Agnes Christina Laut - The 'Adventurers of England' on Hudson Bay (Agnes Christina Laut) (Literary Thoughts Edition)

Thomas Button, afterwards knighted for his effort, came out the very next year at the expense of the merchant adventurers—Walstenholme, Smith, and Digges—to search for Hudson. He wintered (1612-13) at Port Nelson, which he explored and named after his mate, who died there of scurvy; but the sea gave up no secret of its dead. Prickett and Bylot, of Hudson's former crew, were there also with the old ship Discovery and a large frigate called Resolution, an appropriate name. Button's crew became infected with scurvy, and Port Nelson a camp for the dead. Then came Captain Gibbon in 1614; but the ice caught him at Labrador and turned him back. The merchant adventurers then fitted out Bylot, Hudson's second mate, and in 1615-16 he searched the desolate, lonely northern waters. He found no trace of Hudson, nor a passage to the South Sea; but he gave his mate's name—Baffin—to the lonely land that lines the northern side of the straits. Novelists are frequently accused of sensationalism and exaggeration, but if, as tradition seems to suggest, Hudson were still alive seven hundred miles south at the lower end of the Bay, straining vain eyes for a sail at sea, like Alexander Selkirk of a later day—with a Button and a Gibbon and a Bylot and a Baffin searching for him with echoing cannon roll and useless call in the north—then the life and death of the old pathfinder are more like a tale from Defoe than a story of real life.

The English merchant adventurers then gave up—possibly for the very good reason that they had emptied their purses. This brings us to the year 1617 with no North-West Passage discovered, and very little other reward for the toll of life and heroism during seven years.

Superficially, when we contemplate such failure, it looks like the broken arc of a circle; but when we find the whole circle we see that it is made up very largely of broken endeavour, and that Destiny has shaped the wheel to roll to undreamed ends. There was no practicable North-West Passage, as we know; but the search for such a passage gave to the world a new empire.

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