Never heard of more
Henry Hudson, the great explorer, robbed of all new vistas and doomed to stare in eternal horror from the walls of London’s Tate Gallery, frozen by John Collier in that heart-stopping flashbulb moment of realisation, the nirvana of the nevermore.
He’d been all across the Arctic seas and discovered a great deal, though not a faster track to China, his original goal. Now he was cast away, with his teenage son John — not yet his age when he first set out to sea as a cabin boy — and a shaky cohort of lame and dying ex-crewmembers, in a small boat in peril of capsising under the weight of his own ice-encrusted stubbornness. It was June 1611.
Four years earlier the Muscovy Company had dispatched him from London to find the speculative northeast passage to China, a gap in the snow that the long days of sunlight must surely open each year. For months Hudson clung to the perimeter of the Pole but then gave up. In 1608 he tried again, crossing Russia’s frozen north shore. And in 1609 he tried again, this time on a mission for the Dutch East India Company. There was too much ice. Maybe there would be another way to Peking’s pearls and the Indian spices — through the heart of North America.
The Half Moon prodded at Chesapeake and Delaware Bays, then the future New York Harbor and along the river that now carries his name. At Albany the riverbed arose to stop him. He didn’t even get to see the Great Lakes, but he did find Holland some trading partners among the the natives.
In 1610 Hudson again flew the English flag as the British East India Company launched him aboard the Discovery toward Iceland and another likely fable, the Northwest Passage. By August he was sailing across what would become Hudson Bay, big enough to keep an explorer busy for a long time. Too long, as it happened. In November the ice held the ship fast in James Bay.
When the thaw came, Hudson gave orders to continue the expedition. The crew had had enough, and mutinied in June. They claimed to have given Hudson and his entourage of nine powder and shot, an iron pot, some meal and clothing. Hudson’s men tried to row after the Discovery, but couldn’t keep up when the wind caught her sails. None of the surviving mutineers was prosecuted, likely because they knew the way to the new happy hunting grounds.
John Maler Collier (1850-1934) was one of Britain’s most prominent portrait painters, a pre-Raphaelite who counted King George V, Charles Darwin and Rudyard Kipling among the well-known figures who solemnly posed for him.
His grandfather was a Quaker merchant and member of parliament, his father, the first Lord Monkswell, an attorney general and Privy Council judge, his elder brother under-secretary of state for war and chairman of London County Council. Collier married two daughters of the revered scientist Thomas Huxley, Marian, also a painter, who died in 1887, and her younger sister Ethel. Their daughter became a portrait miniaturist and their son became Sir Laurence Collier, Britain’s ambassador to Norway.
A romantic by nature, Collier must have seen the stark possibilities in depicting Henry Hudson “when last seen alive”.
“They were never heard of more,” he wrote in a brief synopsis of the saga that was hung beside “The Last Voyage of Henry Hudson” when it first appeared at the Royal Academy in 1881.
It wasn’t quite George V, but Collier’s illustrious family had no need to wince, as they no doubt did when he came up with what are now called “problem pictures”. I suppose this applies to his paintings of Lilith and Lady Godiva.
