Henry Hudson

Henry Hudson was an English navigator with two failed attempts at a northern route to Asia behind him when the Dutch East India Company hired him in 1609 to try again, this time sailing for a foreign crown rather than his own. Blocked by ice in the Arctic, Hudson turned his ship, the Half Moon, south and west instead, and that September he sailed up the river that now bears his name as far as present-day Albany, becoming the first European to chart it in detail and to trade directly with the Mohican and other Algonquian-speaking nations living along its banks.

Hudson's report to the Dutch East India Company on returning became the basis for the Netherlands' claim to the region, which Dutch colonists settled within a few years as New Netherland, with New Amsterdam at its southern tip growing into the city England would later seize and rename New York. Hudson himself never profited from any of it directly; he undertook one more Arctic voyage in 1610 and 1611, this time for English backers, searching for a northwest passage through the bay that now carries his name.

That final voyage ended in mutiny. Trapped by ice over a brutal winter and running low on food, Hudson's crew turned on him in June 1611, setting him, his teenage son, and a handful of loyal or sick crew members adrift in a small boat in Hudson Bay. None of them were ever seen again. The mutineers who returned to England were arrested but never convicted, since the only witnesses able to testify against them were the men they had set adrift.