Jodocus Hondius, Henry Hudson and My Voyage to the Past

Hearing the name of the cruise ship sent me back to my research notes. I have been researching Henry Hudson and his contemporaries (Shakespeare, Walter Raleigh, Dr John Dee, Guy Fawkes, et al) off and on for a few years. It started with a question and someone else's theory that no prior history for Hudson survives because he was a pirate prior to 1607.

More water in the northern hemisphere is named for Henry Hudson than for any deity, king or person that ever lived yet he discovered none of it. Not in the real sense and not even in the Doctrine of Discovery sense. He retraced John Davis, Waymouth, Frobisher, Cartier, Erik the Red, and with respect to the Hudson River, both Gomez and Verrazzano.

Most people, if they know any details, know that Hudson explored the Hudson River in 1609 and the Hudson Bay in 1610/11. They may believe that his crew mutineed after a harsh winter in the Hudson Bay. Essentially correct although not technically a mutiny since it was not a military ship. They left Hudson, his young son and 7 crew members in a fair sized shallop at the beginning of the summer of 1611. There was shelter, a carpenter and his tool kit and well-fed Inuit had come through the area to trade during the prior winter. But history records this event as 'they left Hudson and the others to die.'

In a dispassionate review of the journals, legal cases and other facts, Hudson emerges as a deal maker and he had to be fairly good at managing people of various classes, from his wealthy patrons to his desperate sailors.

Hudson was called to Amsterdam by investors who wanted to find a route over Russia. Hudson consulted with their best hydrographers in what some researchers believe was a kind of espionage. In other words he goes to what are essentially job interviews and learns what various foreign powers know about routes and what their goals are. Among the most knowledgeable people in Europe at that time with respect to a full map of the world and the true distance between places (via water) is a person at the center of Hudson's negotiations: Jodocus Hondius, which is Dutchified to Joost de Hondt. Wikipedia tells us