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A man in a fur cap stares out of the picture with the ice behind him. This is Henry Hudson. No likeness of Hudson was made in his lifetime, so Collier invented the face.

Henry Hudson spent four voyages hunting a shortcut to Asia through the ice. Two were for English merchants, over the top of Norway. One was for the Dutch, and ended a thousand miles the wrong way up the river that now carries his name. The last, in 1610, took him through the strait into the enormous cold bay where everything stopped. The Discovery pushed south all autumn, Hudson certain the Pacific lay around each next headland, until James Bay closed like a trap and the ship froze in for the winter. Scurvy came, and hunger, and the particular rot that idle months in the dark work on a crew already short on trust. Hudson quarreled with his officers, demoted his mate, and played favorites with the bread. By the June thaw of 1611 the men who wanted to sail home outnumbered the men still willing to look for China on quarter rations. On 22 June the mutineers came for him at dawn. The leaders were Robert Juet, the demoted mate, and Henry Greene, a young man Hudson had taken aboard as a personal favor and fed at his own table. They put the captain into the ship's shallop, an open boat about the size of a modern dinghy. His teenage son John went in with him, along with seven men who were sick, or loyal, or both. The carpenter Philip Staffe climbed in of his own accord, the one clear hero of the story. Nine in all, with a musket, an iron pot, some meal, and the horizon. The shallop raised its small sail and chased the Discovery for a while. Then the ship made full sail, and the boat fell astern, and no European ever saw any of the nine again. The bay took its share of them on the way out. Greene was killed within weeks by Inuit at the mouth of the strait. Juet starved to death before the ship reached Ireland. Of 13 mutineers, 8 came home. They were questioned, and years later tried for murder rather than mutiny, and acquitted in an afternoon. The court knew perfectly well that these were the only living men who could navigate the bay, and England still wanted the bay. Searches in 1612 found no trace. The water Hudson died on took his name and kept it. John Collier painted the ending in 1881 and gave the boat nowhere to go. The son kneels at his father's knee and holds his hand. A man in a red cap sits wrapped in a fur. Hudson keeps one hand on the stern of a boat with nowhere left to steer to, and looks straight out of the picture, past the ice. It hangs in the Tate.