James Bay, 23 June 1611: the last voyage of Henry Hudson

On the morning of 23 June 1611, off the eastern shore of James Bay, the mutineers aboard the English bark Discovery brought Henry Hudson out of his cabin with his hands bound. They put him into the ship’s small open boat, the shallop, with his teenage son John; the carpenter Philip Staffe, who had been offered a place aboard the Discovery and refused it; the mathematician Thomas Wydowse, also rendered Woodhouse in some sources; the mate John King; and four seamen, Andrew Ludlow, Michael Butt, Adam Moore, and Syracke Fanner. Nine souls in a boat meant for short work near the shore. The mutineers gave them, in the surviving phrasing, some meal, some pork, a fowling piece, powder and shot, a few pikes, and an iron pot, and then they cut the rope.

For a few hours the shallop ran in the Discovery’s wake. Then the mutineers pressed sail, and the bark outran her. After that morning, no European ever saw Henry Hudson, his son, or any of the seven others again. The eight men who survived the homeward run did return, and they told a detailed story of how the boat was cut loose. They could not tell what became of it. Four hundred and fifteen years of subsequent investigation has not been able to either.

The documented account

Hudson was an English navigator of uncertain birth, conventionally dated around 1565, who had made three previous voyages in search of a polar route to Asia. In 1607 he had sailed for the Muscovy Company over Spitsbergen and reached about 80 degrees 23 minutes north. In 1608 he tried again to the northeast, by way of Novaya Zemlya, and the ice turned him back. In 1609, sailing the Halve Maen for the Dutch East India Company, he charted the river that now bears his name as far as modern Albany. The English authorities detained him on his return for serving under a foreign flag, and a consortium of London merchants and gentry then engaged him for a fourth attempt, this time at the Northwest Passage.

The backers were Sir Thomas Smythe, governor of the Virginia Company, Sir Dudley Digges, and John Wolstenholme. The ship was the Discovery, a 55-ton bark already used in the Waymouth voyage of 1602 to roughly the same waters. She sailed from London on 17 April 1610 with a complement of about twenty-three. Among them were Robert Juet, Hudson’s mate from the 1609 voyage; Henry Greene, a young man Hudson had taken on outside the ship’s articles; the lame Londoner Abacuk Prickett, the lone first-person voice the case would later turn on; and Hudson’s son John, in his teens.

The Discovery raised southern Greenland on 4 June 1610 and entered the strait between Resolution Island and Labrador around 25 June. Through August the ship stood south down the eastern shore of the inland sea on the far side, the body of water now called Hudson Bay. By early November she was beset by ice in the southern bight, the body now called James Bay, and was wintered there, probably near the mouth of the Rupert River on what is today the Quebec shore.

The winter broke the expedition. Food ran short. Hudson’s distribution of remaining provisions became the central grievance later set down against him. He had already demoted Robert Juet during the outward voyage, on the ground of a “mutinous” tongue, and raised Robert Bylot in his place. Juet’s enmity is consistent across the surviving record. Henry Greene, the young man Hudson had defended at one point and then turned on after a dispute, became one of the two named ringleaders of what came next.

The ice opened in early June 1611. The Discovery worked her way out of the southern bight and began the homeward run on 12 June. On or about the night of 21 to 22 June, the conspiracy was set. Prickett’s account, written after his return, places its central scene in his own cabin, where he lay confined by lameness, and has Greene and Wilson swearing an oath that he could neither prevent nor refuse. Bylot’s later deposition to the Admiralty admitted prior knowledge that Prickett’s narrative omits. On the morning of 23 June 1611, the mutineers seized Hudson, bound his hands, put him and eight others into the shallop, and cut it loose.

The Discovery worked north through Hudson Bay and reached Cape Digges, at the northern lip of the bay, on or about 28 July. A party went ashore to trade with a group of Inuit, and the trading broke down into a skirmish. Henry Greene, William Wilson, John Thomas, and Michael Perce were killed; Prickett was wounded but reached the ship. Two of the three named ringleaders were dead within five weeks of the casting-adrift. Robert Juet, the third, died of starvation at sea in September as the Discovery fought a hungry crossing of the North Atlantic. The eight men who finally brought her into Berehaven in southwest Ireland that autumn were Bylot, Prickett, Edward Wilson, Bennet Mathew, Adrian Motter, Francis Clemens, Nicholas Sims, and Silvanus Bond.

London received them. The Trinity House masters, who heard the case for the backers, reportedly recommended that the survivors should hang. No prosecution followed in 1611. Instead, in 1612, the same consortium sent the Discovery and a consort back to the bay under Sir Thomas Button, charged with continuing the search and, secondarily, with looking for Hudson. Bylot and Prickett were carried as ice-pilots, the geographic knowledge in their heads being too valuable to hang. The expedition wintered at the mouth of the Nelson River, lost many men, found no trace, and returned in 1613.

The trial came six and a half years after the mutiny. In 1617 and 1618 the High Court of Admiralty examined the survivors. In 1618 Bylot, Prickett, Edward Wilson, and Bennet Mathew were arraigned, on a murder indictment rather than a mutiny indictment, and acquitted. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography summarises the legal ground the court took: that on the law of the time it was not murder to turn experienced seamen adrift within reach of a shore. The court was not asked whether Hudson had survived. It was asked whether the surviving sailors had committed murder, and the answer it gave was no.

The evidence

The case rests on two contemporary documentary strands, a fragment of Hudson’s own journal, and four strands of later oral history and archaeological claim. None of them has produced a positive identification of the nine men in the shallop.

The first strand is Prickett’s narrative, the only first-person account of the mutiny. Samuel Purchas printed it in 1625 in Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes, more than a decade after the trial that turned on its content. The narrative is detailed and largely consistent with the legal record, and it is also the work of a surviving mutineer who knew when he wrote that he had answered to the Admiralty for what it said. Purchas himself flagged the difficulty, noting that “this report of Prickett may happely bee suspected by some as not so friendly to Hudson.” Modern scholarship is divided. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography treats the narrative as plausible and consistent; Douglas Hunter reads it more skeptically, pointing to contradictions with Bylot’s deposition and the implausibility of the cabin-meeting scene; Peter Mancall treats it as a partial but largely usable record.

The second strand is the 1617 to 1618 Admiralty depositions, filed at the National Archives at Kew under HCA 1/48. Bylot, Prickett, Edward Wilson, and Bennet Mathew gave evidence on the mutiny and the casting-adrift, and the 1618 acquittal closed the legal record without a finding on what had happened in the boat. The depositions corroborate the basic timeline. They do not establish anything about Hudson’s survival, because that question was not before the court.

The third strand is the fragment of Hudson’s own journal that Prickett brought back. Purchas printed it alongside the narrative in 1625. The entries end on 3 August 1610, ten months before the mutiny, for reasons that are not on the record. The journal confirms the outward route and the entry into the bay, and it falls silent before the wintering.

The four later strands have to be read with care. Samuel de Champlain, in his 1613 Voyages, recorded that Algonquian-speaking informants at Tadoussac had described an English boy held inland, the survivor of a wreck in the northern sea. The identification of the boy with John Hudson is a much later inference, drawn from the timing and the geographic plausibility. No French or English contact confirmed it. Captain Thomas James, wintering in James Bay in 1631 and 1632, recorded in his 1633 account the remains of a shelter on a small island he called Danby Island; the attribution to Philip Staffe is a later guess, not James’s own. Various 19th and 20th century Cree and Inuit oral histories, collected long after the event, describe European castaways consistent in shape with the Hudson case, including the tradition collected by Dorothy Harley Eber of an old man with a long white beard and a young boy arriving in a small wooden boat. None was recorded contemporaneously. None has been confirmed as a record of the 1611 party.

The remaining item is a stone of roughly 150 pounds, found near Deep River, Ontario, in 1959, reportedly carved with the letters “HH,” the year “1612,” and the word “Captive.” It has been pointed to as evidence that Hudson was alive a year after the casting-adrift and was being held inland. No peer-reviewed archaeological examination of the stone has been published. The popular-press summary of the find concedes that the absence of authentication leaves a hoax open as a possibility. The stone is recorded here as an unauthenticated 20th century find.

The 19th century painting most commonly reproduced with the case, John Collier’s The Last Voyage of Henry Hudson, was made in 1881 and shows Hudson and his son in the shallop watching the Discovery sail away. It is a historical-imagination painting from 270 years after the event, not evidence of anything that happened on 23 June 1611.

Hypotheses and open questions

The serious readings of the case fall into four families, and none has been confirmed.

Hypothesis A: death by exposure and starvation in the boat or near the shore, within days or weeks. The shallop was small and open, the southern bight of James Bay is cold and storm-prone even in late June, the provisions handed down were scant, and the party included a sick man and a teenage boy. The Button search the following year and the Gillam voyage half a century later found no trace, which is consistent with bodies and gear lost to the season. Peter Mancall’s 2009 reading takes this as the most probable outcome. The objection is that no remains, no boat, and no equipment have ever been recovered, which fits silence equally well in any direction.

Hypothesis B: reaching shore and contact with a local community, peaceful or hostile. The southern and eastern shores of James Bay were Cree territory; the northern lip of Hudson Bay was Inuit. A short crossing to land was within reach. The Cape Digges skirmish weeks later shows that first contacts could turn lethal quickly. It also shows the reverse, that an Inuit hunting party could absorb a sudden European arrival without killing every member of it. The later Cree and Inuit oral traditions described under the evidence are consistent with peaceful contact and assimilation; the absence of any documented hostile encounter at the southern end of the bay is consistent with the same.

Hypothesis C: an attempt at onward navigation, lost at sea. Staffe was a carpenter, King was a mate, the party had a fowling piece, an iron pot, and some idea of where the ship had been heading. A run north up the bay to attempt the strait was technically possible. The shallop’s loss in storm, ice, or current would leave nothing recoverable. The objection is that the geography is hard. The casting-adrift was at the southern end of James Bay, several hundred miles by water against prevailing winds and currents from any open route.

Hypothesis D: survival into captivity inland, the reading the Deep River stone would support if it were authentic. The stone is the only physical artifact that has ever been advanced as evidence Hudson outlived the casting-adrift, and its authentication is exactly what is missing. The Champlain passage of 1613, if it referred to John Hudson, would be consistent with at least one survivor being carried inland. Both pieces have stood for decades as suggestive without being confirmable. They are an outlier rather than a finding.

A fifth, popular reading, that the mutineers killed Hudson aboard the Discovery and substituted the cast-adrift story, is not supported by the contemporary record. The Trinity House recommendation to hang the survivors in 1611 is sometimes read as proof they did not believe the story; the 1618 acquittal turned on the legal definition of murder, not on whether the casting-adrift had occurred. Bylot’s deposition and Prickett’s narrative agree on the basic event. The reading is recorded here as a suspicion the record does not sustain.

What remains unknown

What is in the record is narrow and clear. On the morning of 23 June 1611, off the eastern shore of James Bay, Henry Hudson, his teenage son John, the carpenter Philip Staffe, the mathematician Thomas Wydowse, the mate John King, and the seamen Andrew Ludlow, Michael Butt, Adam Moore, and Syracke Fanner were put into the Discovery’s small boat, given a sparse handful of stores, and cut loose. The Discovery set sail. They were not seen again by any European witness.

What is not in the record is the rest. The 1612 Button search expedition, sponsored by the same consortium that had backed Hudson, found no trace of the nine. The 1668 Gillam voyage, whose return led to the founding of the Hudson’s Bay Company, made no recovery either. Four centuries of European and Canadian presence on the shores of the bay have produced no remains, no shallop, no certain campsite, and no individual identifiable artifact. The Champlain testimony of 1613, the later Cree and Inuit oral-history strands, and the Deep River stone of 1959 are each consistent with a different partial reading. None has been confirmed.

The eight men who reached England in the autumn of 1611 brought back a detailed account of how the boat had been cut loose and no account of what happened after that. The 1618 court acquitted them on a murder charge without ruling on Hudson’s fate, because the law of the time did not require a court to find that question to dispose of the case. The bay still carries the name of the man last seen sitting in an open boat on its eastern shore, watching the ship he had captained run away from him under sail. What happened to him after that morning, and to his son, and to the seven men beside him, is unknown on the record.

James Bay, 23 June 1611: the last voyage of Henry Hudson

The documented account

The evidence

Hypotheses and open questions

What remains unknown

Sources

Primary / documentary

Secondary / contextual