Episode Details

Henry Hudson's name covers a river, a strait and a vast bay, yet we have no confirmed birth date, no contemporary portrait and no record of his death. This deep dive reconstructs his career from ship's logs, court records and company charters, showing how an explorer who failed at nearly every objective he was hired for accidentally redrew the map of North America.

The episode follows his Muscovy Company attempts to sail over the North Pole and around Russia, his decision to defy Dutch East India Company orders and sail the Half Moon to North America, and his final voyage on the Discovery into Hudson Bay. It ends with the 1611 mutiny, the trial of the survivors, and clues about what happened to Hudson and his son.

• The open polar sea theory and why cartographers believed constant Arctic sunlight would melt the polar ice
• How his 1607 logs of whale populations near Spitsbergen sparked a lucrative whaling boom
• Violent and peaceful encounters with Indigenous peoples, and how his river voyage laid the groundwork for New Netherland
• Scurvy, a brutal winter in James Bay and why Abacuk Prickett's account of the mutiny is suspect
• A reported shipwreck, an HH 1612 carved stone and Inuit oral histories of an old man and a boy arriving by boat