to carry it out.
Edward Wilson’s account, dated January 25, 1611, differed slightly from Prickett’s—he said that Staffe asked for clothes, not his chest, when he went out to the shallop. And he said that six of the men put into the shallop thought they were there only to keep Hudson and John King company while the mutineers divided up the food fairly. Wilson said those men went into the shallop “willingly, but later, when they found they were not allowed to come back on the ship again, they desired that they might have their clothes, of which a part of them were delivered.”
It seems odd that the men would be so concerned about clothes, rather than food.
Edward Wilson also said that he didn’t know anything about the mutiny until it was half over and he saw the master tied up. Wilson claimed, “I would have come out of my cabin to have given some food to them, but those who had bound the master told me that if I were well enough off, I should keep myself so.”
Did that make him guilty too? Were all eight of the Discovery survivors guilty of mutiny because they hadn’t gone out into the shallop with their captain?
Five more years passed before anyone decided to look closely at those questions. It’s not hard to guess why justice was so slow if you know what else was going on: In 1612 at least two of the Discovery survivors—Robert Bylot and Abacuk Prickett—went back to Hudson Bay supported by a new company called the Discoverers of the North-west Passage.
Essentially, they must have said, You know, if you hang us for murder, you’ll never know if we really did find the secret location of the Northwest Passage ….
As an afterthought they might also have promised to look for Hudson and the other abandoned men.
Bylot and Prickett and the rest of their expedition found neither the Northwest Passage nor any sign of Hudson and his men. Bylot made another search for the Northwest Passage—in Baffin Bay this time—in 1616.
Again, of course, he failed to find it.
Also in 1616 all eight Discovery survivors were indicted for murder. The charge was that the survivors had placed Hudson, his son, and seven others “in a certain shallop in the ice, without victuals, drink, fire, and clothing.” The indictment went on to say that “by reason thereof they [the men in the shallop] came to their death and miserably did perish. And that Robert Bylot and etc. did kill and murder Henry Hudson.”
Prickett, defending himself, said no one was “shot at or hurt in any way” during the mutiny. Bylot made it sound like the men in the shallop had agreed to leave on their own. Another crew member, Bennet Matthew, claimed that even after being put in the shallop, Hudson and some of the others came back onto the ship to warm up and to get some of their things—and then climbed back into the shallop.
How could all the men in the shallop have gone so peacefully? How could anyone believe the survivors’ stories—especially when there were so many bloodstains covering the ship’s deck?
Whether anyone believed them or not, none of the survivors ended up being hanged. Bylot was pardoned because he’d managed to sail the Discovery home safely with the rest of the men; Edward Wilson and Prickett were found not guilty; by 1618 charges were thrown out against everybody else who was still alive.
Maybe Prickett and the others made Hudson sound crazy enough that the mutiny seemed justifiable. Maybe after seven years had passed, no one really cared that much anymore.
Or maybe, even after multiple failed voyages, the English were still holding out hope that someone from the Discovery could find the elusive Northwest Passage.
It actually does exist, though not in a way that would have helped Henry Hudson even if he’d found it. If you look at a current map of North America—not one of the sketchy, half-guessed 1600s maps that Hudson would have used—you’ll see a number of possible routes around and through the islands that make up northern Canada and Alaska. The maps I consulted show these waterways in pastel blue, as if the seas there are as open and clear as the Caribbean. But for most of the year those routes are iced over, and they certainly would have been impassable for a ship as primitive as the Discovery. The first time anyone managed to sail all the way through was in 1906, when the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen completed the route—after spending three winters trapped in ice.
Recently the Northwest Passage has received renewed attention because of climate change. Although climate change could certainly cause awful problems elsewhere, some point out that as more ice melts, the Northwest Passage could actually become a useful shipping route—finally achieving Hudson’s dream.
But perhaps you, like Jonah and Katherine, are more concerned about the people involved than the fate of the Northwest Passage. Perhaps the burning question in your mind is not, What good is the Northwest Passage? but What hap
pened to John Hudson and the others left in a shallop in the ice?
Truly, nobody knows for sure. But that hasn’t stopped lots of people from speculating.
Since the men managed to survive the winter of 1610–1611, it’s not too much of a stretch to suppose that at least some of them might have survived other winters, other years. This would have been even more likely if they were able to learn from natives in the area (who probably would have been Cree, near James Bay, rather than Inuit, as Katherine supposes). Not surprisingly, in his previous encounters with Native Americans, Hudson seemed no better at dealing with people from other cultures than he was at dealing with his own men. But maybe others in the shallop were more capable of diplomacy.
Perhaps at least some of the men in the shallop managed to keep alive on the hope that a rescue mission would come for them from England. This hope would have been overly optimistic. But two later English expeditions—one in 1631, the other in 1668–1670—each found remains of a shelter that might have been built by an English carpenter. Of course, either of these structures could have been the shelter Staffe erected in 1610 for the entire crew of the Discovery, so these finds don’t prove anything about the men in the shallop.
A few legends told by natives might also be relevant. According to a website dedicated to Henry Hudson (www.ianchadwick.com/hudson), one of those legends tells of Inuits finding a small boat containing dead white men—and a single living boy. Could it have been John Hudson? The story ends anticlimactically: The Inuits weren’t sure what to do with the boy, so they tied him outside with their dogs. It’s hard to believe he would have survived that for long.
Another story told in the Ottawa Valley claims that Henry Hudson and others from the shallop—possibly including John Hudson—became slaves for natives before being killed. Supposedly they traveled down the Ottawa River, and a stone was found there reading HH CAPTIVE 1612. But the markings have never been authenticated.
Yet another theory came up more recently. Based on accounts of graves found on Spitzbergen Island off the coast of Norway, a researcher in England speculated that Hudson and his remaining men might have managed to sail their tiny shallop three thousand miles across the Arctic before dying back in Europe, if not quite back home in England.
It sounds like an outlandish theory—but is it any more outlandish than putting eight men and a teenager out in a tiny boat in the middle of ice and just sailing away?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Even though this is very much a fictionalized account of the mutiny on the Discovery, I am grateful to many experts who have studied and written about the true event. In particular, I appreciate the assistance I got by e-mail from Peter C. Mancall, professor of history and anthropology at the University of Southern California; director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute; and author of the book, Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson. I’m also very grateful to William “Chip” Reynolds, captain of the replica ship Half Moon and director of the New Netherland Museum, for answering my questions about Henry Hudson and what it would have been like to sail on one of his ships. I apologize for all the instances when—for the sake of the story—I went with less-plausible explanations than the experts gave me.
I’m also grateful to my friends Linda Gerber, Erin MacLellan, Jenny Patton, Nancy Roe Pimm, and Linda Stanek for reading portions of this book and making suggestions. And, as always, I appreciate the help from my agents, Tracey and Josh Adams; my editor, David Gale; and everyone else at Simon & Schuster who has supported this series.
Margaret Peterson Haddix, Torn
(Series: # )
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