Discovery
Spotlight
The Young Englishman
A new exploration history links the careers of Champlain and
Hudson.
MARK LOVEWELL
God’s Mercies:
Rivalry, Betrayal in the Dream of Discovery
Douglas Hunter
Doubleday Canada
416 pages, hardcover
ISB N 9780385660587
n 1612, Samuel de Champlain
was in France when he learned some startling news. A youthful employee, Nicolas
de Vignau, had been sent to live with an Algonquin tribe far up the Ottawa
River. He had now crossed the Atlantic to inform Champlain that he had travelled
with his hosts to a northern sea, where he had seen the wreck of a small
English boat and been shown the scalps of those in it. All had been killed
except a boy who had been passed on to a neighbouring tribe. This tribe, said
Vignau, was now willing to present the boy to Champlain to cement an alliance
with the French.
Champlain
was intrigued, aware that scant months earlier the ship of English explorer
Henry Hudson had returned to London reporting its discovery of a vast bay on the
northern edge of the Americas. There had also been news of mutiny: seven crew
members as well as the captain and his young son had been cast off in a small
shallop somewhere in the bay. Mustn’t this be the boy Vignau was speaking of?
And since there could be no doubt that it was, what valuable knowledge had John
Hudson gained while being kept a prisoner?
Douglas
Hunter employs this arresting episode as the central thread in his account of
French and English exploratory ventures during the first decades of the 17th
century. Having made his reputation as a business writer with books on the
Molson family’s history and the Nortel meltdown, he now joins Canada’s stable
of exploration historians with a work that combines scholarly rigour and fresh
insight—especially in dealing with Henry Hudson’s final voyage, whose details
have always been controversial given the self-serving nature of the surviving
primary documents. Meticulously sifting through this material, Hunter has
produced a riveting account of probable events aboard Hudson’s Discovery during
the fateful months the ship spent in Hudson Bay.
As
Hunter is careful to emphasize, whatever mistakes Hudson made in inflaming the
conspiracy against him, inexperience as a mariner was not one of them. By the
time he took on the Discovery’s command, he had headed three expeditions
for English and Dutch merchants: an attempt at a transpolar passage by way of
the remote Svarlbard islands and two attempts to sail across the top of Asia.
On the last, after being stymied yet again by Arctic ice, he had made an
unplanned detour to North America’s eastern coast, where, to the great benefit
of his Dutch masters (as surprised as they were when they finally learned it),
he discovered and explored the river named in his honour.
Now
he was again working for the English, charged with surveying the strait south
of Baffin Island. On completing this task, the Discovery turned south
into the bay beyond. Hudson insisted on sailing down its entire length, then
spent precious weeks at its southern end in an apparent attempt to find a
navigable river. His exact reasoning is hard to divine, since the bulk of his
logbook was later confiscated by the mutineers, but Hunter contends he was
searching for one or more large lakes further south, where he hoped to find a
westward channel to the Pacific. This plan, argues Hunter, represented the same
basic agenda Hudson had in mind back in 1609, which was to find the continent’s
inland lakes and head west—an ambition based on conjectures gleaned from a map
drawn by English cartographer Edward Wright in 1599, as well as snippets of
geographical information found in Champlain’s first exploratory record, Des
Sauvages, published in 1603.
“Hudson
had never intended to be back in England after eight months and a basic reconnaissance,”
says Hunter. “He was seizing the Discovery voyage as if it were his last
chance at a grand success.” As for his crew, alarm was growing that their
captain’s delay now consigned them to months-long imprisonment in alien surroundings.
The winter, when it arrived, was even harsher than feared. By late spring,
scurvy had arrived and starvation loomed, provoking insurrection plans. Early
one June morning, impatient to take advantage of the ice-free passage north,
the conspirators herded Hudson, his close allies and several of the extremely
ill into the small shallop, cut its tow line and watched as the castaways
first pursued them northward and then put in for the bleak shore, never to be
seen again.
Hunter
adeptly details not just the rebellion and the perpetrators’ difficult homeward
journey but the aftermath once the Discovery docked in London. The
survivors were saved from the gallows through the machinations of their employers—some
of them key political figures—intent on using several of the crewmembers for
future Hudson Bay forays. Their case was also aided by the fact that two of the
conspiracy’s main instigators had died on the return voyage, making it
possible to lay all of the blame at their feet. But, as Hunter makes clear,
this questionable denouement was also due to a corrupt High Court of the
Admiralty far more lenient toward conspiracies aboard commercial expeditions
than when dealing with naval mutinies.
Turning
to the French side of his story, Hunter reveals similar talents in sketching
the myriad intrigues that Samuel de Champlain and his allies faced in their
colonization efforts. His portrait of Champlain is a highly sympathetic one,
as he sketches a career that began in the service of France’s Henry IV,
followed by a gradually expanding role in France’s New World ventures. Now
Champlain was again navigating tricky political waters with his usual aplomb,
making full use of Vignau’s tale and its provocative connection with the lost
Hudson party to maintain needed royal support.
Coincidentally,
as Hunter mentions, Champlain and Hudson had once come close to meeting,
separated by just 130 kilometres and seven weeks as one charted the upper
reaches of the Hudson River soon after the other visited the shores of Lake
Champlain. Although Champlain would not have realized just how near they had
come to one another, he knew the basic facts of Hudson’s earlier journey. As
someone so strategically minded, Champlain could not have failed to note this
English captain’s success in planting foreign flags uncomfortably close to New
France from opposite sides of the compass. But now Champlain was committed to
ensuring that his rival’s personal tragedy would work in France’s favour.
As
soon as he alighted in Quebec in 1613, he began organizing his journey up the
Ottawa to visit Vignau’s Algonquin hosts. On reaching this destination,
however, Champlain discovered that, once in the company of the Algonquins,
Vignau was forced to admit his northern journey was a lie, while the Algonquins
had no desire to facilitate Champlain’s planned meeting with the tribe who
Vignau had said were holding the English boy. His immediate hopes dashed, and
angered as well as flummoxed by his assistant’s easily punctured duplicity,
Champlain had to return down the Ottawa with little to boast of except a
renewal of his contacts with this important tribe, as well as an of his angry
Native hosts, had been too fulsome. Perhaps portions of the young man’s
concocted tale were based on some actual report Vignau had heard, but he had
then become too embarrassed to divulge these kernels of truth after his
betrayal of Champlain had been revealed. If so, neither Champlain nor anyone after
him was ever able to know for sure, while Vignau himself dropped completely
from view.
Despite this
lingering mystery, Hunter’s use of this episode and the events surrounding it
help reveal how much the exploration of this era transcended national
boundaries, and how crucially it was shaped by the personalities and individual
initiative of the explorers themselves. For this reason alone, as well as for
many others, the motives and beliefs of men like Hudson and Champlain will
always hold special significance, while adding considerable popular lustre to
books such as Hunter’s. And Vignau’s story itself can be seen as more than just
a narrative device. For who is to say that more light might not still be shed
on its veracity? Hunter does not go into these details, but local lore suggests
that Hudson and his castaways may have spent some time on Charlton Island near
the bay’s southern end, and tangible remains may yet have to be found to prove
this. All that exists at present are tantalizing hints and possibilities.¹ For example,
some of the Cree occupants of the village of Wemindji, on James Bay’s western
shore, presume they are descended from Hudson. Meanwhile just outside their
community is a nondescript spot in the lonely wilderness, which, for as long as
anyone can remember, has been known by the Cree name Waamistikushish, or “young
Englishman.”
Note
1 This lore is outlined in Corey Sandler’s Henry Hudson: Dreams
and Obsession — The Tragic Legacy of the New World’s Least Understood Explorer (New
York: Kensington, 2007).
Mark
Lovewell teaches
at Ryerson University and is co-publisher of the LRC. Currently on sabbatical,
he is writing a book on Canada’s North.