Half Moon not half bad

Before becoming the world's most famous historical castaway after William Bligh, English explorer Henry Hudson was known as a bit of a bad boy. He would work for the highest bidder, but then would use their ships, gear and men to sail wherever he felt, presumably utilizing his orders for the 17th century version of toilet paper or perhaps as firestarter.

Like his rough contemporaries Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, Hudson was "results-oriented", naturally cagey about his plans, loath to commit much to writing and usually had three or four contrasting agendas in play. Plan B for this fellow was to keep mum about the rest of the alphabet, each letter of which signified yet another exit strategy.

As we learn in Ontario sailor Douglas Hunter's Half Moon: Henry Hudson and the Voyage that Redrew the Map of the World, Hudson was a rogue, but not particularly lovable. He was, however, very good at picking up the fragments of information that circulated among the small cadre of skipper/explorers/freebooters who regularly visited the imperfectly known shores of North America, where overlapping claims and failed colonies did not dissuade those merchants eager to exploit its unestimated riches (and perhaps find a good source of slaves). Better yet, the various inland rivers from Virginia to Greenland might be the fabled Northwest Passage to China, of which considerably more was known and lusted after.

Unfortunately, Hudson's voyage to the river that today bears his name, and to the complicated harbour of today's New York City, is not well documented, and the author's original research, culled from second-hand accounts, Dutch mercantile writings and painstaking research of long-outdated sailor's charts, gives a sketchy if probable outline of where Hudson's small ship, Half Moon, and largely Dutch (and rebellious) crew touched and, after a fashion, explored.

The history is therefore naturally couched in "likelies", "perhapses" and "probablies", but this is not to be faulted. Hudson seemed a cagey, secretive sort, and as his stock-in-trade was less native trade goods and more raw information no one European knew, it is inevitable that four centuries have obscured his accomplishments. More well known, however, is the clashes his crew had with native North Americans, and how their presence led to large-scale disruptions of the social order, as well as the better-known effects of European diseases.

Within a couple of decades after Hudson's death at the hands of his own crew in the frosty bay named after him (which happened a mere two years after his probing of the Hudson River at Manhattan and beyond), the area now known as New York City would be established as a Dutch outpost, and later as an English city. Hudson had, very likely, no concept of how his attempt to find the right Northwest Passage would play out, but thanks to this book, we do.