By the Erie canal the river is connected with Lake Erie, by the Champlain canal with Lake Champlain, and by the Delaware canal with the Delaware river; and its commercial importance as a means of traffic is not excelled by that of any other river in the world. It was on the Hudson that Fulton, the inventor of steam navigation, made his first successful experiment. The Hudson River Railway skirts the east bank of the river from New York to Troy, whence it bends eastward on its way to Lake Champlain. On the west bank a railway is to run from Jersey City to Newburg, and branch lines from various centres touch both banks at several points. The Hudson has some valuable fisheries, the principal fish being bass, shad, and sturgeon. The attempts to stock it with salmon have not been very successful. Though Verrazzani in 1524 proceeded up the river Hudson a short distance in a boat, the first to demonstrate its extent and importance was Henry Hudson, from whom it derives its name. He sailed above the mouth of the Mohawk in September 1609.
HUDSON, George (1800–1871), the “railway king,” was born in York in 1800, was a successful linen draper in that city, and subsequently became the leading representative of the railway mania of 1845–46. Elected chairman of the North Midland Company, he was for three years the ruling spirit of speculation and as the arbiter of capital held the key of untold treasures. All classes delighted to honour him, and, as if a colossal fortune were an insufficient reward for his public services, the richest men in England presented him with a tribute of £20,000. Deputy-lieutenant for Durham, and thrice lord mayor of York, he was returned in the Conservative interest for Sunderland in 1845, the event being judged of such public interest that the news was conveyed to London by a special train, which travelled part of the way at the rate of 75 miles an hour. Full of rewards and honours, he was suddenly ruined by the disclosure of the Eastern Railway frauds. Sunderland clung to her generous representative till 1859, but on the bursting of the bubble he had lost influence and fortune at a single stroke. His later life was chiefly spent on the Continent, where he benefited little by a display of unabated energy and enterprise. Some friends gave him a small annuity a short time before his death, which took place in London, 14th December 1871. His name has long been used to point the moral of vaunting ambition and unstable fortune. The “big swollen gambler,” as Carlyle calls him in one of the Latter Day Pamphlets, was savagely and excessively reprobated by the world which had blindly believed in his golden prophecies. He certainly ruined scrip-holders, and disturbed the great centres of industry; but he had an honest faith in his own schemes, and, while he beggared himself in their promotion, he succeeded in overcoming the powerful landed interest which delayed the adoption of railways in England long after the date of their regular introduction into America.
HUDSON, Henry, a distinguished English navigator, of whose personal history before April 19, 1607, or after June 21, 1611, absolutely nothing is known, and whose well-earned fame rests entirely on four voyages which were all unsuccessful as regarded their immediate object, the discovery of a commercial passage to China other and shorter than that by the Cape of Good Hope. The first of these, in quest of new trade and the passage to China by the North Pole, was made for the Muscovy Company, with ten men and a boy, in the little “Hopewell” of 60 tons that had so successfully braved the dangers of Frobisher’s last voyage twenty-nine years before. Sailing from the Thames on April 19, 1607, Hudson first coasted the east side of Greenland, and thence hugging the Arctic ice-barrier, proceeded to the “north-east of Newland” to near 82° N. lat. He then turned back to seek, according to his chart, the passage round the north of Greenland into Davis Straits to make trial of Lumley’s Inlet, or “the furious overfall”; but, having traced the ice-barrier from 78° to 80°, he on July 27 became convinced that by this way there is no passage, and on August 15 he returned to the Thames. Molineux’s chart, published by Hakluyt about 1600, was Hudson’s blind guide in this voyage, and the polar map of 1611 by Pontanus illustrates well what he attempted, and the valuable results both negative and positive which he reached. He investigated the trade prospects at Cherrie Island, and recommended his patrons to seek higher game in Newland; hence he may be called the father of the English whale-fisheries at Spitzbergen.
Next year Hudson was a second time sent by the Muscovy Company “to open the passage to China by the north-east between Newland and Nova Zemla;” this voyage lasted from April 22 to August 26, 1608. From June 12 to June 29, he raked the Barrentz Sea between 75° 30′ N.W. and 71° 15′ S.E. on the Goose coast of Nova Zemla, meeting with much ice and no great encouragement for trade, and deleting Willoughby Island from his chart. On July 6, “voide of hope of a north-east passage (except by the Waygats, for which I was not fitted to try or prove), I therefore resolved to use all means I could to sayle to the north-west” (still harping on Lumley’s Inlet and “the furious overfall”). The failure of this second attempt satisfied the Muscovy Company, which thenceforward directed all its energies to the profitable Spitzbergen trade.
