Familiar As The
Story Is Of Henry Hudson's Fate, For John King's Sake How Gladly We
Repeat It.
While sailing on the waters he discovered, in 1611, his
men mutinied; the mutiny was aided by Henry Green, a prodigal, whom
Hudson had generously shielded from ruin.
Hudson, the master, and
his son, with six sick or disabled members of the crew, were driven
from their cabins, forced into a little shallop, and committed
helpless to the water and the ice. But there was one stout man,
John King, the carpenter, who stepped into the boat, abjuring his
companions, and chose rather to die than even passively be partaker
in so foul a crime. John King, we who live after will remember you.
Here on aim island, Charlton Island, near our entrance to the bay,
in 1631, wintered poor Captain James with his wrecked crew. This is
a point outside the Arctic circle, but quite cold enough. Of
nights, with a good fire in the house they built, hoar frost covered
their beds, and the cook's water in a metal pan before the fire was
warm on one side and froze on the other. Here "it snowed and froze
extremely, at which time we, looking from the shore towards the
ship, she appeared a piece of ice in the fashion of a ship, or a
ship resembling a piece of ice." Here the gunner, who hand lost his
leg, besought that, "for the little the he had to live, he might
drink sack altogether." He died and was buried in the ice far from
the vessel, but when afterwards two more were dead of scurvy, and
the others, in a miserable state, were working with faint hope about
their shattered vessel, the gunner was found to have returned home
to the old vessel; his leg had penetrated through a port-hole.
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