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Hudson looks at the one shore left, the viewer. Collier gives him the stare of a man still steering out of habit.

Henry Hudson had spent four voyages hunting a shortcut to Asia through the ice, two for English merchants over the top of Norway, one for the Dutch that ended up a thousand miles the wrong way up the river that now carries his name, and the last, in 1610, 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, played favorites with the bread, and by the June thaw of 1611 the men who wanted to sail home outnumbered the men willing to keep searching 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 the size of a modern dinghy, with his teenage son John, the carpenter Philip Staffe, who stepped in voluntarily and is the one unambiguous hero of the story, and six sick or loyal men: nine in all, given 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 ledger of what followed reads like a sentence handed down by the bay itself. Greene was killed within weeks by Inuit at the mouth of the strait; Juet starved to death within sight of Ireland; of thirteen mutineers, eight came home. They were questioned, and years later tried for murder rather than mutiny, and acquitted in an afternoon, the court being gently aware that these were the only living men who knew the navigation of 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 as a portrait with nowhere to look away: the son slumped against his father's knee, a dying loyalist under a fur, and Hudson at the tiller of nothing, steering a boat with no destination through ice with no exit, his eyes fixed on the viewer as the only shore available. The Tate has kept it in front of the public ever since.