Torn-missing 4 (29 page)

This was practically the longest string of sentences Jonah had ever heard Andrea say.

“My mom acts like life is supposed to be weird when you’re a teenager,” Jonah said. He grinned. “But I don’t think any of this was what she was talking about.”

“Jonah … even if we can’t be boyfriend-girlfriend … we can still be two kids who know how to deal with weird things together,” Andrea said.

Strangely, this seemed like one of the nicest things anyone had ever said to Jonah.

“That sounds good,” he said, trying hard to make his voice sound light and carefree.

He still thought Andrea understood.

They sat in silence for a few moments, until Andrea’s aunt gave a brief beep of her horn.

“I’ve got to go,” Andrea said. She surprised him by giving him a quick hug. “But I’ll call, or text, or IM, or …”

She was already across the park and climbing into the car with her aunt before she’d finished listing ways they could communicate.

Just because she doesn’t want to be my girlfriend now, that doesn’t mean she won’t want to be my girlfriend in the future,
Jonah thought.

JB came walking toward him as soon as Andrea and her aunt drove off.

“You look happier,” JB observed.

“Why not?” Jonah said. “I don’t have scurvy. I don’t have frostbite. I’m not in the middle of a mutiny. Nobody’s threatening me with a knife or a gun or a sword. Katherine and I got out of 1611. Time didn’t collapse. Everyone got out of 1605. And Andrea didn’t say she would
never
be my girlfriend.” He took a deep breath. “The future looks pretty bright, don’t you think?”

“It’s good that you can think so,” JB said, smiling indulgently.

Should I worry that he didn’t completely agree?
Jonah wondered. But Jonah had done enough worrying in the 1600s to last him for a lifetime. If there was something bad waiting for him in the future—or the past—he didn’t want to know about it now. Not when the sun was shining and his stomach was full and he wouldn’t have to go back in time again anytime soon.

“Hey, Jonah!” someone yelled from across the park. For the first time Jonah noticed that a group of kids from school were playing soccer at the opposite end of the park. They were too far away for Jonah even to see who was calling to him. “Want to play?”

Jonah looked at JB.

“Go on,” JB said, giving him a little shove on the back. “Have fun.”

JB turned away. He probably thought that Jonah was going to race off to the game immediately. But Jonah didn’t. He stood there a moment longer, and so he heard the rest of what JB said: “Have fun … while you still can.”

I can’t tell you what happened to the real John Hudson in real history.

This probably doesn’t surprise you if you’ve read the author’s notes at the back of previous books in the Missing series. Like Virginia Dare (from
Sabotaged
) and Edward V and his brother, Richard (from
Sent
), John Hudson truly is one of the missing children in history.

However, John Hudson’s situation is a little stranger than the other kids’. It’s not just that he and his father vanished from history. It’s that the stories about the last moments before they vanished sound so much like lies.

John Hudson was ship’s boy for all four of his father’s known voyages. He was probably about twelve to fourteen at the time of the first voyage in 1607, which would have made him sixteen to eighteen at the time of the mutiny on the
Discovery.
As ship’s boy he probably would have been expected to run errands, stand watch, deliver messages, repair ropes, swab the deck, help the ship’s cook, and follow whatever other orders he was given. Since he was not just ship’s boy but also the captain’s son, it’s easy to believe that part of John’s duties might have been learning how to lead a ship of his own someday.

If that’s the case, his father provided a rather mixed role model.

Like numerous European explorers before and after him, Henry Hudson was eager to find a better route to the rich trade goods of China and India and other places in Asia. In 1607 and 1608 he tried going northeast from England, encountering crippling ice each time. He did manage to sail closer to the North Pole than any European ship’s captain before him—and his travels proved once and for all that the polar areas would not be as warm as the tropics in the summertime, even with all the sunlight.

In 1609 Hudson sailed on behalf of a Dutch company, rather than the English. Although he swore on a Bible that he would go back and keep searching in a northeasterly direction, by now Henry Hudson was more interested in looking for a route to the northwest—through or above North America. He first sailed to the northeast, then broke his promise and headed west. This voyage became his most famous one, as it led to his discovery of the Hudson River and gave the Dutch a basis for claiming the lands of New Netherland (part of present-day New York and nearby areas).

And as a result of that voyage, Hudson was viewed as a traitor in England. Hudson feared that King James
would have him thrown into prison for making such a huge discovery for another country. But English investors seemed to decide,
Hey, if he can do that for the Dutch—what can he do for us?
And so they funded a voyage for Hudson to look for the Northwest Passage under the English flag.

By the time of Hudson’s fourth voyage he’d established himself as an able sailor. Three times he’d sailed into dangerous icy waters in ships that were hardly suited to Arctic conditions. And three times he’d managed to return home safely—two of those times without losing a single man from his crew.

However, the records of Hudson’s first three voyages show numerous occasions where he wasn’t nearly as good at dealing with people as he was at sailing. Part of the problem might have been that frightened, cooped-up sailors in desperate situations aren’t exactly the easiest people to manage. But it appears that his crews were near mutiny more than once.

This pattern was to continue on the fourth voyage.

The
Discovery,
with a crew of twenty-three—including John Hudson and another ship’s boy, Nicholas Symmes—sailed from London on April 17, 1610. The intrigue began almost immediately, as Hudson stopped by Gravesend, England, five days later to let off one
crew member he’d decided to dismiss, and to pick up another crew member, Henry Greene, who was widely considered to be a troublemaker.

And Greene was to become heavily involved in the troubles on the
Discovery.

Hudson sailed around the tip of Greenland and then headed farther north than he’d gone on his previous trip to North America. He crossed the Davis Strait and sailed into what was then known as the Furious Overfall—the entry to what would become the Hudson Strait. Struggling through ice and dangerous currents, the
Discovery
entered the Hudson Bay and sailed south. Some of the names Hudson gave to the lands he found along the way may have indicated his state of mind: Desire Provoketh, Isles of God’s Mercies, Hold with Hope.

The account Hudson kept of his voyage on the
Discovery
ended on August 3, 1610, more than ten months before the mutiny. It is likely that Hudson actually wrote a longer account, but the mutineers may have destroyed it because it made them look even guiltier. What survives of Hudson’s account is fairly dry and factual, dealing mostly with latitude readings and weather reports.

It fell to others to describe the arguments and anger that simmered on the ship.

The longest report from the voyage was written by the bizarrely named Abacuk Prickett—yes, there really was a person with that name. Before joining the crew of the
Discovery,
he had worked as a London haberdasher and as a servant of one of the investors in the expedition. This would not be the most likely career path toward becoming a sailor.

According to Prickett, about a month and a half into the journey some of the crew got mad when Henry Greene started a fistfight with another man and Hudson took Greene’s side. Soon after, first mate Robert Juet began spreading rumors that Greene was a spy for Hudson. And, not long after that, Hudson demoted Juet and held a trial for him that might have left Juet believing he would be hanged when he returned to England. Later Greene himself got mad at Hudson when another crew member died and Hudson gave the man’s coat to Greene, but then took it back and let someone else have it instead. This is just one of several times Prickett claims Hudson reversed his decisions or waffled back and forth, infuriating everyone.

Thomas Wydowse—who was indeed one of the sickly men sent out in the shallop—really did leave behind at least one note about the tensions on the ship. He was a mathematician, on the voyage to help
with navigation, and so was better educated than others in the crew. (Especially considering that many of the men could neither read nor write.) Wydowse’s writings, found in his desk when the
Discovery
returned to England, also tell of the accusations and trial against Juet in September 1610.

Even as the tensions grew among the crew, the
Discovery
was sailing farther and farther south, deeper and deeper into the Hudson Bay. Hudson undoubtedly hoped that they would reach a more temperate region before winter hit—perhaps even the South Seas.

Instead he was sailing into a dead end.

If you look at a map of Canada, you can see instantly what a huge cutout the Hudson Bay makes in the land. Hudson and his men sailed all the way to the bottom of it, into the slightly narrower James Bay.

By late October it was more than clear that they wouldn’t make it back to England before winter hit, as Hudson had done on his three previous trips. And the icy waters around them certainly looked nothing like the South Seas. If they tried to keep sailing, they faced numerous dangers. One was that the ice might completely trap them. They also faced the risk of having the ship smashed to bits by the huge ice floes churning around them.

Hudson apparently chose to ground his ship in the safest area he could find, away from the worst of the ice. According to Prickett, Hudson ordered Philip Staffe, the ship’s carpenter, to build a winter cabin on the nearby land. In what seems to have been an uncharacteristic act of defiance, Staffe refused, saying, essentially,
I’m a
ship’s
carpenter. I don’t do houses.
But he apparently relented soon afterward, and did build a shelter. Prickett said that building the house took “much labor” but was “of little use.”

Winters along James Bay are brutal, with temperatures falling as low as forty or fifty degrees below zero. And Hudson’s men had no North Face fleece, no micro-fiber, no Under Armour. In fact, the warmest clothes they had probably would have been made of wool. If they got their clothes wet, it would have been like asking for frostbite.

According to Prickett, the cold weather “lamed most of the crew.”

Surprisingly, though, during the first part of the winter they felt quite blessed with their food supplies. Prickett wrote that partridges were so plentiful nearby that “we killed more than a hundred dozen,” along with other kinds of birds, and “we had all the fish we could net.”

Then, as spring approached, the flocks of partridges
flew away, and soon the other birds did as well. The fish evidently became more difficult to catch too. Prickett said the men were reduced to foraging through “the woods and hills and valleys in search of anything that had any substance to it, no matter how vile: Nothing was spared, including moss of the ground, compared to which rotten wood is better, and the frog, which in breeding time is as loathsome as the toad.”

It wasn’t just that this minimal food tasted awful—it also failed to provide basic nutrients. No one in 1611 completely understood the link between certain foods and certain diseases, but they’d figured out a little bit. Prickett mentioned that Thomas Wydowse brewed a turpentine-like substance from the bud of a local tree to treat what must have been severe symptoms of scurvy.

If you remember that scurvy is what you get if you don’t have enough vitamin C, then congratulations. I hope that you’re never in a position to find out for yourself just what an unpleasant disease this is. People with scurvy get weaker and weaker, and they become more and more exhausted. Their gums hurt and their teeth begin to fall out. Their bones could crumble. They faint easily. They have pale skin, sunken eyes, aching muscles, internal bleeding, and, eventually, hemorrhaging. New wounds take longer to heal; old wounds, such as sword
cuts that might have healed years earlier, can reopen.

Sounds fun, doesn’t it? If this has made you want to go get a big glass of orange juice to drink while you’re reading this, that’s fine with me. Just drink it fast, because I’m going to be talking about some really disgusting food in a little bit.

Amazingly, in spite of the terrible cold and the lack of food and the widespread ailments, all but one man survived the winter. As the ice broke up in the bay and everyone prepared to sail again, food stores were so low that Hudson decided to divide up the only bread and cheese they had left. Each crew member got a supply meant to last fourteen days—even though Hudson was warned that some of the men would just gobble up their share immediately and then not have anything. And this was exactly what happened. One man even ate so much bread in one day that he made himself sick. Others began to whisper that Hudson was actually hiding food, keeping the best for himself and his favorites. Hudson, meanwhile, thought his men were stealing food, so he had ship’s boy Nicholas Symmes search all their sea chests. This made the men even madder.

On top of all the worries and disputes about food, when they began sailing again, Hudson did not rush immediately northeast, toward home and food and safety.

Instead he went back to sailing northwest.

How could he still be looking for the Northwest Passage while his men were so close to starving?

On June 18, 1610, the
Discovery
got trapped in ice once more, and Hudson could not sail in any direction. Three days later, when the ice finally broke up, the resentments and fears boiled over—into mutiny.