From our collection of old postcards ...
The Half Moon was a Dutch East India Company yacht, more properly known as Halve Maen. The ship was assigned to Henry Hudson by the Dutch East India Company for a voyage in 1609 to find a passage from the Netherlands to the Spice Islands. This old postcard features an image and description on the back.
The following is our summary of information found on the Library of Congress website about Dutch Exploration and tells the story of the ship on our postcard.
The Half Moon was a Dutch East India Company yacht, more properly known as Halve Maen. The ship was assigned to Henry Hudson by the Dutch East India Company for a voyage in 1609 to find a passage from the Netherlands to the Spice Islands in the Far East. Actually, what Hudson found was a part of the New World.
Hudson left Amsterdam on April 6, 1609, aboard the Half Moon, a small, eighty-ton yacht with a crew of eighteen sailors. Sailing along the coast of Norway, he reached the North Cape on May 5. Fearful of another setback in the Arctic waters and worried about quarreling among the Dutch and English sailors on his crew, he made a bold decision to head westward toward North America, following a map that his friend Captain John Smith had shown him. There he hoped to find a westward passage to the Far East - an inlet that would lead to a river across America and into the Pacific.
Hudson made landfall on Labrador and then began to head south along the coast. He entered Chesapeake Bay and stopped briefly at the mouth of the Delaware River before turning north again. In early September he entered what later would come to be called New York Harbor and the Hudson River. Still searching for a passage to the East, the Half Moon sailed almost as far north as present-day Albany before Hudson turned back, convinced by the increasingly shallow water that the river would not lead to the open sea. Although disappointed that he was unable to find the fabled route to Asia, Hudson was impressed by the wealth of the New World. The ship's log describes a country teeming with beaver, deer, and otter and dotted with Indian villages that cultivated corn and beans.
The maps of Hudson's voyage are quite interesting and can be found on the website
here.
Read more about the Half Moon at Ship Wiki
here.
Thank you for stopping by John's Island.
