Book Title:  God's Mercies:  Rivalry, Betrayal and the Dream of Discovery
Author: Douglas Hunter
Publishing Company: Doubleday Canada
Year:  2007
# of Pages: 416
ISBN:  978-0-385-66058-7   
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Reviewed By:  Deborah Ground Buckner (Kansas City Correspondent - USA)

Douglas Hunter brings the age of exploration and discovery vividly to life in God's Mercies:  Rivalry, Betrayal and the Dream of Discovery.  His subjects are Henry Hudson and Samuel de Champlain, two rival explorers in a race to discover and exploit the northern parts of North America, and, hopefully, find a passage to the Orient.  Hudson's son, John, becomes a point of intersection in the lives of these two famous seamen.

In 1610, Hudson set sail in the ship Discovery with a crew of twenty-three, including Habakkuk Prickett, a representative of the investors who financed this mission to locate a Northwest Passage.  Almost immediately, problems arose aboard when Hudson added to the crew a young man, Henry Greene, deemed by Prickett as a problem.  Apparently, it would be Greene's role to record the details of the voyage.  As Hunter points out: "This was a new, literate age of exploration, emerging in lockstep with the blossoming of the commercial publishing industry."  Publishers had found a a ready market for chronicles of travels with "pages lush with the hyperbole of new discoveries and colonizing possibilities," and the better the story, the more likely an explorer could obtain funding for future voyages.  When Greene attacked the ship's surgeon, Hudson surprised Prickett by letting the matter go without discipline.  Later, it became apparent that Greene's role also included serving as a spy on the rest of the crew and reporting on them to Hudson.  This led to dissension between Hudson and the ship's mate Robert Juet, when Juet revealed Greene as a spy to other crew members.  Ultimately, Greene and Juet were among the mutinous crew members who set Hudson, his teen-aged son, John, and seven other crew members adrift in a small boat, never to be seen again.  When the remains of the crew of Discovery reached Ireland on September 6, 1611, they sailed "a veritable ghost ship-sails flapping seemingly untended, the hull gnawed by pack ice and gouged by groundings," and though crew members ultimately stood trial, what actually happened to Hudson remains a mystery. 

Samuel de Champlain was writing his memoirs of his voyages through 1611 when he received a report of an English shipwreck near La Grande Riviere, a river that ultimately became known as the Ottawa River.  The survivors came aboard weak, ill and starving.  They tried to steal corn and were killed by the natives-except for a boy who came to be held by the Nebicerini, a people who ranged north through river systems that led to the Northern Sea.  Convinced the boy had to be Hudson's son, Champlain became obsessed with finding this "English boy" and learning of the final travels of Hudson and the waterways navigated by the Nebicerini.  Part II of the book follows Champlain's journeys while also reporting on the trial of the surviving Discovery crew members.

Much of the book reads like a combination of an old-fashioned pirate story and an episode of one of the 1980s big money prime time soap operas such as Dallas or Dynasty.  Money, fame and power were at the heart of the exploration trade, and personalities come through handily in Hunter's account.  While Hunter provides interesting background about crew members and their past interactions, in doing so he often jumps back and forth between different voyages and time periods, making the reading confusing at several points.  Still, the story could not be told adequately without taking into account old grudges and insights.

Hunter provides a detailed bibliographic essay and thirty-four pages of notes, as well as an index.   

Hunter's previous books include:  War Games, Molson: The Birth of a Business Empire, and The Bubble and the Bear:  How Nortel Burst the Canadian Dream, which won the National Business Book Award.