Excerpts from
North West to Hudson Bay
By Thorkild Hansen
During the months when Jens Munk was working on preparations for the Indian voyage, he had studied time and time again the route Ove Giedde had now taken, calculated courses, allowed for variations, and pored over the copperplate sea charts and Portuguese navigational aids. First Ove Giedde was to make his way down through the Channel, then continue to the Cape Verde Islands, cross the equator, and proceed south the whole long way down to the Cape of Good Hope. Yet there he would not be substantially nearer his destination; for in line with the practice of the time, he had to sail back along the east coast of Africa, up through the Mozambique Channel to the Comoro Islands, cross the equator once more, and continue north to an island called Socotra. Only then could he begin to lay a course eastward to India. All his captains were nobles, and if the expedition went in any way like the hunt for Mendozaīs brothers, it would clearly be an interminable undertaking....
But what if the way south circling Africa was not the only passage to the Orient? What if those people were right who claimed that there was a passage to the north of America which was only a fifth as long? Ove Giedde would sail south and north and east, but what if one ought in reality to sail west? Or as they said in Bahia, para buscar el levante por el ponente, seek the sunrise through the sunset. His brother Niels was dead. This sad fact could not be altered; but Jorgen Daa, his old friend and comrade in arms from Elfsborg and Kanin Nos, still lived and was in the best of health. What if he could be prevailed upon? What if it might one day be rumored on Amagertorv that Jens Munk had landed in China long before Ove Giedde of Tommerup had even reached India?
Six months later a round-the-world race was under way. Both captains kept their logbooks carefully during the passage; both logbooks are preserved, and we can still follow their respective positions from day to day. One thing is incontrovertible: four days after Ove Giedde sighted the Cape of Good Hope and began to make his way at snailīs pace up into the bright tropical warmth of the Indian Ocean, Jens Munk swept past Cape Farewell under full sail bound for the icefilled Hudson Bay.
From: North West to Hudson Bay
Collins St. James Place, London, 1970
Translated by James McFarlane and John Lynch
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