THE HUDSON.

■u'ell assured that it is the portrait of an eminent navigator, who, in that remarkable year in the history of England and America, one thousand six hundred and seven, met "certains worshippeful merchants of London," in the parlour of a son of Sir Thomas Gresham, in Bishopsgatc Street, and bargained concerning a proposed voyage in search of a north-east passage to India, between the icy and rock-bound coasts of Nova Zembla and Spitzbergcn.

That navigator was Henry Hudson, a friend of Captain John Smith, a man of science and liberal views, and a pupil, perhaps, of Drake, or Probisher, or Grenville, in the seaman's art. On May-day morning he knelt in tlic church of St. Ethelburga, and partook of the Sacrament ; and soon afterward he left the Thames for the circumpolar waters. During two voyages he battled the ice-pack manfully off the Korth Cape, but without success : boreal frosts were too intense for the brine, and cast impenetrable ice-barriers across the eastern pathway of the sea. His employers praised the navigator's skill and courage, but, losing faith in the scheme, the undertaking was abandoned. Hudson went to Holland with a stout heart ; and the Dutch East India Company, then sending their uncouth argosies to every sea, gladly employed "the bold Englishman, the expert pilot, and famous navigator," of whose fame they had heard so much.}

At the middle of March, 1609, Heudrick, as the Dutch called him, sailed from Amsterdam in a yacht of ninety tons, named the Half -Moon, manned with a choice crew, and turned his prow, once more, toward Nova Zembla. Again ice, and fogs, and fiei'ce tempests, disputed his passage, and he steered westward, passed Cape Farewell, and, on the 2nd of July, made soundings upon the banks of Newfoundland. He sailed along the coast to the fine harbour of Charleston, in South Carolina, in search of a north-west passage " below Yirginia," spoken of by his friend Captain Smith.