Henry Hudson Reached Delaware Bay
On this day · 28 August 1609
Sailing for the Dutch in search of a shortcut to Asia, an English captain stumbled into a wide American bay instead.
On August 28, 1609, the explorer Henry Hudson brought his small yacht, the Half Moon (Halve Maen), to the mouth of what is now Delaware Bay. He was not looking for it. Working for the Dutch East India Company, Hudson was hunting a northwest passage to Asia, and he probed the North American coast hoping one of its inlets would open into open ocean.
The bay disappointed him. Hudson anchored near a spot his log called “the Point” — likely today’s Cape Henlopen — but found the water choked with shifting sandbars and shoals too treacherous for his vessel. Convinced the route led nowhere useful, he soon turned north toward the river that would later bear his name.
No reliable map showed Delaware Bay before Hudson’s visit.
Though he barely entered it, his voyage put the bay on the European map: the Velasco Map of 1610 is the earliest surviving chart to clearly depict it, drawn only after Hudson’s passage helped fix the coastline.
Sources & references
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