32 
A VOYAGE TO SPITZBERGEN 
Hudson’s last voyage, from which, he never returned, 
was made, at the charge of members of the Muscovy 
Company, in 1610. Having explored the Bay called 
after him, and attached to prominent localities within it 
the names of Smith, Digges, Wolstenholme, &c. (his 
patrons), -— which have proved less permanent than his 
own, — he was set adrift in a boat by his mutinous crew, 
and perished, it is supposed, by cold or starvation. 
After 1603, the Muscovy Company sent annually to 
Cherie Island for the mohorse, or morse (as the walrus 
was then called), until that animal grew comparatively 
scarce, and difficult to take: which might very well be 
the case, since Jonas Poole (the commander), in his 
accounts of these expeditions, speaks of slaying, at one 
time, seven or eight hundred of them in less than six 
hours ; and again, nine hundred or a thousand in less 
than seven hours. * * * 7 Such wholesale destruction would 
necessarily soon exhaust the supply to be derived from 
the beaches of a small island. Accordingly, in 1610, 
Poole was sent with one of the ships to Spitzbergen, 
and sailed along the western coast to a point in latitude 
79° 5(K; to which he gave the name of “ Gurnard’s 
Nose.” 8 His report' of the “ great store of whales, 
grampuses, mohorses, &c.,” to be found there, cr eated 
so much interest, that he was appointed on a stip end to 
the north-east and north-west attempts for a passage to China, in planting America, 
in the circumnavigation of the globe, and in the East-India commerce.” — Macphersori's 
Annals of Commerce , vol. ii. p. 264. 
7 Purchas, vol. iii. p. 560, 
8 Gurnard, an acanthopterous fish, belonging to the genera Trigla (Linn.) and Prio-. 
notus (Cuv.); the latter being peculiar to America. — New Am. Cyclopaedia , art. “ Gur¬ 
nard.” There is a Gurnard’s Nose at the south of England. The point near Plymouth, 
Mass., now known as the “ Gurnet,” was originally Gurnet’s, or Gurnard’s Nose. 
