If you ever wondered who the Hudson River and Hudson Bay are named for - wonder no more - Henry Hudson an explore in the first decade of the 1600s.
The trouble is, we do not know much about Henry. We know he had four northern journeys trying to find that elusive short cut to China that Global Warming is not uncovering.
And we know he did not come back from his last journey when he was forced to anchor in what would become James Bay on the South end of what is now Hudson Bay. But he never came back to complete his story.
In fact, his crew mutinied and but he and the sickest members of the crew on a raft at the end of the winter and bid them good luck. Of course, as luck would have it - the leader of the Mutiny and his primary henchmen went ashore during the trip home to procure food from the local Indians and were disemboweled and killed.
So a skeleton crew made it back to England and through a series of somewhat blase hearings were not found guilty of the crime of murder - mutiny had not yet been described as a crime.
Good story, but how much to we know of Henry? Very little. How much do we know about the mutiny and its aftermath - very little Like so many histories that lack the good first hand documents, this book has to rely on fillers - information about piracy and the laws that it engendered, the subsequent trips to Hudson Bay, and what others faced when over wintering in the Arctic.
Interesting, but my knowledge of Henry Hudson is only slightly greater because of this book.
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