What befell the survivors of the “Discovery’s” crew, on the ship’s return to England, has remained until now unknown; and even now the account of them is inconclusive.  In the Latin edition of the year 1613 of his “Detectio Freti” Hessel Gerritz wrote:  “They exposed Hudson and the other officers in a boat on the open sea, and returned into their country.  There they have been thrown into prison for their crime, and will be kept in prison until their captain shall be safely brought home.  For that purpose some ships have been sent out last year by the late Prince of Wales and by the Directors of the Moscovia Company, about the return of which nothing as yet has been heard.”

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.  And they are his justly.  Before his time, those great waterways, and that great inland sea, were mere hazy geographical concepts.  After his time they were clearly defined geographical facts.  He did—­and those who had seen them before him did not—­make them effectively known.  Here, in this city of New York—­which owes to him its being—­he has a monument of a different and of a nobler sort.  Here, assuredly, down through the coming ages his memory will be honored actively, his name will be in men’s mouths ceaselessly, so long as the city shall endure.