Condensed and adapted from Half Moon: Henry Hudson and the Voyage that Redrew the Map of the New World. Copyright Douglas Hunter 2009. Published Sept. 1, 2009, by Bloomsbury Press, New York.

Emanuel Van Meteren, who was the Dutch consul in London and most likely played a role in Hudson’s hiring by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) for the 1609 voyage, would write that Hudson was equipped with a vlieboat, a design the English called a flyboat. Broad-beamed with a shallow hull and a high stern, it was well suited to negotiating rivers and streams and shoaling waters. (The Vlie was the estuary of the river IJssel, which gave its name to the island of Vlieland.) The flyboat proved suitable to the exploration game because it could sail in unknown coastal tidewaters with minimal risk of damage in the event of a grounding.

Van Meteren might well have understood that a flyboat was what Hudson thought he would receive. But VOC records indicate that he was instead provided with a jaght, a variation on the vlieboat. Jaght means “hunter” or “chaser.” It had less cargo capacity than a vlieboat, and while it might not have been more ferociously armed, being relatively swift and nimble made it useful for chasing down pirates, and capable of conducting piracy of its own. The evolving jaght became a favored design of Dutch burghers wishing a private pleasure vessel, and it gave us the modern term “yacht.”

Hudson’s ship’s name (in the original Dutch variously recorded as Halve Maan or Halve Maen) clearly was inspired by the half-moon medallion worn by Dutch privateers. Called “sea beggars,” (watergeuzen) they were often financed by leading Dutch merchants. They could be ruthless in their conduct and unscrupulous in their choice of targets. The VOC, in providing Hudson with a jaght, had ensured that this single-ship expedition would be able to thwart aggressors. The VOC would not have supplied such a potent vessel without including crew members that could fight at sea. Many of them could have had experience as sea beggars, although even crews of heavily-armed VOC merchant vessels had to know how to handle weapons.

Beyond the fact that the Half Moon was a jaght, we have no firm knowledge of what she was like. Ships were not built from plans at the time, and so no drawings survive. We can be sure she wasn’t purpose-built for Hudson. On December 29, 1608, two directors of the VOC’s Amsterdam chamber, along with the chamber’s chief boatswain, Dirck Gerritsz, were instructed to look out for “a suitable vessel [scheepgen]” of 25 to 35 lasten or “lasts” for Hudson’s voyage. She was being outfitted by March 1609. Later VOC documents indicate she was 40 lasten.

Two unnamed jaghts were built for the VOC in 1608, and they were probably seventy and eighty feet long, from stem to stern post. While neither of them necessarily was the Half Moon, she could have been the larger of the two, which would have been in keeping with a capacity of 40 lasten. But recordings of lasten are not especially helpful, because the definition of this measurement was extremely inconsistent at the time.

Thomas Holland, mayor of Dartmouth, was an eyewitness to the Half Moon’s surprise appearance in his riverine port in November 1609 at the end of Hudson’s controversial voyage. He discussed the voyage with Hudson, and as a watcher of the coast for Sir Robert Cecil, England’s secretary of state and chief spymaster, set down his observations in a letter to Cecil. Holland noted that a vessel out of Amsterdam called the Half Moon had arrived, “whereof one Henry Hudson, an Englishman late of London, is master.” She was “of 70 tons or thereabouts,” which is a little more informative as to her size, as we have a better grip on what this volume measurement meant, and it would suggest a smaller vessel. But the calculation of tonnage was also so flexible in Hudson’s time that it is still a challenge to come up with absolute dimensions. While she had a crew of 16 for the 1609 voyage, she was large enough to accommodate 20 men, as Hudson proposed to the VOC for a 1610 voyage.

Her hull could have been anywhere from 65 to as many as 80 feet long, and around 15 to 20 feet wide. Her draught, or depth below the water, was around eight or nine feet, no more, as Hudson would sound waters as shallow as 10 feet without going aground.

The 1612 chart Tabula Nautica by Hessel Gerritsz, which depicted discoveries from Henry Hudson’s final, fatal voyage of 1610-11, includes this lively depiction of vessels, one of the best from Hudson’s time. They are rigged like the Half Moon, and give us a fair idea of what she looked like. Note the furled mizen sails at the stern.

In 1999 the Duyfken was launched in Australia. She is a meticulously considered replica of a VOC jaght built in 1595, and may give us the best idea of what the Half Moon was like. (Photo courtesy Nick Burningham)

The journal of Hudson’s right-hand man, Robert Juet, confirms she had a mainmast, a foremast, and a bowsprit, and while he never mentions a mizen mast, we can be confident her sailplan conformed to the standard rig of Dutch ships in contemporary drawings. She thus had three masts, as well as the bowsprit, with a total of six sails. All but one sail was cut square and supported by horizontal yards. The exception was the triangular lateen on the smallest mast, the mizen, which emerged from the highest, stern-most deck, the poop. An aid to steering, it seldom seems to have been set. Contemporary illustrations of ships at sea usually show the mizen furled, and Juet never refers to it in the entirety of his journal.

The bowsprit extended forward from the blunt profile of the bow like the tusk of a narwhal, supported by the beak. We’re accustomed to thinking of a figurehead being mounted on the beak of historic sailing ships, but the Half Moon probably didn’t have one. Sailors clambered into the beak to relieve themselves: there was no toilet on board. The bowsprit had a single square sail, the spritsail. The mainmast, which was stepped on the keel about halfway along the ship’s length, featured the mainsail, and above it, on the topmast, the main topsail. At the very bow, and raking slightly forward, was the foremast, shorter than the mainmast and with two sails of its own, the fore course at the bottom and the fore topsail above it. She would not have had crow’s nests: Juet ascended the rig several times to scout the American shore, and specifically mentions in his journal climbing to the main topmast head.

As to armaments. Juet refers to a falconet, which was a small cannon about four feet long that typically fired an iron ball two inches in diameter. Weighing more than 400 pounds, it would have been mounted in a carriage at a gun port, and the Half Moon probably had at least four of them. Juet also refers to stone-shot “murderers,” which were small rail-mounted cannon that could be swiveled and aimed along the ship’s length to repel boarders. Muskets are also mentioned.

We’re fairly at sea in deciding what the hull was like. Because no hard evidence survives for interior layouts of most ships of this time, the Half Moon included, the issue of how many decks to include has preoccupied efforts to build replicas (or more precisely, informed-guesswork imaginings). Deck nomenclature can be confusing. By “single deck” we mean that there was one main deck, with no “walk-through” interior decks directly below it, above the hold. Choosing multiple decks creates a more complex interior, and also a taller hull. The larger of the two jaghts built for the VOC in 1608 had some kind of two-deck arrangement.

This rare contemporary portrait of a Dutch jaght from Hudson’s time is of the Duyfken, sketched by Jouris Joostensz in the journal of the ship Gelderland in 1601. The illustration appears courtesy Algemeen Rijksarchief  in “The Duyfken Project: an Age of Discovery ship reconstruction as experimental archaeology,” by Nick Burningham and Adriaan de Jong, The lnternational Journal of Nautical Archaeology (1997) 26.4, p. 277-292

Juet’s mention of waistboards—temporary defensive screenings that increased the height of the bulwarks to protect the crew from hostile fire—confirms that, as in the case of the Duyfken replica, the Half Moon’s main deck was broken into  higher “castles” at either end, with a lower exposed area, or waist, between them. Forward was the forecastle; aft was the sterncastle. These were not substantial elevated areas, along the lines of 16th-century ships. The sterncastle probably was only a few steps higher than the main deck. A further slight rise in the quarter deck toward the tall, narrow stern created the poop deck, which provided headroom in the master’s cabin. The helmsman was sheltered beneath the forward end of the poop at the whipstaff, and peered out of his hutch along the quarter deck, where the officer conning the ship stood. Forward, the forecastle similarly was elevated slightly above the waist of the main deck, enough to provide headroom to the compartment below it, the forecastle.

The master’s cabin featured shuttered windows on the high stern, which in the case of a jaght had a square transom, rather than the rounded one often found on vlieboats. Narrative evidence suggests Hudson shared the cabin with Juet, and possibly with his son John as well. The door from Hudson’s cabin led directly to the helm station, with its whipstaff and compass binnacle. Ahead was the main cabin.

If the Duyfken is our guide, below the master’s cabin was a low-ceilinged space known as the aft peak, or tiller flat—so called because the tiller swept across its ceiling, which would have been a creaking distraction to anyone trying to sleep. While this cabin could have featured a cannon poking out of a gun port in the transom, it would have been home to senior crewmembers. While no crew manifest survives, a master’s mate, a carpenter and a cook appear in Juet’s journal. A boatswain (who was responsible for the physical state of the ship) also would have been on hand. The crews of Hudson’s earlier Hopewell voyages (1607, 1608) were too small to include a barber-surgeon, and there may not have been one aboard the Half Moon, either.

The Half Moon likely followed longstanding convention in granting little consideration to the privacy or comfort of the general crew. The hammock had not yet been invented. If hard wooden berths were not available, the crew would have slept off-watch wherever they could make themselves comfortable.

Crews routinely dozed out-of-doors in fair weather, rather than breathe foul belowdecks air. Sailors literally pitched camp on the upper decks, sleeping in tents or leather-covered “kennels” of their own making, which likely was the practice aboard the Half Moon.

While a single-deck Half Moon still would have had elevated castles, she was probably more rakish and predatory looking than usually has been depicted. The distance from the main deck to the water might have been only about six feet midway along her length, and her cannons would have been placed on this deck, to be fired through ports in the protective bulwarks. The stone-short murderers would have been positioned on the castles. But the fierce look probably was compromised by a strange village of tents and kennels, in the words of nautical archaeologist and Duyfken replica designer Nick Burningham, “cluttering all the decks like the most desperate kind of refugee camp.”

To help understand the seagoing world of Henry Hudson and his men, we can look to the Duyfken (Little Dove), a jaght built in 1595 that was in VOC service in the East Indies from 1601 to 1608. Variously described as having been 25 to 30 lasten, she might have been slightly smaller than the Half Moon, but we really cannot be sure. The design team responsible for the Australian replica launched in 1999 went to considerable lengths to create a faithful circa 1600 jaght, and drew up a variety of configurations based on computer analysis of hull shape, archaeological evidence, shipbuilders’ contracts, surviving ship models, descriptions in logs, and contemporary illustrations. Unusual for such research efforts was their emphasis on creating a ship that could live up to the performance criteria indicated by historical records, as so many “replicas” have left us with a jaundiced view of the capabilities of historic vessels. (The replica of the Half Moon launched in 1909, which burned in 1931, essentially could not sail toward the wind, and was impossible to tack without the use of the mizen sail to swing the stern around.) They were also blessed by the fact that an eyewitness sketch of the Duyfken at anchor exists (above), something that cannot be said of other individual jaghts, the Half Moon included.

“Then we took in our boat, and set our mainsail, and spritsail, and our topsails, and sailed away east southeast...”

—journal of Robert Juet, October 4, 1609

Sailplan drawing showing the likely rig of the Half Moon, based on a drawing of the Duyfken. (Illustration by Nick Burningham, labels by Douglas Hunter)

Lines drawing of the Duyfken, by Nick Burningham

Top: a basic single-deck configurtion for a jaght about the size of the Half Moon, as chosen for the Duyfken replica of 1999. Two- and three-deck configurations (middle, and bottom) were also investigated, but judged to be too top-heavy and not in keeping with the performance attributed to the original ship. (Drawings by Nick Burningham, with labels by Douglas Hunter)

While I am partial to the 1999 Duyfken replica’s more rakish interpretation of the jaght,  this does not make the 1989 Half Moon replica, which has a three-deck configuration, “wrong.” All attempts to create an example of a ship of this era require a considerable amount of educated guessing, and no one who has done so has ever expected to produce a definitive version of an unknowable original.

ONLINE RESOURCES

Duyfken 1606 Replica Foundation

New Netherland Museum and the Half Moon

Hudson River Maritime Museum

The Life and Voyages of Henry Hudson, English explorer & navigator

Half Moon: Henry Hudson and the Voyage that Redrew the Map of the New World, by Douglas Hunter

Published by Bloomsbury Press

My thanks to Australian nautical archaeologist Nick Burningham, who played a leading role in the design and construction of the replica VOC jaght Duyfken. In the course of researching and writing the book, he engaged in a lengthy and enjoyable series of email exchanges (and one Skype conversation), which fundamentally informed my impressions of the nature of Hudson’s Half Moon. He also provided the illustrations (some shown here), which had previously been published in his papers in The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.

Illustrations of the Half Moon (such as this oft-reproduced 19th century example) invariably portray the ship as much more stodgy-looking and high-sided than she would have been. This illustration also forgets to include the foremast and places two sails (rather than a single spritsai) on the bowsprit.