John Ledyard, one of America’s first celebrity adventurers, was born in Groton, Connecticut in 1751. The son of a sea captain, young John had acquired plenty of shipboard experience — as well as an insatiable appetite for travel coupled with a flair for the dramatic — by the time he was a teenager. Heeding his family’s wishes, he entered Dartmouth College in New Hampshire at the age of 21. There he enjoyed exploring the nearby wilderness but found the curriculum and behavioral code much too strict for his liking. After only a year, he bid Dartmouth farewell with an elaborate “escape” that involved sailing down the Connecticut River to Hartford in a 40-foot dugout canoe he had fashioned himself.
After his failed college experiment, Ledyard sought his fortune on the high seas, only to be captured and pressed into military service by the British navy in 1775, on the eve of the American Revolution. The next year, as a British marine, he accompanied Captain James Cook on his famous third (and final) Pacific expedition. That voyage ended in 1780, following Captain Cook’s death at the hands of Hawaiian natives. In 1783, still serving as a British marine, Ledyard was transported back to the United States. Instead of taking up arms against his countrymen in the final year of the Revolutionary War, however, he deserted as soon as he reached American shores.
Later that year, Ledyard became a minor celebrity after writing his best-selling recollections of Captain Cook’s ill-fated voyage, titled A Journal of Captain Cook’s Voyage to the Pacific Ocean. He leveraged his newfound fame as an explorer to gain audiences with influential politicians whom he lobbied to sponsor new excursions. In 1785, he met with Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and the Marquis de Lafayette in France. Jefferson was especially taken with Ledyard’s desire to experience the far reaches of the world, and encouraged him to explore the Alaskan frontier via an overland route through Russia. That, Jefferson asserted, would serve America’s goals of surveying geographic borders while expanding the young country’s fur and sealskin trade.
In the summer of 1787, Ledyard set out on his great Russian excursion, traveling nearly 4,000 miles eastward over the mountains and steppes of north Asia over eight months. During that time, news of the outgoing and gregarious American explorer raised suspicions among Russian authorities who feared he might be gathering intelligence on their hunting and trapping techniques. On February 24, 1788, they caught up with Ledyard, who was then in the east Siberian port town of Yakutsk, and arrested him as a spy on the order of Catherine the Great. Ledyard was forced to retrace his steps westward and was then promptly expelled from the country. It was one of the only times Connecticut’s most famous explorer had been forced to turn back during one of his journeys, but Ledyard took it in stride.
He immediately started out on a new expedition — this time to Egypt to try and find the source of the Nile River. There, his itinerant life of fearless exploration finally came to an end when he died from an illness in Cairo. Only 37 years old at his death, John Ledyard had experienced enough encounters to fill several lifetimes — certainly enough to brand him as one of the most famous and well-traveled adventurers in Connecticut history.
Further Reading
David Drury, “John Ledyard, Connecticut’s Most Famous Traveler,” connecticuthistory.org
Ben Gammell, “The Adventure of a Lifetime: John Ledyard and Captain Cook’s Last Voyage,” Connecticut Public Radio/WNPR
Bill Gifford, “The Amazing Life and Times of John Ledyard,” Dartmouth Alumni Magazine
