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As chief mate and favorite companion, the commodore chose Master Robert Juet, of Limehouse, in England. By some his name has been spelt Chewit, and ascribed to the circumstance of his having been the first man that ever chewed tobacco; but this I believe to be a mere flippancy; more especially as certain of his progeny are living at this day, who write their names Juet.
Then, as he passed through the Southern Gate of the Highlands, and thence onward, his hope must have waned until on September 22d it vanished utterly away. Under that date Juet wrote in his log: "This night, at ten of the clocke, our boat returned in a showre of raine from sounding the river; and found it to bee at an end for shipping to goe in." That was the end of the adventure inland.
Judging him by the facts recorded in the accounts of the voyage into Hudson's Bay, it is a fair assumption that in both of these earlier mutinies Juet had a hand. I wish that we could find the bond that held Hudson and Juet together.
By Prickett's showing, there seems to have been a clash of opinions in regard to the ship's course; and of so violent a sort that strong measures were required to maintain discipline. The outcome was that "our Master took occasion to revive old matters, and to displace Robert Juet from being his mate, and the boatswaine from his place, for the words spoken in the first great bay of ice."
Among these sailors, to Hudson's cost, was his former surly mate, Juet, and a young ne'er-do-well named Henry Greene, who had been cast off by his family for his evil ways and his dissolute living. Hudson had befriended this young man and had offered him a refuge in his own house and now, to keep him out of mischief, took him along as a member of his crew.
After exchanging gifts with the Indians and plying them with drink whose unaccustomed sensations filled them with fear, amazement and joy, Hudson continued his voyage up the noble river, anchoring at frequent intervals. More trouble soon occurred between his crew and the savages, for Juet the mate shot and killed an Indian who was attempting to steal some trifle from the cabin of the Half Moon.
The journal goes on to make mention of divers interviews between the crew and the natives in the voyage up the river; but as they would be impertinent to my history, I shall pass over them in silence, except the following dry joke, played off by the old commodore and his schoolfellow Robert Juet, which does such vast credit to their experimental philosophy that I cannot refrain from inserting it.
Certain it is that the old people about Limehouse declared Robert Juet to be a unlucky urchin prone to mischief, that would one day or other come to the gallows.
There we saw no people to trouble us, and rode quietly all night, but had much wind and raine." In that entry the name Manna-hata was written for the first time, and was applied, not to our island but to the opposite Jersey shore. The explanation of Juet's record seems to be that the Indians known as the Mannahattes dwelt or that Juet thought that they dwelt on both sides of the river.
That Juet could write, and that he understood the science of navigation although those were rare accomplishments among seamen in his time fail sufficiently to account for Hudson's persistent employment of him. For my own part, I revert to my theory of fatalism.
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