Part 1

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Hudson Tercentenary AN HISTORICAL RETROSPECT

REGARDING THE OBJECT AND QUEST OF AN ALL-WATER ROUTE FROM EUROPE TO INDIA; THE OBSTACLES IN THE WAY; AND ALSO HUDSON'S VOYAGE TO AMERICA IN 1609 AND SOME OF ITS RESULTS

BY FRANK CHAMBERLAIN

ALBANY J. B. LYON COMPANY, PRINTERS 1909

COPYRIGHT 1909 By Frank Chamberlain

HUDSON TERCENTENARY

Let us turn back the pages of history and take a cursory view of what gave the wonderful stimulus to maritime adventure; and what so long delayed the discovery of the western world by the Europeans.

Civilized mankind scarcely secures the _necessaries_ of life before the desire for the _luxuries_ springs up and is cherished.

For untold centuries all of eastern Asia forbade the entrance of foreigners into its territories. To Europeans it was an unknown land.

In the year 326 B. C. Alexander the Great marched his conquering Macedonian legions against the myriads of Asiatic troops, subdued them and marched on to the Hindus, where he "improvised a fleet" for his army, sailed down that river, called Sacred, to the Indian ocean. Astonished at the wealth of the country and having amassed precious gems and hundreds of millions of dollars he returned loaded with his treasures up the Euphrates, to that most wonderful city of ancient times, Babylon, where he died. He opened the western doors of India, which exposed its great wealth, excited the avarice of the small number of Greeks who knew of his exploits; and for centuries it was the Europeans' Eldorado, which ultimately, by its luxury and effeminacy, undermined western manhood and led to the decay of Greece and Rome.

Asia, beyond the Euphrates, except by a few, was an unknown country to Europeans until Marco Polo in 1271 A. D., in the company of his father and uncle, met Kublai Khan, the Mongol Emperor, won his confidence and esteem and by him was entrusted with the most important missions. During the seventeen years he remained he visited the most important places in China, India and the East Indies, and returned to Italy loaded with the rarest, most precious gems and immense wealth, published a book telling his experience and picturing the East in the most roseate colors, generally emanating from fancy, but in this case resting upon facts of which he was able to furnish satisfactory proof.

The fact established that India--the East Indies had the gold, silver, precious gems and stones, ebony, ivory, cloves, cinnamon, cassia, spices and the most beautiful and costly fabrics, articles not obtainable elsewhere and the great desiderata of the Europeans, the question arose as to how they could the most easily, quickly and cheaply be obtained. They could, without much difficulty, find their way to the Indian ocean, but the transportation thence to Europe must be by "the ship of the desert," the camel, across the Arabian desert and the Isthmus of Suez, "the bridge of nations" to the Mediterranean or by a more northerly route through the Caspian and Black seas. Caravans must be formed by the merchants and armed troops to protect them against the robbers. The land route by the caravans was slow and very expensive, and the hope was cherished that an all-water route might be found which would not only shorten the time, but greatly lessen the expense of transportation. For a considerable time the Phoenicians, occupying a little skirt of land on the eastern end of the Mediterranean, and the first distinctly commercial nation in the world's history, virtually monopolized this land transportation; and then distributed the articles along the shore of the Mediterranean, where they had planted colonies clear up to the Pillars of Hercules. But Venice and Genoa, rival and wealthy cities of Italy, with fine harbors on this inland sea, sought the India trade, supplanted Phoenicia and became greatly enriched by it. The great desideratum--an all-water route from western Europe to the Indies--had not yet been found, but after the Italian cities had enjoyed, monopolized the trade with India for a period of 150 years, another little skirt of land on the west end of the Mediterranean and on the Atlantic ocean, Portugal, brought about a complete change in the transportation which deprived Venice and Genoa of that business.

Henry, Prince of Portugal, surnamed the Navigator, far in advance of his time in geographical knowledge and in the science of navigation, introduced the compass and the astrolabe, which he furnished with nautical maps and other guides for his mariners, whom he inspired to sail along the western coast of Africa and double the Cape of Good Hope. This, Bartholomew Diaz, a Portuguese navigator, did in 1486, and then it seemed certain that an all-water route from western Europe to India had been found, but it was not an accomplished fact until Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese navigator, availing himself of Diaz's discovery of 1486, made a voyage in 1497 from Lisbon to Calicut (not Calcutta) in southwestern India.

Henry "the Navigator" was the father of what may be called ocean, in contradistinction to coast, navigation, scientific, instead of chance navigation, although he died before the Cape of Good Hope had been doubled. After Diaz had doubled the Cape of Good Hope in 1486, the furor of every mariner was to point the prow of his vessel toward India to share in its precious gems, its beautiful and costly fabrics, articles of luxury, and its great wealth. The India fever seized all the maritime nations of Europe, Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands, England, Sweden and Denmark. Christopher Columbus in 1492 sought, and thought he had found India by sailing westward. Then Rodrigo Lenzoli Borgia, a Spaniard, and the Pope, under the title of Alexander VI, assuming to be vice-gerent of the world, made a division of all the newly-discovered, or subsequently to be discovered, heathen lands between the two great Catholic powers, Spain and Portugal, by drawing a line from pole to pole one hundred leagues west of the Azores and the Cape de Verde islands (this line was subsequently changed) and declared that all lands discovered west of that line and not belonging to some Christian prince should belong to Spain, and all similar lands east of that line should belong to Portugal. The two great maritime and exploring nations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were Portugal and Spain--the former in the east and the latter in the west. Alas! their great fame is in the past. Spain hoped to reach the Indies by a shorter all-water route, sailing _westward_, and that was Columbus's mission, purpose and hope.

The edict of the Pope did not, in the least, restrain France, England or the Netherlands from attempting to make discoveries, and France, England, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark granted charters to companies of their own subjects, granting them great and exclusive rights, and calling them East India companies. At the close of the year A. D. 1600, Queen Elizabeth chartered the English East India Company with most extraordinary rights and privileges, and thus laid the foundations for Great Britain's Asiatic empire.

The Dutch East India Company charter was granted in 1602, to trade to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope and the Strait of Magellan for twenty-one years, and no other of the East India companies has been so successfully managed. The Dutch have derived large revenue from the islands they still hold there, viz.: Java, the Moluccas or Spice islands, a large part of Borneo, Sumatra, Celebes and several small islands in the Malay Archipelago.

Cornelius Hartman, a Dutch navigator, who had spent some time in Lisbon, Portugal, returned in 1594 to Amsterdam, where he gave such a glowing account of the rich and wonderful products of the East, which covered the quays of the Tagus, in Lisbon, that nine prominent merchants of Amsterdam formed a company, equipped a fleet of four ships, fitted for war (a war then prevailing between Holland and Spain) and for trade, and put Hartman in command. He followed the Portuguese route, and two years later returned with cargoes far surpassing the expectations or even the hopes of the company.

Seeing this Indian wealth upon their own docks, other associations and companies were formed in the Netherlands to engage in this lucrative trade. Rivalry between them became so great as to diminish the profits that a consolidation of the companies was effected by Barneveldt. This company consisted of six branches called chambers, each of which was to be managed by its own directors (originally fifty-three in all) in different parts of the country.

A general council of seventeen directors (Amsterdam eight, Zealand four, Rotterdam, Hoorn and Enkhuizen each one, and the seventeenth to be chosen by the chamber of Zealand, the Maas and North Holland) were by a majority of votes to _determine all voyages_. This arrangement was made to protect the small chambers against the power and policy of Amsterdam if against their interests. Each locality was secured in its due proportion of the business of the company. Each chamber had the exclusive management of its ships sent out by it and was held responsible for the property coming into its possession. The general council of seventeen did not meet often, but the subordinate chambers could legislate upon subjects appropriate, and which did not trench upon the general policy and course of the company.

The Dutch East India Company was clothed with extraordinary powers and privileges and became very wealthy; not alone in the pursuit of the East India trade, but by capturing in the West Indies galleons containing great quantities of gold and silver, which the Spaniards, by the most cruel methods, had taken in Mexico and Peru.

The ancients held different opinions about the form, dimensions, the proportion of land to water, of the earth, and as to whether it was motionless, around which all the universe revolved, as the great center, and of supreme importance, or whether it was merely a satellite revolving around the sun. It seems flat and the heavenly bodies seem to revolve around it. Others thought the earth was a sphere because "the sphere is the most perfect form; it was the center of the universe because that is the place of honor; and it is motionless, because motion is less dignified than rest." Some believed that the earth is round and rests upon the ocean. Homer (900 B. C.) taught that the earth is flat, and so, too, did some of the learned men of Greece and Rome, in the Augustan age. The great Church of Rome, of unequaled influence and power, taught that the earth is flat and the center of the universe and interdicted, and for centuries punished as heretics, those denying the infallibility of the Popes and teaching otherwise. It is probable that about 600 B. C., Thales of Miletus, one of the "Seven Wise Men of Greece," a famous astronomer and geometer, was the first to teach that the earth is round. About 550 B. C. Pythagoras, the renowned Greek philosopher and mathematician, taught that "the earth is a globe which admits of antipodes; that it is in motion; is not the center of the universe, but revolves around the sun." Plato, Aristotle, Hipparchus, Pliny, Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, Eratosthenes and many others, the most eminent scholars of their times, believed that the earth is a sphere; and Eratosthenes, an Alexandrian philosopher, astronomer, geometer and geographer about 210 B. C. thought that he had not only proved that by scientific astronomical observations but also the speed of the earth in its revolutions; its magnitude and also the relative proportion of its constituent elements of land and water.

Claudius Ptolemy, about 150 A. D., a celebrated Alexandrian astronomer, geographer and mathematician, held the opinion and promulgated it, that the earth is a sphere and that the sun, planets and stars revolve around it as the grand center. He was the founder of the Ptolemaic System which was almost universally received for 1,350 years, when the system of Copernicus (a revival of the system of Pythagoras) permanently displaced it, notwithstanding the violent opposition, extending to persecution, of the Church of Rome against it.

Claudius Ptolemy had calculated the equatorial girth of the earth to be 20,400 miles. Making allowance for latitude, the circumference at the Canaries would be about 18,000 miles and the diameter about one-third of that, or 6,000 miles. Columbus was a student of everything accessible concerning geography and navigation and a devout Roman Catholic. He credited the statement in the Apochrypha of the Bible, Second Esdras, chapter 6, verse 42, which says: "Upon the third day Thou didst command that the _waters_ should be gathered in the _seventh part of the earth_, six parts has Thou dried up and kept them," etc., etc.

If Ptolemy's calculation had been correct and Esdras's statement reliable, 18,000 miles divided by 7, giving a quotient of 2,571 miles, would have been the distance Columbus would have had to sail from the Azores to Japan. He estimated he might have to sail 4,000 miles (to reach the west coast of India facing Europe) by being deflected from a straight course. The real distance from the Canaries to Japan is 12,000 miles, and the relative proportion of salt water on the surface of the earth to the land is _three-quarters_. Columbus, believing that he was inspired and commissioned by God to convert the heathen, sailed and thought he had reached India, called the natives Indians (so they have been called ever since) and he died so thinking.

If the magnitude of the earth--its diameter had been ascertained and the relative proportion of land to water with the known longitude and latitude of India, then the problem was easily solved that an all-water route to India from Europe, whether by sailing westward or northward, would greatly diminish the distance (about 8,000 miles) covered by sailing around Cape Good Hope. That was a great desideratum--the aim of individuals and nations, which would seem to warrant the belief of speedy accomplishment. Let us not forget that we must consider the conditions of the past and not of the twentieth or nineteenth centuries.

Notwithstanding "Henry, the Navigator" applied the inventions and equipments so indispensable to scientific navigation, and did all he could to inspire his sailors to sail around South Africa, it was forty years before that was an accomplished fact. So inferior, so inadequate, for ocean navigation, were the vessels then, and so little was known about ocean currents and the trade winds, that we can easily imagine that long sea voyages were discouraging.

There is no other class of men so superstitious as were the sailors, nor as are the sailors now. Everything that they see or hear of, that is unusual or they don't understand, frightens them as foreboding evil. It is an experience reported by so many of the famous navigators. You will recall Columbus's experience in his first voyage across the Atlantic, and not only the evasive answers he gave when the sailors noticed a variation of the needle and his threats to enforce his orders, that he might continue his voyage.

About 480 B. C., Pindar, the greatest of the lyric poets of Greece, declared that "Beyond Cades (Cadiz in Spain) no man, however bold and brave, could pass; only a god might voyage those waters." The Atlantic was deemed a dangerous ocean. Thus we are reminded of some of the obstacles which delayed European discovery of the western world.

All that is known of the life, education, pursuits and achievements of Hudson, the Navigator, whose name is perpetuated in monuments ("more enduring than brass") upon the face of nature (its waters and land) in North America, is contained in the brief period of five years, or from 1606 to 1611, and is almost entirely contained in his log-books of his four voyages.

That so little about Hudson is known is not because efforts have not been made by competent and zealous investigators. It is greatly to be regretted that Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, Englishmen and contemporaries of Hudson, so greatly condensed in their writings the material they had and which is the chief source of information.

Hessel Gerritsz and Emanuel Van Meteren, Hollanders, also contemporaries of Hudson, historians, geographers, map-makers and publishers, threw much side-light upon the discoveries which had been made in search of an all-water route to India (describing and illustrating by maps) before Hudson made any of his four famous voyages.

Coming down to the nineteenth century we find prominent among Hudson's biographers, Henry R. Cleveland's Life of Hudson, in Sparks' Library of American Biography, vol. 10, 1838; Henry Hudson in Holland, by the Hon. Henry C. Murphy, United States Minister at The Hague in 1859; Gen. John Meredith Read, Jr.'s elaborate historical research about Hudson published in 1866; Dr. G. M. Asher's article on Henry Hudson, printed for the Hakluyt Society in London, 1860; and John Knox Laughton, Professor of Modern History in Kings College since 1885, whose article appears in the Dictionary of International Biography, vol. 28, pp. 147-149, stating that Dr. Asher's article of 400 pages covers almost everything known about Henry Hudson, and Justin Winsor's America, eight volumes, in 1889; John Brodhead's History of New York, 1871, etc., etc.

_We do know that Hudson, the Navigator's name was Henry and not Hendrick_, as so often called and even now blazoned on the newest and finest steamboat on the Hudson river, as evidenced in his contract with the Amsterdam directors of the Dutch East India Company, a copy of which follows. _We know that he was and remained an Englishman when on his return from his third voyage_ (for the Dutch) the English government forbade him and all the Englishmen with him to enter any service other than for her own country.

As Hudson did not understand the Dutch language he employed, as his interpreter in his conference with the two Amsterdam directors of the Dutch East India Company, a learned Hollander named Jodocus Hondius, who signed the contract as a witness.

CONTRACT.

"On this eighth day of January in the year of our Lord 1609, the directors of the East India Company of the Chamber of Amsterdam, of the ten year's reckoning of the one part, and Mr Henry Hudson, Englishman assisted by Jodocus Hondius of the other part have agreed in manner following, to wit: That the said directors shall in the first place equip a small vessel or yacht of about thirty lasts (about 60 tons) burden with which well provided with men, provisions, and other necessaries the aforesaid Hudson shall about the first of April sail in order to search for a passage by the North, around by the North side of Novaya Zemlya and shall continue thus along that parallel until he shall be able to sail southward to the latitude of 60 degrees. He shall obtain as much knowledge of the lands as can be done without any considerable loss of time, and if it be possible return immediately, in order to make a faithful report and relation of his voyage to the directors, and to deliver over his journals, log books and charts together with an account of everything whatsoever which shall happen to him during the voyage, without keeping anything back; for which said voyage the directors shall pay to the said Hudson as well as for his outfit for the said voyage as for the support of his wife and children the sum of 800 guilders; (about 320 dollars) and, in case (which God prevent) he do not come back or arrive hereabouts within a year the directors shall further pay to his wife 200 guilders in cash; and thereupon they shall not be further liable to him or his heirs, unless he shall either afterward or within the year arrive and have found the passage good and suitable for the company to use; in which case the directors will reward the aforenamed Hudson for his dangers, trouble and knowledge in their discretion, with which the before mentioned Hudson is content. And in case the directors think proper to prosecute and continue the same voyage it is stipulated and agreed with the aforenamed Hudson that he shall make his residence in this country with his wife and children, and shall enter into the employment of no other than the Company and this at the discretion of the directors, who also promise to make him satisfied and content for such further service in all justice and equity. All without fraud or evil intent. In witness of the truth, two contracts are made hereof, of the same tenor and are subscribed by both parties and also by Jodocus Hondius as interpreter and witness.

"Dated as above Signed "DIRK VAN OS "J. POPPE "HENRY HUDSON "JODOCUS HONDIUS "Witness"

The period of the tercentenary of Henry Hudson's exploration, in 1609, of the "Grande river," which for centuries has been called the "Hudson river," approaches, and already plans and preparations, on a grand scale, have been begun to commemorate that highly important event.

Albanians are especially interested and participating in the preparations for this celebration, for the site of Albany was deemed the most important in the New Netherlands, that of the city of New York alone excepted, and in many respects, early, even more important than that. For at Albany, near the confluence of the two great rivers of the territory of New York, the Hudson from the north and the Mohawk from the west, the Indians from the north and west came in their canoes with their peltry and furs, as a market place, designed by nature, for the exchange of articles between the red men and the white men for what they did not want, to get what, respectively, they did want. Then, too, it was where the Indians assembled to make their important treaties; where the governors of the American provinces met to consider and decide important measures; and where the first provincial congress, in 1754, met and prepared a plan for the union of the colonies. It was, moreover, the great strategic point contended for by the French and English on American soil, and later by the English against the United States in the War of the American Revolution. Albany's charter, as a city, under the date of 1686, is the oldest unrevoked charter of a city in the United States and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries no place in the western world surpassed it in historic interest; and for the last hundred years and more, as the capital of the Empire State, it has been considered, next to Washington, the most influential and important legislative center in the United States.

The Scandinavians were the earliest and boldest Arctic navigators and Iceland was their rendezvous. A great part of the Arctic shores that have been visited in modern times was known to the Scandinavians.

Columbus visited Iceland fifteen years before he sailed in 1492. S. Cabot went to North America in 1498 by way of Iceland. Scandinavians were seeking fisheries, as were the exploring nations of that period, and many of their acts were those of freebooters. The Portuguese, the Spanish, and the French, the three nations which had followed in the track of Cabot and his English companions and had then arrived at the northern shores of America in search of a passage to Asia, did not abandon the newly explored region.