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  • Dead Reckoning:The Mysterious Henry Hudson
  • Maurice Isserman (bio)
Douglas Hunter . Half Moon: Henry Hudson and the Voyage that Redrew the Map of the New World. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009. 336 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, and index. $28.00.
Peter C. Mancall . Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson. New York: Basic Books, 2009. 303 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $26.95.

In 1909, on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of Henry Hudson's discovery and exploration of the river that bears his name, an Albany, New York, historian named Frank Chamberlain published a slender book entitled Hudson Tercentenary: An Historical Retrospect. Chamberlain's chief motives in writing seem to have been to establish once and for all that Hudson's first name was "Henry," not the Dutch-sounding "Hendrick"; that he "was and remained an Englishman" (emphasis in the original); and that the fact that the name "Hendrick Hudson" was "emblazoned on the newest and finest steamboat on the Hudson river" was an insult both to the explorer and the Englishmen who followed in his wake to settle that particular corner of the New World. Despite his somewhat cranky preoccupations, Chamberlain provided an able overview of most of what was known at the time about Hudson's life and career as an explorer. He could do so in the space of a mere 101 pages because, as he noted, "so little documentary evidence [has] been found about a man whose name appears so often and so prominently in North America."

The passage of another century has not added to the store of documentary evidence available to historians interested in Henry Hudson. We do not know with complete certainty the year of his birth, nor much about his family background or early career. His name first crops up in the written record in 1607, by which time he was in his late thirties, already an accomplished sailor, a figure of some significance in the world of Atlantic exploration, and about to set off in command of a voyage on behalf of the London-based Muscovy Company in search of a "northeast passage" through arctic waters to the Pacific. Most of what we know about Hudson's activities over the remaining four years of his life, during which he shifted his efforts to the search for the "northwest [End Page 402] passage," are contained in a collection of documents gathered by Richard Hakluyt, Anglican priest and tireless promoter of British settlement in the New World. This was published in 1625 by a fellow priest and geographer, Samuel Purchas, who was personally acquainted with Hudson. The collection, entitled Hakluytus Posthumus, includes Hudson's own accounts of his 1607 and 1608 voyages on behalf of the Muscovy Company, shipmate Robert Juet's account of Hudson's exploration of the coast of North America on behalf of the Dutch East India Company in 1609, a few pages of Hudson's journal from 1610-11, plus an account of that final voyage by crew member Abacuck Prickett. In addition, for the 1609 voyage, portions of Hudson's journal (the original of which has been lost) were published in 1625 by Dutch geographer Jan de Laet as Nieuwe Werelt. And for the fatal final voyage of 1610-11 we also have the records of official inquiries by the High Court of the Admiralty and from a few additional sources drawn together by Samuel Purchas and published in 1613 and 1614 as Purchas, His Pilgrim.

That little has been added to this limited collection of documents over the years that followed has not kept subsequent generations of historians from bringing out new accounts of Hudson's life and voyages on a regular basis, including—just in time for the quadracentennial of the discovery of the Hudson River—Douglas Hunter's Half Moon: Henry Hudson and the Voyage that Redrew the Map of the New World and Peter C. Mancall's Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson. As the titles of their books suggest, Hunter focuses primarily on Hudson's 1609 voyage on board the Half Moon up the Hudson River to a location just below present-day Albany, while Mancall takes...

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