God's Mercies:
Rivalry, Betrayal and the Dream of Discovery
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by Douglas Hunter
Doubleday Canada, Toronto, 2007
432 pp., $34.95 hardcover
The first time I saw The Last Voyage of Henry Hudson, John Collier’s 1881 painting, I was mesmerized. There’s something about Hudson’s forlorn stare — a sense of profound hopelessness — that forces viewers to empathize with the doomed English explorer. Hudson’s obsession with finding the fabled Northwest Passage proved to be his undoing; set adrift in a small boat by mutineers, Hudson, his son John, and a handful of loyal crew members would disappear amid the ice floes of the bay that now bears his name.
In God’s Mercies, Douglas Hunter explains in vivid detail how incompetent management, shipboard power struggles, and betrayals of friendships led Hudson’s crew to abandon him to his death.
Hunter also deftly illustrates how Hudson’s fate affected another of Canada’s early explorers, the renowned Samuel de Champlain.
The “Father of New France” shared Hudson’s dream of discovering the passage, without allowing it to destroy him. That’s why, four hundred years later, we are celebrating Champlain’s continuing legacy at Quebec City, while Hudson remains the pitiful caricature in Collier’s painting, sitting at the tiller of his shallop, awaiting a rescue that will never come.
— Mark Collin Reid (Read bio)
Mark Collin Reid is the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's History.