This week’s little stories from contemporary historical sources…
Upriver, 1609
It’s the first decade of the 17th century, only a few years after the death of Queen Elizabeth I, and a slightly mysterious Englishman called Henry is available for hire for his seafaring and navigation skills. We first hear of him in 1607, when he was probably in his early 40s, hired by English merchants to find a new trade route to China (which they called Cathay then) via a Northeast Passage past Norway and Russia – but the extent of the ice near Svalbard forced them back home unsuccessful. They made a second attempt in 1608, hugging closer to Russia, but again the ice defeated them.
Skip forward another year, and Henry has now been commissioned by the Dutch East India Company – arch-rivals of the English merchants – to try again. He left Amsterdam on April 4th on board the Dutch ship Halve Maen (‘Half Moon’), initially going northeast as commissioned but yet again foiled by ice, so he decided to try his luck westward having heard of a possible Northwest Passage through the islands north of mainland Canada. By mid-July, they were at Nova Scotia (looting an indigenous village) – not nearly far north enough, but finding an interesting coast to explore.
By early September, Henry had arrived at a large estuary – he wasn’t the first European to find it, but when he set sail up the river itself on September 12th, he would make history – and of course the river is now named after him: the Hudson.1
Hudson kept a log of his travels, but only a few fragments have survived – but what we do have is the journal of his first mate, Robert Juet (or Ivet).2 And here’s what he wrote for September 12th:
The twelfth, very fair and hot. In the afternoon at two of the clock we weighed, the wind being variable, between the North and the North-west. So we turned into the River two leagues and Anchored. This morning at our first rode in the River, there came eight and twenty Canoes full of men, women, and children to betray us; but we saw their intent, and suffered no one of them to come aboard of us. At twelve of the clock they departed. They brought with them Oysters and Beans, whereof we bought some. They have great Tobacco pipes of yellow Copper, and Pots of Earth to dress their meat in. It flows South-east by South within.
He continued to log the detail of the voyage upstream (“The River is a mile broad: there is very high Land on both sides… The Land grew very high and Mountainous.”), matter-of-factly detailing the weather, turns in the river and encounters (both positive and negative) with the Indigenous people. After a week or two they had got as far as somewhere near modern Albany before turning back downstream and then heading straight back to England.
A relatively uneventful river trip 400-odd years ago… but a hugely influential one. The fur trading that Hudson began on this voyage would blossom into a major industry and his trip encouraged the Dutch to found their 1624 settlement of New Amsterdam on the tip of the island Juet referred to as Manna-Hata. Forty-three years later this city was rechristened New York.
Hudson himself did not fare so well. In 1610 he was back working for the English, looking for the Northwest Passage again, and reached what we now call Hudson Bay in Canada. But in June 1611, his crew had had enough, and mutinied. Hudson and seven companions were set on a small open boat – with a few supplies at least – but were never seen again. So it goes. And the leader of the mutiny? It was probably Robert Juet.3
No ostriches, 1683
On September 12th 1683, the Battle of Vienna took place between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire (in league with the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth). After a two-month siege of the city, a relief army led by King Jan III Sobieski of Poland struck the Ottomans in a surprise attack. The battle culminated in one of the largest cavalry charges in history, led by the famed Polish winged hussars. The city was saved – and the bigger picture is this marked a turning point in relations between the Christian West and the Islamic world, with the latter forever held back from further expansion. Some writers – led by Christopher Hitchens in October 2001 – have even suggested that the date of the 9/11 attacks was chosen precisely because of September 11th being the last day before this humiliation for Islam.
A day after his victory, Sobieski crowed in a letter to his wife:
The Immortal God… has Blest us with so Signal a Victory, as scarce the Memory of Man can Equal: The Enemy was not only content to Raise the Siege of Vienna, and Leave us Masters of the Field; But also of all their Cannon, and Tents, with Inestimable Treasure, and clim’d over Mountains of Carcasses made by their own Bodies in the Flight. My Eyes were never Blest before with so delightful a Prospect as to see my Soldiers follow here a great Drove of their Sheep and Oxen, and there a much greater Herd of Turkish Captives; Nor my Ears e’er Charm’d with so pleasing Musick, as the Howlings and Dying Groans of these Miserable Wretches…
Sobieski also noted:
The Rarities which were found in the Prime Vizier’s Tent, were no less Numerous than Strange and Surprising, as very curious Parrots, and some Birds of Paradise, with all his Banios, and Fountains, and some Ostriches, which he Chose rather to Kill, than let ’em fall Alive into our Hands; Nay his Dispair and Jealousy transported him so far, as to Destroy his very Women for the same Reason.
The ship of gold, 1857
Two hundred and forty-eight years after Hudson was exploring what would become New York City’s river, another ship was heading that way, this time coming from Panama. The steamship SS Central America had left there on September 3rd laden with a vast amount of gold (some accounts say 9 tonnes, others as much as 15) gleaned in the Californian Gold Rush. There were 477 passengers and 101 crew aboard.
A day after the ship left Havana on September 8th, the wind started to get up, and grew into a hurricane. Massive waves and violent winds battered the steamer, damaging its sails and crippling its engines, which left the ship unable to manoeuvre.4 Despite the crew’s efforts to bail water and keep the boilers running, leaks overwhelmed the vessel, and pumps could not keep pace with the flooding. As the storm raged on, rescue attempts were delayed, and on September 12th, the Central America finally succumbed to the sea.
Distress signals were spotted by passing vessels. Despite the stormy seas, the Marine was able to approach the stricken steamer and rescue more than 150 passengers, primarily women and children who had been lowered in lifeboats. Hours later, after the Central America slipped beneath the waves, the El Dorado and other passing ships picked up additional survivors. But more than 420 people died – and this is still the largest loss of life from a commercial vessel in US history.5
Many first-person accounts of survivors were reported by newspapers in the days that followed. The ship’s fireman Alexander Grant, for example, kept a diary and for the day of the wreck noted:
The night was very dark, with a few stars to be seen in the skies; there was no lightning nor rain. We could see over one hundred persons all around us, clinging to pieces of the wreck. They were all around us, crying for help; but, as the sea was washing over us every moment, and the wind blowing very heavy, we all had just as much as we could possibly attend to to save ourselves from being washed from the deck. We could not see over one hundred yards from us… but we heard cries for help all around us up to daylight.
But one account I found, printed in the Pontiac Gazette of September 26th, caught my eye for being very different. It was by an unnamed passenger who described one of those strange human moments in the face of possible death:
I guess I had been about four hours in the water, and had floated away from the rest, when the waves ceased to make any noise, and I heard my mother say, “Johnny, did you eat sister’s grapes? I hadn’t thought of it for twenty years at least… I had a sister that died of consumption more than thirty years ago, and when she was sick—I was a boy of about eleven—a neighbor had sent her some early hot-house grapes. Well, those grapes were left in a room where I was, and—I ought to have been skinned alive for it, little rascal that I was—I devoured them all. Mother came to me after I had gone to bed, when she couldn’t find the fruit for sister to moisten her mouth with in the night, and said, ‘Johnny, did you eat sister’s grapes?’ I did not add to the meanness of my conduct by telling a lie. I owned up, and my mother went away in tears, but without flogging me. It occasioned me a qualm of conscience for many a year after; but, as I said, for twenty years at least I had not tho’t of it, till when I was floating about benumbed with cold I heard it as plain as ever I heard her voice in my life… It did not scare me, though. I thought it was a presage of my death.
Grape-guilt aside, the sinking of the Central America had other consequences: the sheer quantity of gold on board (worth as much as $2m even then – probably near $1bn today)6 fed into a financial crisis already brewing thanks to overexpansion of the railroads, the failure of an Ohio bank in August and inflation from the gold rush. And thanks to the recent invention of the telegraph, what became known as the Panic of 1857 was effectively the world’s first global economic crisis.
Though it would be over a century before this name was commonly used, and it has had many other names, both Indigenous and European. Hudson himself called it the Mauritius River to suck up to his paymaster Prince Maurice of Orange.
It was first published as a chapter of the 1625 book by travel anthologist Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, entitled ‘The third Voyage of Master HENRIE HVDSON toward NOUA ZEMBLA, and at his returne, his passing from Farre Ilands, to New-found Land, and along to fortie foure degrees and ten minutes, and thence to Cape Cod, and so to thirtie three degrees; and along the Coast to the Northward, to fortie two degrees and an halfe, and up the Riuer neere to fortie three degrees’. Which is a bit of a mouthful.
Juet himself is believed to have died on the return journey to England, though there are various rumours to this day that both Hudson and Juet might have survived. Intriguingly a 1610 account of the 1609 river voyage by Dutch historian Emanuel van Meteren noted that even on that trip Hudson “was afraid of his mutinous crew, who had sometimes savagely threatened him”.
The sheer weight of gold can’t have helped either.
The ship’s captain, William Lewis Herndon (43 at the time), is an interesting character: he had been a notable explorer of the Amazon a few years earlier. When the Captain America went down, he helped many women and children into lifeboats, and went down nobly with his ship.
Of course, history did not forget that this much gold was sitting around at the bottom of the sea. Treasure hunter Tommy Gregory Thompson found the wreck in 1988, but controversially had no legal right to salvage until 2003. This didn’t stop him from acquiring lots of the gold – and the authorities imprisoned him in 2015. Now 73, he continues to languish in jail for as long he claims to be suffering from memory loss about where 500 gold coins are stashed! There have been a lot of legal battles waged by insurance companies, too.