Note 205 — NEW ENGLISH CANAAN OR NEW CANAAN.

Morton here confounds Davis with Hudson. Davis’s three voyages were made in 1585-6-7, and it was in the first of them that he discovered the straits which bear his name. He afterwards made five voyages to the East Indies, in the last of which he was killed in a fight with some Japanese on the coast of Malacca. Hudson made four voyages between 1607 and 1610, during the last of which he passed a winter, frozen in, near the entrance to Hudson Bay. His crew mutinied, and turned him adrift in an open boat, on the 22d of July, 1610. He was never heard of again; and it is his “fate,” probably, which Morton had in mind. No other noted discoverer of the Northwest Passage was lost prior to 1634. The discovery of that passage, however, then excited as active an interest as it has since, or does now. In 1632 Edward Howes sent out to Governor Winthrop a printed “Treatise of the North-West Passage” (IV. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. vi. p. 480) which is still in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society.