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e end of a GOLDEN THREAD before you can follow the baffling mazes of a discoverer's faith, and these men hadn't faith in anything except a full stomach and a sure wage. After all, their arguments were the same as the obstructions presented against every expedition to the Pole to-day, or for that matter, to any other realm of the Unknown. It was like asking the inventor to show his invention in full work before he has made it, or the bank to pay its dividends before you contribute to its capital. What reason could Hudson give to justify his faith? Standing on the quarter deck with clenched fists and troubled face, he might as well have argued with stones, or pleaded for a chance with modern money bags as talked down the expostulations of the mutineers. They were men of the kidney who will always be on the safe side. As the world knows--there was no passage across the Pole suitable for commerce. There was no justification for Hudson's faith. Yet it was the goal of that faith, which led him on the road to greater discoveries than a dozen passages across the Pole.

Faith has always been represented as one of three sister graces; cringing, meek-spirited, downtrodden damsels at their best. In view of all she has accomplished for the world in religion, in art, in science, in discovery, in commerce, Faith should be represented as a fiery-eyed goddess with the forked lightnings for her torch, treading the mountain peaks of the universe. From her high place, she alone can see whence comes the light and which way runs the Trail. Step by step, the battle has been against darkness, every step a blow, every blow a bruise driving back to the right Trail; every blood mark a milestone in human progress from lowland to upland.

HUDSON'S SECOND VOYAGE

This time, the Muscovy Company commissioned Hudson to look out for ivory hunting as well as the short passage to Asia. Three men only of the old crew enlisted. Hudson might enjoy risking his life for glory. Most mortals prefer safety. Of the three who re-enlisted one was his son.

Keeping close to the cloud-capped, mountainous shores of Norway, the boat sighted Cape North on June 3, 1608. Clouds wreathed the mountains in belts and plumes of mist. Snow-fields of far summits shone gold in sudden bursts of sunshine through the cloud-wrack. Fjords like holes in the wall nestled at the foot of the mountains, the hamlets of the fisher folk like tiny match boxes against the mighty hills. To the restless tide rocked and heaved the fishing smacks--emblems of man's spirit at endless wrestle with the elements. As Hudson's ship climbed the waves, the fishermen stood up in their little boats to wave a God-speed to these adventurers bound for earth's ends. Sails swelling to the wind, Hudson's vessel rode the roll of green waters, then dipped behind a cataract of waves, and dropped over the edge of the known world.

What wonder that Hudson's ignorant sailors began to feel the marvel of the strange ice-world, and to see fabulous things in the light of the midnight sun? One morning a face was seen following the ship, staring up from the sea. There was no doubt of it. Two sailors saw it. Was it one of the monsters of Saga myth, that haunted this region? The watch called a comrade. Both witnessed the hideous apparition of a human face with black hair streaming behind on the waves. The body was like a woman's and the seamen's terror had conjured up the ill omen of a mermaid when wave-wash overturned its body, exhibiting the fins and tail of a porpoise--"skin very white"--mermaid without a doubt, portent of evil, though the hair may have been floating seaweed.

Sure enough, within a week, ice locked round the ship in a vise. The floes were no brashy ice-cakes that could be plowed through by a ship's prow with a strong, stern wind. They were huge fields of ice, five, ten, twenty and thirty feet deep interspread with hummocks and hillocks that were miniature bergs in themselves. Across these rolling meadows of crystal, the wind blew with the nip of midwinter; but when the sun became partly hidden in fiery cloud-banks, the scene was a fairy land, sea and sky shading off in deepest tinges to all the tints of the rainbow. Where the ocean showed through ice depths, there was a blue reflection deep as indigo. Where the clear water was only a surface pool on top of submerged ice, the sky shone above with a light green delicate as apple bloom. Where the ice was a broken mass of an adjacent glacier sliding down to the sea through the eternal snows of some mountain gorge, a curious phenomenon could sometimes be observed. The edge of the ice was in layers--each layer representing one year's snowfall congealed by the summer thaw, so that the observer could count back perhaps a century from the ice layers. Other men tread on snow that fell but yesterday. Hudson's crew were treading on the snowfall of a hundred years as though this were God's workshop in the making and a hundred years were but as a day.

Beyond the floating ice fields, the heights of Nova Zembla were sighted, awesome and lonely in the white night, gruesome to these men from memory of the fate that befell the Dutch crews here fifteen years previously. Rowing and punting through the ice-brash, two men went ashore to explore. They saw abundance of game for the Muscovy gentlemen; and at one place among driftwood came on the cold ashes of an old fire. It was like the first print of man's footstep found by Robinson Crusoe. Startled by signs of human presence, they scanned the surrounding landscape. On the shore, a solitary cross had been erected of driftwood. Then the men recalled the fate of the Dutch crew, that had perished wandering over these islands in 1597. What fearful battles had the white silences witnessed between puny men explorers and the stony Goddess of Death? What had become of the last man, of the man who had erected the cross? Did his body lie somewhere along the shores of Nova Zembla, or had he manned his little craft like the Vikings of old and sailed out lashed to the spars to meet death in tempest? The horror of the North seemed to touch the men as with the hands of the dead whom she had slain.

The report that the two men carried back to Hudson's boat did not raise the spirits of the crew. One night the entire ship's company but Hudson and his son had gone ashore to hunt walrus. Such illimitable fields of ice lay north that Hudson knew his only chance must be between the south end of Nova Zembla and the main coast of Asia. It was three o'clock in the morning. The ice began to drive landward with the fury of a whirlpool. Two anchors were thrown out against the tide. Fenders were lowered to protect the ship's sides. Captain and boy stood with iron-shod poles in hand to push the ice from the ship, or the ship from the ice. The men from the hunt saw the coming danger and rushed over the churning icepans to the rescue. Some on the ice, some on the ship, with poles and oars and crowbars, they pushed and heaved away the icepans, and ramming their crowbars down crevices wrenched the ice to splinters or swerved it off the sides of the ship. Sometimes an icepan would tilt, teeter, rise on end and turn a somerset, plunging the sailors in ice water to their arm pits. The jam seemed to be coming on the ship from both directions at once, for the simple reason the ship offered the line of least resistance. Twelve hours the battle lasted, the heaving ice-crush threatening to crush the ship's ribs like slats till at last a channel of open water appeared just outside the ship's prison. But the air was a dead calm. Springing from icepan to icepan, the men towed their ship out of danger.

No elixir of life, you dreamer; but your mad-brained search for the elixir gave us the secrets of chemistry by which man prolongs life if he doesn't preserve eternal youth! No fate written on the scroll of the heavens, you star-gazer; but your fool-astrology has given us astronomy, by which man may predict the movements of the stars for a thousand years though he cannot forsee his own fate for a day! No North-West Passage to Asia, you fevered adventurers of the trackless sea; but your search for a short way to China has given us a New World worth a thousand Chinas! Go on with your dreams, you mad-souled visionaries! If it is a will-o'-the wisp you chase, your will-o'-the-wisp is a lantern to the rest of humanity!

Climbing the rigging to the topmast yardarm, Hudson scanned the sea. His heart sank. His hopes seemed to congeal like the eternal ice of this ice-world. The springs of life seemed to grow both heavy and cold. Far as eye could reach was ice--only ice, while outside the cove there raged a tempest as if all the demons of the North were blowing their trumpets.

HUDSON'S THIRD VOYAGE

While Hudson was pursuing his phantom across Polar seas, Europe had at last awakened to the secret of Spain's greatness--colonial wealth that poured the gold of Peru into her treasury. To counteract Spain, colonizing became the master policy of Europe. France was at work on the St. Lawrence. England was settling Virginia, and Smith, the pioneer of Virginia, who was Hudson's personal friend, had explored the Chesapeake.

But the Netherlands went a step farther. To throw off the yoke of Spain, they maintained a fleet of seventy merchantmen furnished as ships of war to wage battle on the high seas. Spanish colonies were to be attacked wherever found. Spanish cities were to be sacked as the buccaneers sacked them on the South Sea. Spanish caravels with cargoes of gold were to be scuttled and sunk wherever met. It was to be brigandage--brigandage pure and simple--from the Zuider Zee to Panama, from the North Pole to the South.

Hudson's voyages for the Muscovy merchants of London to find a short way to Asia at once arrested the attention of the Dutch. Dutch and English vied with each other for the discovery of that short road to the Orient. For a century the chance encounter of Dutch and English sailors on Arctic seas had been the signal for the instant breaking of heads. Not whales but men were harpooned when Dutch and English fishermen met off Nova Zembla, or Spitzbergen, or the North Cape.

Hudson was no sooner home from his second voyage for the English than the Dutch East India Company invited him to Holland to seek passage across the Pole for them. This--it should be explained--is the only justification that exists for writing the English pilot's name as Hendrick instead of Henry, as though employment by the Dutch changed the Englishman's nationality.

The invitation was Hudson's salvation. Just at the moment when all doors were shut against him in England and when his hopes were utterly baffled by two failures--another door opened. Just at the moment when his own thoughts were turning toward America as the solution of the North-West Passage, the chance came to seek the passage in America. Just when Hudson was at the point where he might have abandoned his will-o'-the-wisp, it lighted him to a fresh pursuit on a new Trail. It is such coincidences as these in human life that cause the poet to sing of Destiny.

But the chanciness of human fortune did not cease because of this stroke of good luck. The great merchants of the Netherlands heard his plans. His former failures were against him. Money bags do not care to back an uncertainty. Having paid his expenses to come to Holland, the merchant princes were disposed to let him cool his heels in the outer halls waiting their pleasure. The chances are they would have rejected his overtures altogether if France and Belgium had not at that time begun to consider the employment of Hudson on voyages of discovery. The Amsterdam merchants of the Dutch East India Company suddenly awakened to the fact that they wanted Hudson, and wanted him at once. Again Destiny, or a will-o'-the-wisp as impish as Puck--had befriended him.

On March 25 , 1609, the cumbersome crafts swung out on the hazy yellow of the Zuider Zee. Motlier ships were about Hudson, here, than on the Thames, for the Dutch had an enormous commerce with the East and the West Indies. Feluccas with lateen sails and galleys for oarsmen had come up from the Mediterranean. Dutch pirates of the Barbary Coast--narrow in the prow, narrow in the keel, built for swift sailing and light cargoes--had forgathered, sporting sails of a different design for every harbor. Then, there were the East Indiamen, ponderous, slow-moving, deep and broad, with cannon bristling through the ports like men-of-war, and tawny Asiatic faces leering over the taffrail. Yawls from the low-lying coast, three-masted luggers from Denmark, Norwegian ships with hideous scaled griffins carved on the sharp-curved prows, brigs and brigantines and caravels and tall galleons from Spain--all crowded the ports of the Netherlands, whose commerce was at its zenith. Threading his way through the motley craft, Hudson slowly worked out to sea.

If he turned back, he was ruined. The door of opportunity to new success is a door that shuts against retreat. His friend, Smith of Virginia, had written to him of the great inlet of the Chesapeake in America. South of the Chesapeake was no passage to the South Sea. Smith knew that; but north of the Chesapeake old charts marked an unexplored arm of the sea. When Verrazano, the Italian, coasted America for France in 1524, he had been driven by a squall from the entrance to a vast river between Thirty-nine and Forty-one ; and the Spanish charts of Estevan Gomez, in 1525, marked an unknown Rio de Gamos on the same coast. Hudson now recalled Smith's advice--to seek passage between the James River and the St. Lawrence.

To clinch matters came a gust driving westward over open sea. Robert Juet, seeking guidance from the heavenly bodies, notices for the first time in history, on May 19, that there is a spot on the sun. If Hudson had accomplished nothing more, he had made two important discoveries for science--the Polar Current and the spot on the sun. Geographers and astronomers have been knighted and pensioned for less important discoveries.

Then the fogs of the Banks settled down again like wool. Here and there, like phantom ships were the sails of the French fishing fleet, or the black-hulled bateaux, or the rocking Newfoundland dories.

A long white curl of combing waves, and they have sheered off from the Wreckers' Reef at Sable Island.

That week Hudson sailed up the river and sent his carpenters ashore to make fresh masts, but the East India men rummaged the redskins' camp. Great store of furs, they saw. It was not the kind of loot they wanted. Gold was more to their choice, but it was better than no loot at all.

Silent is the future, silent as the sphinx! How could those Dutch sailors guess, how could the Dutch company that sent them to the Pole know, that the commerce of the world for which they fought Spain--would one day beat up and down these harbor waters? Dreamed he never so wildly, Hudson's wildest dream could not have forseen that the river he had discovered would one day throb to the multitudinous voices of a world traffic, a world empire, a world wealth.

In Hudson's day, Spain was the leader of the world's commerce against whom all nations vied. To-day her population does not exceed twenty million, but there flows through the harbor gates, which Hudson, the penniless pilot dreamer, discovered, the commerce of a hundred million people. It is no straining to say that individual fortunes have been made in the traffic of New York harbor which exceed the national incomes of Spain and Holland and Belgium combined. But if a city's greatness consists in something more than volume of wealth and volume of traffic; if it consists in high endeavor and self-sacrifice and the pursuit of ideals to the death, Hudson, the dreamer, beset by rascal mutineers and pursuing his aim in spite of all difficulties, embodied in himself the qualities that go to make true greatness.

How far up the river had Hudson sailed? Juet's ship log does not give the latitude, but Van Meteren's record says 42? 40'. Beyond this, on September 22, the small boat advanced thirty miles. Tradition says Hudson ascended as far as Waterford.

While the boats were sounding, the conspirators were at their usual mischief. Indian chiefs had come on board. They were taken down to the cabin and made gloriously drunk. All went merrily till one Indian fell insensible. The rest scampered in panic and came back with offerings of wampum--their most precious possession--for the chief's ransom. When they secured him alive, they brought more presents--wampum and venison--in gratitude. To this escapade of the mischief-making crew, moccasin rumor added a thousand exaggerations which came down in Indian tradition to the beginning of the last century. After the drunken frenzy--legend says--the white men made a great oration promising to come again. When they returned the next year, they asked for as much land as the hide of a bullock would cover. The Indians granted it, but the white men cut the buffalo hide to strips narrow as a child's finger and so encompassed all the land of Manahat . The whites then built a fort for trade. The name of the fort was New Amsterdam. It grew to be a mighty city. Such are Indian legends of New York's beginnings. They probably have as much truth as the story of Rome and the wolf.

HUDSON'S FOURTH VOYAGE

It was July when the boat reached the southern end of Greenland, and if the crew had been terrified by Juet's tales of ice north of Asia, they were panic-stricken now, for the icebergs of America were as mountains are to mole-hills compared to the ice floes of Asia. Before, Hudson had cruised the east coast of Greenland. There, the ice continents of a polar world can disport themselves in an ocean's spacious area, but west of Greenland, ice fields the area of Europe are crunched for four hundred miles into a passage narrower than the Mediterranean. To make matters worse, up these passages jammed with icebergs washed hard as adamant, the full force of the Atlantic tide flings against the southward flow of the Arctic waters. The result is the famous "furious overfall," the nightmare of northern seamen--a cataract of waters thirty feet high flinging themselves against the natural flow of the ice. It is a battle of blind fury, ceaseless and tireless.

Hudson Straits may be described as a great arm of the ocean curving to an inland sea the size of the Mediterranean. At each end, the Straits are less than fifty miles wide, lined and interspread with rocky islands and dangerous reefs. Inside, the Straits widen to a breadth of from one hundred to two hundred miles. Ungava Bay on the east is a cup-like basin, which the wash of the iron ice has literally ground out of Labrador's rocky shore. Half way up at Savage Point about two hundred miles from the ocean, Hudson Straits suddenly contract. This is known as the Second Narrows. The mountainous, snow-clad shores converge to a sharp funnel. Into this funnel pours the jammed, churning maelstrom of ice floes the size of a continent, and against this chaos flings the Atlantic tide.

Old fur-trade captains of a later era entered the Straits armed and accoutered as for war. It was a standing regulation among the fur-trade captains always to have one-fourth extra allowance of provisions for the delay in the straits. Six iron-shod ice hooks were carried for mooring to the ice floes. Special cables called "ice ropes" were used. Twelve great ice poles, twelve handspikes all steel-shod, and twelve chisels to drill holes in the ice for powder--were the regulation requirements of the fur traders bound through Hudson Straits. Special rules were issued for captains entering the Straits. A checker-board sky--deep blue reflecting the clear water of ocean, apple-green lights the sign of ice--was the invariable indication of distant ice. "Never go on either at night or in a fog when you have sighted such a sky"--was the rule. "Get your ice tackle ready at the straits." "Stand away from the indraught between a big iceberg and the tide, for if once the indraught nails you, you are lost." "To avoid a crush that will sink you in ten minutes, run twenty miles inside the soft ice; that will break the force of the tide." "Be careful of your lead night and day."

Juet, the old mate, raged against the madness of venturing such a sea. Henry Greene, a penniless blackguard, whom Hudson had picked off the streets of London to act as secretary--now played the tale-bearer, fomenting trouble between master and crew. "Our master," says Prickett, one of Digges' servants who was on board, "was in despair." Taking out his chart, Hudson called the crew to the cabin and showed them how they had come farther than any explorer had yet dared. He put it plainly to them--would they go on, or turn back? Let them decide once and for all; no repinings! There, on the west, was the passage they had been seeking. It might lead to the South Sea. There, to the east, the way home. On both sides was equal danger--ice. To the west, was land. They could see that from the masthead. To the east, between them and home, the width of the ocean.

The fury of Juet the rebellious old mate, now knew no bounds. The ship had victuals for only six months more. Here was September. Navigation would hardly open in the Straits before June. If the boat did not emerge on the South Sea, they would all be winter-bound. The waters began to shoal to those dangerous reefs on the south where the Hudson's Bay traders have lost so many ships. In hoisting anchor up, a furious over-sea knocked the sailors from the capstan. With a rebound the heavy iron went splashing overboard. This was too much for Juet. The mate threw down his pole and refused to serve longer. On September 10, Hudson was compelled to try him for mutiny. Juet was deposed with loss of wages for bad conduct and Robert Bylot appointed in his place. The trial showed Hudson he was slumbering over a powder mine. Half the crew was disaffected, plotting to possess themselves of arms; but what did plots matter? Hudson was following a vision which his men could not see.

So the miserable winter dragged on. Snow fell continuously day after day. The frost giants set the ice whooping and crackling every night like artillery fire. A pall of gloom was settling over the ship that seemed to benumb hope and benumb effort. Great numbers of birds were shot by loyal members of the crew, but the ship was short of bread and the cook began to use moss and the juice of tamarac as antidotes to scurvy. As winter closed in, the cold grew more intense. Stone fireplaces were built on the decks of the ship. Pans of shot heated red-hot were taken to the berths as a warming pan. On the whole, Hudson was fortunate in his wintering quarters. It was the most sheltered part of the bay and had the greatest abundance of game to be found on that great inland sea. Also, there was no lack of firewood. Farther north on the west shore, Hudson's ship would have been exposed to the east winds and the ice-drive. Here, he was secure from both, though the cold of James Bay was quite severe enough to cover decks and beds and bedding and port windows with hoar frost an inch thick.

Toward spring came a timid savage to the ship drawing furs on a toboggan for trade. He promised to return after so many sleeps from the tribes of the South, but time to an Indian may mean this year or next, and he was never again seen. As the ice began to break up in May, Hudson sent men fishing in a shallop that the carpenters had built, but the fishermen plotted to escape in the small boat. The next time, Hudson, himself, led the fishermen, threatening to leave any man proved guilty of plots marooned on the bay. It was an unfortunate threat. The men remembered it. Juet, the deposed mate, had but caged his wrath and was now joined by Henry Greene, the secretary, who had fallen from favor. If these men and their allies had hunted half as industriously as they plotted, there would have been food in plenty, but with half the crew living idly on the labors of the others for a winter, somebody was bound to suffer shortage of food on the homeward voyage. The traitor thought was suggested by Henry Greene that if Hudson and the loyal men were, themselves, marooned, the rest could go home with plenty of food and no fear of punishment. The report could be spread that Hudson had died. Hudson had searched the land in vain for Indians. All unconscious of the conspiracy in progress, he returned to prepare the ship for the home voyage.

Prickett bade him stop. This was mutiny. Mutiny was punished in England by death. But Greene swore he would rather be hanged at home than starve at sea.

"Nay, but it is that villain, Henry Greene," Prickett yelled back through the porthole, and the shallop fell away. Some miles out of sight from their victims, the mutineers slackened pace to ransack the contents of the ship. The shallop was sighted oars going, sails spread, coming over a wave in mad pursuit. With guilty terror as if their pursuers had been ghosts, the mutineers out with crowded sails and fled as from an avenging demon! So passed Henry Hudson down the Long Trail on June 21, 1611! Did he suffer that blackest of all despair--loss of vision, of faith in his dream? Did life suddenly seem to him a cruel joke in which he had played the part of the fool? Who can tell?

Hudson's shallop went down to as utter silence as the watery graves of those old sea Vikings, who rode out to meet death on the billow. A famous painting represents Hudson huddled panic-stricken with his child and the ragged castaways in a boat driving to ruin among the ice fields. I like better to think as we know last of him--standing with bound arms and face to fate, shouting defiance at the fleeing enemy. They could kill him, but they could not crush him! It was more as a Viking would have liked to die. He had left the world benefited more than he could have dreamed--this pathfinder of two empires' commerce. He had fought his fight. He had done his work. He had chased his Idea down the Long Trail. What more could the most favored child of the gods ask? With one's task done, better to die in harness than rot in some garret of obscurity, or grow garrulous in an imbecile old age--the fate of so many great benefactors of humanity!

DATA FOR HUDSON'S VOYAGES

When I speak of "Wreckers' Reef" Sable Island, it is not a figure of speech, but a fact of those early days--that false lights were often placed on Sable Island to lure ships on the sand reefs. Men, who waded ashore, were clubbed to death by pirates: See Canadian Archives.

The Indian legends of Hudson's Voyage to New York are to be found in early missionary annals: see New York History, 1811.

The report of the Canadian Geologic Survey of Baffins Land and the North was issued by Mr. A. P. Low as I completed this volume.

All authorities--as seen by the map--place Hudson's wintering quarters off Rupert River. From the Journals, it seems to me, he went as far west as he could go, and did not come back east, which would make his wintering quarters off Moose. This would explain "the old house battered with bullets," which Radisson records.

My authority for data on Moose Factory is Bishop Horden.

THE ADVENTURES OF THE DANES ON HUDSON BAY--JENS MUNCK'S CREW

In 1614, a Captain Gibbon was dispatched to the bay. Ice caught him at Labrador. Here, he was held prisoner for the summer. Again hopes were dashed, but national greatness sometimes consists in sheer dogged persistence. The English adventurers, who had sent Button and Gibbon, now fitted out Bylot, Hudson's former mate. With him went a young man named Baffin. These two spent two years, 1615-1616, on the bay. They found no trace of Hudson. They found no passage to the South Sea, but cruised those vast islands of ice and rock on the north to which Baffin's name has been given.

The English treasure seekers and adventurers of the high seas took a breathing space. Where England left off, the trail of discovery was taken up by little Denmark. Norse sailors had been the first to belt the seas. Before Columbus was born, Norsemen had coasted the ice fields from Iceland to Greenland and Greenland to the Vinelands and Marklands farther south, supposed to be Nova Scotia and Rhode Island. The lost colonies of eastern Greenland had become the folk-lore of Danish fireside.

Munck's father was a nobleman, who had suicided in prison, disgraced for misuse of public funds. Munck's mother was left destitute. At twelve years of age Jens was thrown on the world. Like a true soldier of fortune, he took fate by the beard and shipped as a common sailor to seek his fortunes in the New World. When a mere boy, he chanced to be off Brazil on a Dutch merchant ship. Here, he had his first bout with fate. The Dutch vessel was attacked off Bahia by the French and totally destroyed. Of all the crew, seven only escaped by plunging into the water and swimming ashore in the dark. Of the seven survivors, the Danish boy was one. He had succeeded in reaching shore by clinging to bits of wreckage through the chopping seas. Half drowned, friendless, crawling ashore like a bedraggled water rat, here was the boy, utterly alone in a strange land among a strange people speaking a strange tongue.

Such an experience would have set most boys swallowing a lump in their throat. The little Dane was too glad to get the water out of his throat and to set his feet on dry land for any such nonsense. For a year he worked with a shoemaker for his board, and incidentally picked up a knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese over the cobbler's last. The most of young Danish noblemen gained such knowledge from tutors and travel. Then Munck became apprentice to a house painter. Not a yelp against fate did the plucky young castaway utter, and what is more marvel, he did not lose his head and let it sink to the place where a young gentleman's feet ought to be--namely the pavement. Toiling for his daily bread among the riffraff and ruff-scuff of a foreign port, Munck kept his head up and his face to the future; and at last came his chance.

Munck was now about eighteen years old. Some Dutch vessels had come to Bahia without a license for trade. Munck overheard that the harbor authorities intended to confiscate both vessels. It was Munck's opportunity to escape, and he seized it with both hands. Jostling among the sailors of the water-front, keeping his intentions to himself, Munck waited till it was dark. Then, he stripped, tied his clothes to his back, and swam out to warn the Dutch of their danger. The vessels escaped and carried Munck with them to Europe. Within five years he was sailing ships for himself to Iceland and Nova Zembla and Russia--keeping up that old trick of picking up odds and ends, knowledge of people and things and languages wherever he went. Before he was thirty he had joined the Danish navy and was appointed to conduct embassies to Spain, and Russia where his knowledge of foreign languages held good. When the traders of Copenhagen and King Christian looked for a commander to explore and colonize Hudson Bay, Munck was the man.

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