A curious feature of the trial of the mutineers is its long delay—­more than five years.  The Trinity House authorities acted promptly.  Almost immediately upon the return to London of the eight survivors of the “Discovery” five of them (Prickett, Wilson, Clemens, Motter and Mathews—­no mention is made in the record of Byleth, Bond, and the boy Syms) were brought before the Masters (October 24, 1611) for examination.  In a single day their examination was concluded:  with the resulting verdict of the Masters upon their actions that they “deserved to be hanged for the same.”  Three months later, 25 January, 1611 (O.S.), the matter was before the Instance and Prize Records division of the High Court of Admiralty; of which hearing the only recorded result is the examination of the barber-surgeon, Edward Wilson.  Then, apparently, the mutineers were left to their own devices for five full years.

So far as the records show, no action was taken until the trial began in Oyer and Terminer.  The date of that beginning cannot be fixed precisely—­there being no date attached to the True Bill found against Bileth, Prickett, Wilson, Motter, Bond, and Sims.  (For some unknown reason Mathews and Clemens were not included in the indictment; although Clemens, certainly, was within the jurisdiction of the Court.) The date may be fixed very closely, however, by the fact that the two most important witnesses, Prickett and Byleth, were examined on 7 February, 1616 (O.S.).  Three months later, 13 May, 1617 (O.S.), Clemens was examined.  And that is all!  There, in the very middle of the trial—­leaving in the air the examinations of the other witnesses and the judgments of the Court—­the records end.

Had document No. 2 of the Oyer and Terminer series been found, some explanation of the five years’ delay of the trial might have been forthcoming; and the exact date of its beginning probably would have been fixed.  As the records stand, they leave us—­so far as the trial is concerned—­with a series of increasingly disappointing negatives:  We do not know why two of the crew—­one of them certainly within reach of the Court—­were not included in the indictment; nor why the trial was postponed for so long a time; nor certainly when it ended; nor, worst of all, what was its result.

I should be glad to believe that the mutineers—­even including Byleth, who was the best of them—­came to the hanging that the Elder Brethren of the Trinity, in their off-hand just judgment, declared that they deserved.  If they did, there is no known record of their hanging.  A curiously suggestive interest, however, attaches to the fact that at just about the time when the trial ended one of them, and the only conspicuous one of them, seems permanently to have disappeared.  That most careful investigator the late Mr. Alexander Brown was unable to find any sure trace of Byleth after his second voyage with Baffin, which was made in March-August, 1616.  Seven months later, as the subjoined records prove, he was on trial for his life.  It seems to me to be at least a possibility that the result of that trial may have led directly to his permanent disappearance.  If it did, and if Prickett and the others in a like way disappeared with him, then was justice done on Hudson’s murderers.