Hi everyone, last Monday I said I would publish my exclusive interview with explorer Henry Hudson. I now have gathered enough information through these interviews to give you a series of episodes on his incredible journey. We begin with Episode 1, Surviving in the North.
The winter of 1611 had been a tough one. Hudson and his crew had been trapped on the shores of James Bay in Canada. The water had been frozen and the only thing the crew could do was sit and survive until the ice thawed. No one expected to survive that long. Hudson said, "We all thought death was right around the corner. Not a week went by without a death. It hung in the air like a bad fart." But the crew did make it through to spring. As the ice thawed, the question arose of what to do next. "We had all expected to die that winter. No one thought of what we would do when the ice thawed" said Hudson, "I had no interest in going back. I was already in debt in England. A bunch of creditors were after me and the only way I would have been able to pay them back was by finding the Northwest Passage. There was no way I was going back. So they staged a mutiny."
Hudson was tossed off the boat along with his son John and six other crewmen, three stricken with gout and the other three loyal to Hudson. The spring and summer passed with the eightsome hunting and cooking and looking for people to settle with. Early on the three members with gout died. They were used to food. "We had to resort to cannibalism, " says Hudson, "food wasn't really steady and we needed stability. Their corpses brought that."
Spring turned into summer and summer turned into fall and fall turned into winter and Hudson was where he had been the year before, stuck in the cold. December and January went by and the group of five continued to live off of what they had gathered in the fall. But as February began. They were running out of food. "I was starving. My son was starving. My men were starving. We were miserable." One morning Hudson left his son at camp as he and the other three men went to gather food. He returned dragging the corpses of the men to camp. "I don't want to talk about how I killed them. Its not one of my prouder moments."
Winter eventually came to an end and the Hudsons found themselves in the same position as the previous year. In August they found a hamlet of Metis Native Americans living on a river. The tribe took them in and gave them shelter in food. The tribe eventually demanded pay, so faced with the possibility of a scalping, Hudson sold his son into slavery. Later on the Metis traded him to another tribe and Hudson never saw his son again."I'm not going to say I've been a perfect man. I've done some things I regret. But everything I've done has been for survival."
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
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