Here was a man who was born with two great gifts, one the most precious in the world, the other the most perilous. The first was an abounding physical vitality which made the casual business of being alive a divine adventure, the second, an imagination of the sort which refuses discipline and runs away with the whole mind.
The adventure begins in the spring of the year 1772 with the farmers of the Connecticut Valley halting their ploughs in the furrow, and straightening up to stare at a certain extraordinary vehicle going north on the river road. This vehicle was nothing less than a two-wheeled sulky, then a rig almost unheard of outside the towns, and one never known to be used by travellers. A sulky with bundle baggage lashed behind, surely the driver must be an odd kind of rogue! Stopping at nightfall at a farm, the stranger met with close scrutiny by rural candle light. He was a fair-haired youth an inch or so under six feet tall, and of that “rangy” and powerful build which is as characteristic of American soil as Indian corn. His eyes, which were well spaced in a wide forehead, were grey-blue in color, he had a good chin to face the world with, and something of a lean and eagle-ish nose. His name, he said, was John Ledyard, and he was on his way to become a missionary to the Indians.
This youth, John Ledyard, third of his name, had seen the light of day in the village of Groton, Connecticut; his father, a sea captain, had died young; legal mischance or a descent of harpy relatives had deprived the young mother of her property, and John had been brought up in the house of his grandfather at Hartford. Then had come years at grammar school, the death of his grandfather, his virtual adoption by an uncle and aunt, and the attempt of these good folk to make a lawyer of him, which experiment had not been a success.
At twenty-one years of age, John presented something of a problem to his kinsmen. What was to be done with this great fair-haired youth who had neither money nor influential friends? Suddenly Destiny came down the Connecticut Valley with a letter.
JOHN LEDYARD
Courtesy Judge John A. Aiken.
The Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, founder of Dartmouth, wrote to John inviting him to the college. The passion of this good man’s life was the evangelization of the dispossessed and incorrigible redskins; he visited them in their forlorn and dwindling encampments; he took their young men to be his pupils, and he had founded his college largely for the sake of training the sons of colonists to be Indian missionaries. Good Doctor Wheelock had been a friend of grandfather Ledyard’s, and something or other had recalled to his mind the fair-haired boy who he had seen playing about the old man’s house at Hartford. He would make a missionary of the lad, and send him forth to comfort the copper-skinned of the elect. A letter arrived offering John the status of a free pupil destined to the Indian field. Sulky and ancient nag were presently produced from somewhere, perhaps from John’s own pocket, for he had just inherited a tiny legacy; the uncle and aunt waved farewell, a whip cracked in the air, and John and his sulky vanished over the hills and far away.
At Dartmouth College, he liked to act in plays, and clad in robes of Yankee calico, strutted about as the Numidian Prince, Syphax, in Mr. Addison’s “Tragedy of Cato.” A savour of old-fashioned rhetoric and magniloquence made its way from these plays into John’s mind, and coloured his letters and his language all his life. He liked the out-of-doors, and on one occasion induced a group of comrades to climb with him to the top of a neighboring height, and spend the night on evergreen boughs strewn on the floor of deep holes dug in the snow. Doctor Wheelock nodded an enthusiastic consent; he saw in John’s adventure fine training in hardship for his future missionaries! Letters of classmates paint Ledyard as restless, impatient of the dry bones of discipline, authoritative on occasion, and more a man with devoted cronies than one largely and carelessly popular. All other Dartmouth memories have faded in the epic glow of the adventurer’s flight from his Alma Mater.
He came to college in a sulky, he left it an even more adventurous way. In the spring of 1773, the sound of the axe rings in the Dartmouth woods. Presently comes a shout, a great, crackling crash, and the sound and tremor of a heavy blow upon the earth. John Ledyard and his cronies have just felled a giant pine standing close by the bank of the Connecticut River. From this log, the homespun undergraduates fashion a dug-out canoe, fifty feet long and three feet wide, a veritable barge of a canoe, and once the digging and hacking is done with, John himself weaves at the stern of the craft a kind of shelter-bower of willow wands. Word passes among the lads to be at the river early in the morning.
The spring in northern New England is no gracious and gradual awakening, it is shy, even timid, of approach, and there are times when the new leaves and petals have quite the air of children who have run out of the house on a winter’s day. Then comes a sudden night of warmth and southwest wind, smells of wet earth and the sound of flooded streams fill all the dark, a rushing spirit of fertility shakes the land, and the rising sun reveals a world hurrying on to June. A dangerous spring in a Puritan land, for flesh and spirit are taken unawares, and swept off to the shrines of gods who have never made a covenant with man.
Such a spring it was, as the forest undergraduates gathered at the huge dug-out under the slanting light of early day, and watched their friend carry supplies to his canoe. John first put aboard a provender of dried venison and cornmeal, then a huge bearskin for a coverlet, and last of all two strangely assorted books, a Greek New Testament and the poems of Ovid. The truant Yankee sophomore steps into his canoe. A long halloo, a push all together, and the craft has slid off into the river, which, clear of ice and swollen by a thousand mountain streams, is rushing past their little college and on into the world. The current seizes the canoe; the wet paddle blade flashes in the cool sun; John masters the swirl with his strength and woodsman skill, and the future vagabond disappears on the way to his fantastic destiny. Little does the truant know that in January and February, 1787, a forlorn, penniless but indomitable traveller will accomplish one of the most amazing feats ever performed by mortal man, a fifteen hundred mile trudge through an unknown country deep in arctic snow and cold, and that the vagabond will be John Ledyard.
The mystery of his truancy remains to puzzle the world. For after all, why had he run away? In abandoning Dartmouth, he had locked behind him the one door to an education which had opened to him in his obscurity. John Ledyard’s contemporaries said simply that the spring was racing in his blood, and that the born vagabond had been unable to control a vagabond urge. There is a world of truth in the reply, but not quite all the truth. The present day, with greater historical perspective, will have it that this fair-haired lad was not really a scion of the seaboard generations of transplanted Englishmen, but a son of the new, native-born, and native-minded culture which was springing up in the hearts of Americans during the last half of the eighteenth century. This lad is no spiritual kinsman of harsh and merciless Endecott; his place is with Daniel Boone and the lords of the frontier. But at Dartmouth, the seventeenth century sat in the seat of power, for, intellectually, Wheelock was a contemporary of Cotton Mather; the two dominies would have talked the same Canaanitish jargon, and shared an identical attitude to life. But young John was of different stuff, and, moreover, he was in certain ways, curiously modern. His flight from Dartmouth thus becomes a bit of vagabondage hiding an instinctive recoil, for had he accepted a missionary career, the seventeenth century would have claimed him forever for its own.
Down the Connecticut River floats the log canoe, carrying a young New Englander from theology under Oliver Cromwell to adventure under George the Third.
Now came difficulties and explanations, and John cut the knot by going to sea. Four years later, at the end of a voyage, a young American seaman walks the narrow streets of London’s “Sailortown.” John Ledyard is now twenty-five years old, life has done little with him, and he has done little with life; his friends at home are beginning to regard him as something of a ne’er-do-well, and the pockets of his sailor breeches are emptier than ever.
In “Sailortown” an April sun is shining, the dank smell of the Thames mingles with wood smoke from the hearths, and there is a sound of men’s voices and a clink of glasses at the doors of mariner’s inns. John steps into a tavern, and hears news which fires his imagination, and sets his blood to racing. Captain James Cook, the great navigator and explorer, is about to make a third voyage to the South Seas, and ships are being prepared and loaded for the expedition. With characteristic audacity, John hurries directly to the Captain at his lodgings in Chelsea Hospital, and boldly requests to be allowed to go. His colonial directness pleases, and John Ledyard walks back to London, no longer an obscure American seaman, but a corporal of His Majesty’s Marines attached to Cook’s own vessel, the Discovery.
The two ships of the expedition, the old Resolution and the new Discovery, sailed from England on July 12th, 1776, bound for the South Pacific by the Cape of Good Hope.
He was a marine, now, on a British naval vessel; a roving Yankee caught up in the old navy’s conventionalised routine. A bugle or a drum tattoo woke him at early dawn as he slept in the low ’tween deck caves where the timbers groaned when the wind freshened in the night, and the lanterns and the hammocks swung to the listing of the ship; he escaped from the darkness below, the warm, human smell, and the sight of sleepy men and nakedness to the humid deck, the lilac morning, and the vast splendour of the awakening sea; the drill drum beat for him, he heard the shuffle and the tramp of feet, the peremptory order, and, in the silences, the wind in the rigging and the endless, dissolving whisper of alongside foam.
This Discovery was the more interesting of the ships. Captain Cook himself was aboard, a man over six feet in height, with brown eyes, a pleasant countenance, and brown hair tied behind. Ledyard often saw the tall figure in great cloak and three-cornered hat standing at the other end of the deck. Perhaps of even greater interest to the ship’s company was the Noah’s ark farmyard aboard of cattle, sheep, goats, ducks, dogs, horses, cats, pigs, and rabbits, all intended as gifts to estimable savages who had no such allies, for the eighteenth century was nothing if not benevolent. When in port for any length of time, the sea-going bull and the other grazing animals were put ashore for pasturage; at the Cape of Good Hope, a rascally Hottentot delayed the expedition by stealing a salty and intrepid cow. During a stay in the east, this animal world was strengthened by a vast contingent of cockroaches who fell in showers to the deck when the sails were unfurled before getting under way; not a romantic picture, this, but one with a genuine flavor of old sailing ship days. And when all other things wearied, there was a battle to watch, that battle with never a truce which is the sailing of a sailing ship in open sea.
After a pause by the barren rocks of Kerguelen Land in the Antarctic, and after revisiting Tasmania and New Zealand, the expedition sounded its way through the archipelagos of the South Pacific, and anchored in the bay of Tongataboo in the Friendly Islands. The ships remained there twenty-six days gathering stores.
Tongataboo—the name has a ring of the Bab Ballads; but it hides the memory of a Paradise. John found himself among a people who were beautiful, courteous, and friendly, for no whites had yet poisoned them either with their maladies or their civilization, and there was no tiresome angel with a flaming sword. First of a line of roaring Yankee whalemen and sailors, Corporal John walks the island night under the giant moon, watching the smooth, incoming seas burst and scatter into a churning wash that might be a liquid and greener moonlight; first of American adventurers in the South Seas, John Ledyard hears the endless clatter and dry rustling of the island palms. He lives in a tent ashore, refers to the natives as “the Indians,” eats fish baked in plantain leaves, and drinks water from a coconut shell. Late in the golden night, he hears over the faint monotone of the breaking sea, “a number of flutes, beginning almost at the same time, burst from every quarter of the surrounding grove.” Not to be outdone in the matter of entertainment, Cook delights the innocent natives with a display of fireworks, a form of entertainment then regarded as the height of the ingenious and the civilized. Surely it was pleasant to be alive when Paradise was young. From the Friendly Islands, the Discovery carried John to Hawaii, and thence to the coast whose memory was to shape the greater adventures of his life.
By the last half of the eighteenth century, the one accessible coast of North America which lingered unvisited and unexplored, was the coast of the Pacific North Northwest,—or to be more definite, the shores of northern British Columbia and the great peninsula of Alaska. The geographers of the day were aware that Bering had sighted such a coast, and that the Russians had crossed to it from northeastern Siberia and claimed it for their empire, but with these two facts their knowledge came to an end. The character and the conformation of the land remained unknown. Cook was to be the first to make a scientific survey of the region, for the Admiralty had instructed him to explore any rivers or inlets that might lead eastward to Hudson’s or Baffin’s bay through the “Northwest Passage” of romance. The ships turned north in December, 1777, and arrived off the coast of what is now the state of Oregon on March 7th, 1778. The weather was cold and stormy, but summer came upon them as they worked their way to the north, the splendid summer of the cool, northwestern land.
John Ledyard was once more on American soil, and what an America it was, this great unknown land of bold, indented coasts, evergreens and alders, snow-capped inland mountains, and great rivers moving unsullied to the sea! The beauty and living quality of the new country conquered the Connecticut explorer even as it conquered those who followed him. Carefully charting the way, Cook’s expedition sailed along the coast to Alaska, past the towering cliffs of vast glaciers rising pale-green from the darker surges washing at their base; into this great fjord and into that went the ships, waking the deep arctic silence with the plunge of their anchors and the hurrying rattle of chain. At the Island of Unalaska, John offered to go with native guides in search of some “white strangers,” and thus had a unique opportunity to spy out the land.
“I took with me some presents adapted to the taste of the Indians, brandy in bottles, and bread, but no other provisions. I went entirely unarmed by the advice of Captain Cook.... The country was rough and hilly; and the weather wet and cold. At about three hours before dark we came to a large bay, ... and saw a canoe approaching us from the opposite side of the bay, in which were two Indians. It was beginning to be dark when the canoe came to us. It was a skin canoe after the Esquimaux plan (a kayak) with two holes to accommodate two sitters. The Indians that came in the canoe talked a little with my two guides and desired I would get into the canoe. This I did not very readily agree to, however, as there was no other place for me but to be thrust into the space between the holes, extended at length upon my back, and wholly excluded from seeing the way I went, or the power of extricating myself on any emergency. But as there was no alternative I submitted thus to be stowed away in bulk, and went head foremost very swift through the water about an hour, when I felt the canoe strike a beach, and afterwards lifted up and carried some distance, and then sat down again, after which I was drawn up by the shoulders by three or four men, for it was now so dark that I could not tell who they were, though I was conscious that I heard a language that was new.
“I was conducted by two of these persons, who appeared to be strangers, about forty rods, when I saw lights and a number of huts.... As we approached one of them, a door opened, and discovered a lamp by which, to my joy and surprise, I discovered that the two men who held me by each arm were Europeans, fair and comely, and concluded from their appearance that they were Russians, which I soon after found to be true.... We had supper which consisted of boiled whale, halibut fried in oil, and broiled salmon.... I had a very comfortable bed composed of different fur skins, both under and over me.... After I had lain down, the Russians assembled the Indians in a very silent manner, and said prayers after the manner of the Greek church which is much like the Roman.”
The meeting of the New England marine and certain Russian fur traders visiting Alaska to buy skins for the Chinese trade, is not without significance to the philosophic reader of history, for it is the first contact of a white civilisation advancing across America from the east with another and a belated white civilisation approaching the continent from the west. Had Columbus failed, what strange results might not have sprung from this Russian enterprise! But Yankee John rises to end the reverie. A notion of advancing his fortune by joining in the Alaskan fur trade is getting into his head, and he enters in his journal that skins which were purchased in Alaska for six pence were sold later in China for a hundred dollars.
Save for the tragic death of Captain Cook, who was attacked by natives at Hawaii, and “fell into the water and spoke no more,” there is little in the further history of the ships to halt the chronicle of Corporal John. The ships revisited the Bering Sea and the Russian Asiatic coast, cruised to China, and returned to England round the same Cape of Good Hope. The expedition had been at sea exactly four years and three months.
For two troubled years, John Ledyard walks the flagstones of a British barrack yard, for the war of the Revolution is being fought in America, and he can neither escape nor bring himself to take naval service against his countrymen. Barrack life, however, ends by exhausting his patience, he seeks a transfer to the American station, and the December of 1782 finds him aboard a British man of war lying in Huntington Bay, Long Island. As the island was then in the hands of the British, John obtains seven days’ leave, but patriotically forgets to report aboard. From a stay with friends at Huntington, he hastens to Southold, where his mother keeps a boarding house, then frequented chiefly by British officers.
He rode up to the door, alighted, went in, and asked if he could be accommodated in her house as a lodger. She replied that he could, and showed him a room into which his baggage was conveyed. After having adjusted his dress, he came out, and took a seat by the fire in company with several other officers, without making himself known to his mother, or entering into conversation with any person. She frequently passed and repassed through the room, and her eye was observed to be attracted to him with more than usual attention. At last after looking at him steadily for some minutes, she deliberately put on her spectacles, approached nearer to him, begging his pardon for her rudeness, and telling him that he so much resembled a son of hers, who had been absent eight years, that she could not resist her inclination to view him more closely. “The scene that followed,” adds the old chronicler, “may be imagined, but not described.”
Travelling by night down the Long Island shore, John found a way to reach Hartford, and took refuge there at the house of his Uncle Seymour. He remained with him four months, writing an account of his voyage with Cook. The book was published, and is now exceedingly rare. “I am now at Mr. Seymour’s,” wrote John, “and as happy as need be. I have a little cash, two coats, three waistcoats, six pair stockings, and half a dozen ruffled shirts.... I eat and drink when I am asked, and visit when invited, in short, I generally do as I am bid. All I want of my friends is friendship, possessed of that, I am happy.”
The long and cruel struggle of the American Revolution was drawing to an end. Peace was at hand. John Ledyard, now thirty-two years of age, found himself a personage in his own country. He was John Ledyard, “the American traveller.” And he had lost his corporal’s chevrons—popular imagination had seen to that; John was now Captain Ledyard; Major Ledyard, and even Colonel Ledyard to the eloquent. The American traveller! The great, fair-haired, “rangy” lad had grown into a tall energetic man whose countenance told of hardship and adventure; there were lines, such as sailors have, about his eyes, his nose was thinner and more than ever eagle-like, and the grey eyes had a look in them the world but rarely sees. The man stands at the window of the house in Hartford, looking down the still, New England street, but the inner eye sees only the northwest coast, the waterfalls on the sides of the sea ravines, the dark trees, and the crests of snow. He alone, of all the American world, has seen the unknown land; he alone can guide his fellow-adventurers of the young republic to the wealth that waits the gathering of the bold.
He went first to New York, and walked up dusty stairs into counting houses and shipping offices. “Send a vessel to the northwest coast,” he said to those who would listen; “I have been to it with Captain Cook, it is a glorious, new land, and you may buy furs there for a song, and sell them in China at a great profit.” Shrewd eyes watched him as he sat talking, leaning forward on the edge of his chair; and the papers on which he had written his plans for an expedition crinkled between wary and unsympathetic hands. So this rolling stone wished to guide them to the beds of moss! One after another, his interviews ended in a scraping of chairs, a polite return of his papers, and the formality of bows at an opening door.
He had a better reception at Philadelphia, whither someone had sent him with a letter to the great banker, Robert Morris. “I have had two interviews with him at the Finance Office, and tomorrow I expect a conclusive one. What a noble hold he instantly took of the enterprise!” And later in the same letter, “Send me some money for Heaven’s sake, lest the laurel now suspended over the brows of your friend, should fall irrecoverably into the dust. Adieu.” John’s heart beats high, the dawn of fortune seems at hand, the eastern sky is gay. He goes to Boston, to New London, and to New York in search of a suitable ship, but all in vain, and as he searches, the season becomes too far advanced to think of prosecuting the northwest voyage; and presently the false dawn fades, Mr. Morris withdraws from the venture, and John finds himself in New London once again.
It was clear that he could hope for nothing from the merchants of the United States. “The flame of enterprise I kindled in America,” he wrote, “terminated in a flash.... Perseverance was an effort of understanding which twelve rich merchants were incapable of making.” His exasperation was natural enough, yet in justice to the American ship owner of the time, the economic disorder and poverty of the country should be noted, as well as the fact the owners were being asked to send a long and costly expedition round the Horn on the word of a solitary enthusiast. Would European merchants listen? The winter of 1784-85 found John at the great French port of L’Orient, living on a subsidy granted him by merchants interested in his scheme, but once again hope rose and perished like the seed upon thin ground.
From L’Orient he went to Paris, the Paris of 1785, the Paris of the Bastile, the great nobles, the philosophers of universal benevolence, and the usual Parisian miscellany of the world’s most artful and distinguished knaves. Into this picturesque world, so soon and so terribly to be rent apart, stepped the new adventurer, Mr. Ledyard the American traveller! He was practically penniless, yet he managed to subsist in a modest manner. “You wonder by what means I exist, having brought with me to Paris, this time twelve months, only three louis d’ors. Ask vice-consuls, consuls, ministers, and plenipotentiaries, all of whom have been tributary to me. You think I joke. No, upon my honour, and however irreconcilable to my temper, disposition and education, it is nevertheless strictly true.” He lived in a room in the village of St. Germain, and went to Paris afoot, a distance of some twelve miles. Other American adventurers were there, of the type that have long haunted Paris. John had no illusions about them. “Such a set of moneyless villains,” he remarked, “have never appeared since the epoch of the happy villain Falstaff. I have but five French crowns in the world, Franks has not a sol, and the Fitz Hughs cannot get their tobacco money.”
While in Paris, his dream of a trading voyage collapsed for the last time. Captain John Paul Jones listened to him, and fell in eagerly with his plans, but the necessary money could not be raised, and so ended the tale.
Poor as he is, Ledyard is still a personage, and walks boldly with the great. Lafayette befriends him. “If I find in my travels a mountain,” said John, “as much elevated above other mountains as he is above ordinary men, I will name it Lafayette.” He goes to breakfast at the house of the first American minister to France, and sees at the head of the table a tall angular man neatly and soberly dressed in black, a tall man with a bony but strong frame, angular features, light hazel eyes and sandy-reddish hair, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia. What a table it is,—French abbés and philosopher nobles, learned bigwigs of the day, visiting Americans, diplomats, and John Ledyard with the backs of both hands tattooed with the scrolls of Polynesia! John finds a sympathetic hearer in his host, for the great Virginian has a civilized man’s interest in scientific exploration and a patriotic American’s interest in American discovery. They stroll after breakfast, the statesman and the vagabond, and presently the minister suggests to his companion a voyage that fires his guest’s imagination even as the name of Captain Cook had kindled it just ten years before.
“I suggested to him,” runs the Virginian’s letter, “the enterprise of exploring the western part of our continent, by passing through St. Petersburg to Kamchatka, and procuring a passage thence in some of the Russian vessels to Nootka Sound,[1] whence he might make his way across the continent, and I undertook to have the permission of the Empress of Russia solicited.”
John listens, and listening, becomes once more the vagabond who ran away to see the world; then and there, the man flings off the disappointed trader. “He eagerly embraced the proposition,” wrote Jefferson. Yes, he will attempt just this thing, cross Europe and Asia, take ship to the northwest coast, and cross the wide American continent to Virginia. Did ever a man make such a resolve, and that man a penniless vagabond? Is it not genuinely so mad as to be magnificent?
“I die with anxiety,” he now wrote to a brother, “to be on the back of the American States, after having either come from or penetrated to the Pacific Ocean. There is an extensive field for the acquirement of honest fame.... It was necessary that a European should discover the existence of that continent, but in the name of Amor Patriae, let a native explore its resources and boundaries. It is my wish to be the man!”
Now came a false start from London, his last delay. “The great American traveller” sits writing at a table in his humble London lodging, perhaps again a room in Sailor Town. “I am still the slave of fortune and the son of care,” he writes later to his brother. “I think my last letter informed you that I was absolutely embarked on a ship in the Thames, bound to the northwest coast of America. This will inform you that I have disembarked from the said ship, on account of her having been unfortunately seized by the custom house ... and that I am obliged in consequence to alter my route, and, in short, everything, all my little baggage, shield, buckler, lance, dogs, squire, and all gone. I only am left, left to what?”
He counts his money, a familiar trick with him, shakes the clinking coins in his palm, arranges them in a row on the table, and finds he still has a few guineas left of the sum generously given him by Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, and certain other English gentlemen interested in the advance of geographic knowledge. He adds two final phrases to his letter before he seals it, and sends it off across the sea.
“I will only add that I am going in a few days to make a tour of the globe from London east on foot. Farewell. Fortitude! Adieu.”
It is the month of December, 1786, and from London, lost in smoky winter mist, the tall Yankee vagabond passes unperceived to dull Hamburg on the muddy Elbe, and thence to Copenhagen, and Stockholm of the Swedes. The fair-haired Northmen stare at a thin stranger with outlandish marks on his hands, who asks the way to Russian St. Petersburg. The winter route to Russia, they tell him, lies across the frozen gulf of Bothnia, the sledges strike off from Stockholm, and speed east over the ice to Abo, only fifty miles on the opposite shore; but this year the gulf is not solidly frozen, the ice is broken in midchannel; the horses cannot pass, and tremble, and turn about, and overturn their sleighs;—the traveller will have to wait till the spring frees the gulf of ice, and allows a boat to pass.
The words fall on the ear of a wanderer who will not wait. John Ledyard knows that he must reach St. Petersburg early in the spring, if he is to cross the Siberian wastes in the summer of this same year. A small delay means a year’s delay. Rather than wait or return, he will walk the fifteen hundred miles round the frozen sea. It is the very heart of winter, and the vagabond’s path will lead him north through Sweden into arctic Lapland, and south and east through the vast forests of Finland, now trackless in the depth of the snows. John Ledyard has no