Henry Hudson: The Explorer Who Vanished

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Henry Hudson: The Explorer Who Vanished

In the early summer of 1611, nine men were set adrift in an open boat in a frozen bay at the top of the world — among them Henry Hudson, the most accomplished navigator of his age, and his teenage son. No one ever saw them again. Hudson had found the great strait and bay and river that still bear his name, searching for a passage to Asia that did not exist. This is the complete story of the explorer whose name covers half a continent — and whose grave is an unmarked bay.

Over eleven hours of listening follow the whole brief, blazing career: the London mariner whose early life survives in no record at all; the two ice defeats of 1607 and 1608, chasing an open polar sea over the top of the world; the 1609 voyage for the Dutch East India Company aboard the Half Moon — his defiance of a contract that ordered him northeast, the great river he probed a hundred and fifty miles inland to the head of navigation at present-day Albany, and the violence that shadowed the meetings along its banks; and the final expedition of 1610–11: the Discovery through the strait and into the bay, the winter prison of ice, hunger and suspicion, and the June morning that made Hudson immortal by erasing him. It closes with the London trials and acquittals, the search expeditions that found nothing, and the fur-trade empire his bay created — and an honest reckoning with what is fact, what is legend, and what will never be known.

He found the river, the strait, and the bay — and vanished into the ice that made him immortal. This is his story.

From Bedtime Biographies — history's most fascinating lives, told for modern listeners.