1778-1790
JOHN LEDYARD, THE FORERUNNER OF LEWIS AND CLARK
A New England Ne'er-do-well, turned from the Door of Rich Relatives,
joins Cook's Expedition to America--Adventure among the Russians of
Oonalaska--Useless Endeavor to interest New England Merchants in Fur
Trade--A Soldier of Fortune in Paris, he meets Jefferson and Paul Jones
and outlines Exploration of Western America--Succeeds in crossing
Siberia alone on the Way to America, but is thwarted by Russian Fur
Traders
When his relatives banged the door in his face, turning him destitute
in the streets of London, if John Ledyard could have foreseen that the
act would indirectly lead to the Lewis and Clark exploration of the
great region between the Mississippi and the Pacific, he would
doubtless have regarded the unkindness as Dick Whittington did the cat,
that led on to fortune. He had been a dreamer from the time he was
born in Groton, opposite New London, Connecticut--the kind of a dreamer
whose moonshine lights the path of other men to success; but his
wildest dreams never dared the bigness of an empire many times greater
than the original states of the Union.
{243} Instead he had landed at Plymouth, ragged, not a farthing in the
bottom of his pockets, not a farthing's possession on earth but his
hopes. Those hopes were to reach rich relatives in London, who might
give him a lift to the first rung of the world's climbers. He was
twenty-five years old. He had burned his ships behind him. That is,
he had disappointed all his relatives in America so thoroughly that he
could never again turn for help to the home hands.
They had designed him for a profession, these New England friends. If
Nature had designed him for the same thing, it would have been all
right; but she hadn't. The son of a widowed mother, the love of the
sea, of pathless places, of what is just out of sight over the dip of
the horizon, was in his blood from his father's side. Friends thought
he should be well satisfied when he was sent to live with his
grandfather at Hartford and apprenticed to the law; but John Ledyard
hated the pettifogging of the law, hated roofed-over, walled-in life,
wanted the kind of life where men do things, not just dicker, and
philosophize, and compromise over the fag-ends of things other men have
done. At twenty-one years of age, without any of the prospects that
lure the prudent soul, he threw over all idea of law.[1]
Friends were aghast. Manifestly, the boy had {244} brains. He
devoured information, absorbed facts like an encyclopaedia, and
observed everything. The Greek Testament and Ovid were his companions;
yet he rebelled at the immured existence of the scholar. At that time
(1772), Dartmouth was the rendezvous of {245} missionaries to the
Indians. The college itself held lectures to the singing of the winds
through the forests around it. The blowing of a conch-shell called to
lessons; and a sort of wildwood piety pervaded the atmosphere. Urged
by his mother, Ledyard made one more honest attempt to fit his life to
a stereotyped form, and came to study at Dartmouth for the missionary's
career.
It was not a success. When he thought to get a foretaste of the
missionary vocation by making a dugout and floating down the whole
length of Connecticut River, one hundred and forty miles, the scholarly
professors were shocked. And when he disappeared for four months to
make a farther test by living among the Mohawks, the faculty was
furious. His friends gave him up as hopeless, a ne'er-do-well; and
Ledyard gave over the farce of trying to live according to other men's
patterns.
[Illustration: Ledyard in his dugout, from a contemporaneous print.]
What now determined him was what directs the most of lives--need for
bread and butter. He became a common sailor on the ship of a friend in
New London, and at twenty-five landed in Plymouth, light of heart as he
was light of purse. The world was an oyster to be opened by his own
free lance; and up he tramped from Plymouth to London in company with
an Irishman penniless as himself, gay as a lark, to the world's great
capital with the world's great prizes for those with the wits to win
them. A carriage with driver {246} and footman in livery wearing the
armorial design of his own Ledyard ancestors rolled past in the street.
He ran to the coachman, asked the address, and presented himself at the
door of the ancestral Ledyards, hope beating high. The relationship
was to be the key to open all doors. And the door of the ancestral
Ledyards was shut in his face. The father was out. The son put no
stock in the story of the ragged stranger. He did not even know that
Ledyards existed in America. What was to hinder any common tramp
trumping up such a story? Where were the tattered fellow's proofs?
Ledyard came away with just enough wholesome human rage to keep him
from sinking to despair, or to what is more unmanning, self-pity. He
had failed before, through trying to frame his life to other men's
plans. He had failed now, through trying to win success through other
men's efforts--a barnacle clinging to the hull of some craft freighted
with fortune. Perhaps, too, he fairly and squarely faced the fact that
if he was to be one whit different from the beggar for whom he had been
mistaken, he must build his own life solely and wholly on his own
efforts.
On he wandered, the roar of the great city's activities rolling past
him in a tide. His rage had time to cool. Afternoon, twilight, dark;
and still the tide rolled past him; _past him_ because like a stranded
hull rotting for lack of use, he had put himself _outside_ the tide of
human effort. He must build up his own career. That was the fact he
had wrested out of his {247} rage; but unless his abilities were to rot
in some stagnant pool, he must launch out on the great tide of human
work. Before he had taken that resolution, the roar of the city had
been terrifying--a tide that might swamp. Now, the thunder of the
world's traffic was a shout of triumph. He would launch out, let the
tide carry him where it might.
All London was resounding with the project of Cook's third voyage round
the world--the voyage that was to settle forever how far America
projected into the Pacific. Recruits were being mustered for the
voyage. It came to Ledyard in an inspiration--the new field for his
efforts, the call of the sea that paved a golden path around the world,
the freedom for shoulder-swing to do all that a man was worth. Quick
as flash, he was off--going _with_ the tide now, not a derelict, not a
stranded hull--off to shave, and wash, and respectable-ize, in order to
apply as a recruit with Cook.
In the dark, somewhere near the sailors' mean lodgings, a hand touched
him. He turned; it was the rich man's son, come profuse of apologies:
his father had returned; father and son begged to proffer both
financial aid and hospitality--Ledyard cut him short with a terse but
forcible invitation to go his own way. That the unknown colonial at
once received a berth with Cook as corporal of marines, when half the
young men of England with influence to back their applications were
eager to join the voyage, speaks well for the sincerity of the new
enthusiasm.
{248} Cook left England in midsummer of 1776. He sighted the Pacific
coast, northward of what is now San Francisco, in the spring of 1778.
Ledyard was the first American to see the land that lay beyond the
Rockies. It was not a narrow strip as men had thought, but a broad
belt a thousand miles long by a thousand broad, an unclaimed world; for
storms drove Cook offshore here; and the English discoverer did not
land till abreast of British America.
At Nootka thousands of Indians flocked round the two vessels to trade.
For some trinkets of glass beads and iron, Ledyard obtained one
thousand five hundred skins for Cook. Among the Indians, too, he saw
brass trinkets, that must have come all the way from New Spain on the
south, or from the Hudson's Bay Fur Company on the east. What were the
merchants of New York and Philadelphia doing, that their ships were not
here reaping a harvest of wealth in furs? If this were the outermost
bound of Louisiana, Louisiana might some day be a part of the colonies
now struggling for their liberties; and Ledyard's imagination took one
of those leaps that win a man the reputation of a fool among his
contemporaries, a hero to future generations. "If it was necessary
that a European should discover the existence of the continent," he
afterward wrote, "in the name of Amor Patriae let a native explore its
resources and boundaries. . . It is my wish to be the man."
Cook's ships passed north to Oonalaska. Only {249} twenty-five years
before, the Indians of Oonalaska had massacred every white settlement
on the island. Cook wished to send a message to the Russian fur
traders. Not many men could be risked from the ship. Fired with the
ambition to know more of the coast which he had determined to explore,
Ledyard volunteered to go for the Russians with two Indian guides. The
pace was set at an ambling run over rocks that had cut Ledyard's boots
to tatters before nightfall. He was quite unarmed; and just at dark
the way seemed to end at a sandy shore, where the waves were already
chopping over on the rising tide, and spiral columns of smoke betrayed
the underground mud huts of those very Indian villages that had
massacred the Russians a quarter of a century before. The guides had
dived somewhere underground and, while Ledyard stood nonplussed, came
running back carrying a light skin boat which they launched. It was
made of oiled walrus hide stretched like a drum completely round
whalebones, except for two manholes in the top for the rowers.
Perpheela, the guide, signalled Ledyard to embark; and before the white
man could solve the problem of how three men were to sit in two
manholes, he was seized head and heels, and bundled clear through a
manhole, lying full length imprisoned like Jonah in the whale. Then
the swish of dipping paddles, of the cold waves above and beneath, shut
out by parchment thin as tissue paper, told Ledyard that he was being
carried out to sea, spite of dark and storm, {250} in a craft light as
an air-blown bladder, that bounced forward, through, under, over the
waves, undrownable as a fish.
There was nothing to do but lie still. The slightest motion might have
ruptured the thin skin keel. On he was borne through the dark, the
first American in history to travel by a submarine. At the end of what
seemed ages--it could not have been more than two hours--after a deal
of bouncing to the rising storm with no sound but the whistling of wind
and rush of mountain seas, the keel suddenly grated pebbles. Starlight
came through the vacated manholes; but before Ledyard could jump out,
the boat was hoisted on the shoulders of four men, and carried on a run
overland. The creak of a door slammed open. A bump as the boat dumped
down to soft floor; and Ledyard was dazzled by a glare of light to find
himself in the mess room of the Russian barracks on Captain Harbor, in
the presence of two bearded Russian hunters gasping speechless with
surprise to see a man emerging from the manhole like a newly hatched
chicken from an egg.
Fur rugs covered the floor, the walls, the benches, the berth beds
lining the sides of the barnlike Russian barracks. The windows were of
oiled bladder skin; the lamps, whale-oil in stone basins with skin for
wick. Arms were stacked in the corner. The two Russians had been
sitting down to a supper of boiled salmon, when Ledyard made his
unannounced {251} entrance. By signs he explained that Captain Cook's
ships were at a near harbor and that the English commander desired to
confer with Ismyloff, chief factor of the Russians. Rising, kissing
their hands ceremoniously as they mentioned the august name and taking
off their fur caps, the Russians made solemn answer that all these
parts, with a circumambient wave, belonged to the Empress of Russia;
that they were her subjects--with more kissing of the hands. Russia
did not want foreigners spying on her hunting-grounds. Nevertheless,
Ledyard was given a present of fresh Chinese silk underwear, treated to
the hottest Russian brandy in the barracks, and put comfortably to bed
on a couch of otter skins. From his bed, he saw the Indians crowd in
for evening services before a little Russian crucifix, the two traders
leading prayers. These were the tribes, whom the Russians had hunted
with dogs fifty years before; and who in turn had slain all Russians on
the Island. A better understanding now prevailed.
In the morning Ledyard looked over the fur establishment; galliots,
cannon-mounted in the harbor for refuge in case of attack; the huge
lemon-yellow, red-roofed store-room that might serve as barracks or
fort for a hundred men; the brigades of eight, of nine, of eleven
hundred Indian hunters sailing the surfs under the leadership of
Ismyloff, the chief factor. Oonalaska was the very centre of the
sea-otter hunt. Here, eighteen thousand otter a year were taken. At
once, {252} Ledyard realized how he could pay the cost of exploring
that unclaimed world between New Spain and Alaska: by turning fur
trader as Radisson, and La Salle, and the other explorers had done.
Ismyloff himself, who had been out with his brigade when Ledyard came,
went to visit the Englishman; but Ismyloff had little to say, little of
Benyowsky, the Polish pirate, who had marooned him; less of Alaska; and
the reason for taciturnity was plain. The Russian fur traders were
forming a monopoly. They told no secrets to the world. They wanted no
intruders on their hunting-ground. Could Ledyard have known that the
surly, bearded Russian was to blast his new-born ambitions; could
Ismyloff have guessed that the eager, young, beardless corporal of
marines was indirectly to be the means of wresting the Pacific coast
from Russia--each might have smiled at the tricks of destiny.
Ledyard had two more years to serve in the British navy when he
returned from Cook's voyage. By another trick of destiny he was sent
out on a battle ship to fight against his native country in the
Revolutionary War. It was a time when men wore patriotic coats of many
colors. His ship lay at anchor off Long Island. He had not seen his
mother for seven years, but knew that the war had reduced her to
opening a lodging house for British officers. Asking for a week's
furlough, Ledyard went ashore, proceeded to his mother's {253} house,
knocked at the door, and was taken as a lodger by her without being
recognized, which was, perhaps, as well; for the house was full of
British spies. Ledyard waited till night. Then he went to her private
apartments and found her reading with the broad-rimmed, horn-framed
spectacles of those days. He took her hands. "Look at me," he said.
One glance was enough. Then he shut the door; and the door remains
shut to the world on what happened there.
That was the end of British soldiering for Ledyard. He never returned
to the marines. He betook himself to Hartford, where he wrote an
account of Cook's voyage. Then he set himself to move heaven and earth
for a ship to explore that unknown coast from New Spain to Alaska.
This was ten years before Robert Gray of Boston had discovered the
Columbia; twenty years before the United States thought of buying
Louisiana, twenty-five years before Lewis and Clark reached the
Pacific. Many influences worked against him. Times were troublous.
The country had not recovered sufficiently from the throes of the
Revolution to think of expanding territory. Individually and
collectively, the nation was desperately poor. As for private sailing
masters, they smiled at Ledyard's enthusiasm. An unclaimed world?
What did they care? Where was the money in a venture to the Pacific?
When Ledyard told how Russia was reaping a yearly harvest of millions
in furs, even his old friend, Captain Deshon, whose boat had {254}
carried him to Plymouth, grew chary of such roseate prospects. It was
characteristic of Ledyard that the harder the difficulties proved, the
harder grew his determination to overcome. He was up against the
impossible, and instead of desisting, gritted his teeth, determined to
smash a breach through the wall of the impossible, or smash himself
trying. For six months he besieged leading men in New York and
Philadelphia, outlining his plans, meeting arguments, giving proofs for
all he said of Pacific wealth, holding conference after conference.
Robert Morris entered enthusiastically into the scheme; but what with
shipmasters' reluctance to embark on such a dangerous voyage and the
general scarcity of funds, the patience of both Ledyard and Morris
became exhausted. Ledyard's savings had meanwhile dwindled down to
$4.27.
In Europe, Cook's voyage was beginning to create a stir. The Russian
government had projected an expedition to the Pacific under Joseph
Billings, Cook's assistant astronomer. These Russian plans aimed at no
less than dominance on the Pacific. Forts were to be built in
California and Hawaii. In England and India, private adventurers,
Portlock, Dixon, Meares, Barclay, were fitting out ships for Pacific
trade. Some one advised Ledyard to attempt his venture in the country
that had helped America in the Revolution, France; and to France he
sailed with money loaned by Mr. Sands of New York, in 1784.
{255} In Paris Ledyard met two of the most remarkable men in American
history, Paul Jones, the naval hero, and Jefferson. To them both he
told the marvels of Pacific wealth, and both were far-sighted enough to
share his dreams. It was now that Jefferson began to formulate those
plans that Lewis and Clark afterward carried out. The season was too
late for a voyage this year, but Paul Jones loaned Ledyard money and
arranged to take out a ship of four hundred tons the following year.
The two actually went over every detail together. Jones was to carry
the furs to China, Ledyard with assistants, surgeon, and twenty
soldiers to remain at the fur post and explore.
But Paul Jones was counting on the support of the American government;
and when he found that the government considered Ledyard's promises
visionary, he threw the venture over in a pique.
Was Ledyard beaten? Jefferson and he talked over the project day after
day. Ledyard was willing to tramp it across the two Siberias on foot,
and to chance over the Pacific Ocean in a Russian fur-trading vessel,
if Jefferson could obtain permission from the Russian Empress.
Meanwhile, true soldier of fortune, without money, or influence, he
lived on terms of intimacy with the fashion of Paris.
"I have but five French crowns," he wrote a friend. "The Fitzhughes
(fellow-roomers) haven't money for tobacco. Such a set of moneyless
rascals never {256} appeared since the days of Falstaff." Again--"Sir
James Hall, on his way from Paris to Cherbourg, stopped his coach at
our door. I was in bed, but having flung on my robe de chambre, met
him at the door. . . . In walking across the chamber, he laughingly
put his hand on a six livre piece and a louis d'or on my table, and
with a blush asked me how I was in the money way. Blushes beget
blushes. 'If fifteen guineas,' said he, 'will be of any service to
you, here they are. You have my address in London.'"
While waiting the passports from the Empress of Russia, he was invited
by Sir James Hall to try his luck in England. The very daring of the
wild attempt to cross Siberia and America alone appealed to the
English. Half a dozen men, friends of Cook, took the venture up, and
Ledyard found himself in the odd position of being offered a boat by
the country whose navy he had deserted. Perhaps because of that
desertion all news of the project was kept very quiet. A small ship
had slipped down the Thames for equipments, when the government got
wind of it. Whether the great Hudson's Bay Company of England opposed
the expedition as intrusion on its fur preserve, or the English
government objected to an American conducting the exploration for the
expansion of American territory, the ship was ordered back, and Ledyard
was in no position to confront the English authorities. Again he was
checkmated, and fell back on Jefferson's plan to cross the two Siberias
on foot, and chance it over {257} the Pacific. His friends in London
gathered enough money to pay his way to St. Petersburg.
January of 1787 saw him in Sweden seeking passage across the Baltic.
Usually the trip to St. Petersburg was made by dog sleighs across the
ice. This year the season had been so open, neither boats nor dog
trains could be hired to make the trip. Ledyard was now thirty-six
years old, and the sum of his efforts totalled to a zero. The first
twenty-five years of his life he had wasted trying to fit his life to
other men's patterns. The last five years he had wasted waiting for
other men to act, men in New York, in Philadelphia, in Paris, in
London, to give him a ship. He had done with waiting, with dependence
on others. When boats and dog trains failed him now, he muffled
himself in wolfskins to his neck, flung a knapsack on his back, and set
out in midwinter to tramp overland six hundred miles north to Tornea at
the head of the Baltic, six hundred miles south from Tornea, through
Finland to St. Petersburg. Snow fell continually. Storms raged in
from the sea. The little villages of northern Sweden and Finland were
buried in snow to the chimney-tops. Wherever he happened to be at
nightfall, he knocked at the door of a fisherman's hut. Wherever he
was taken in, he slept, whether on the bare floor before the hearth, or
among the dogs of the outhouses, or in the hay-lofts of the cattle
sheds. No more waiting for Ledyard! Storm or shine, early and late,
he {258} tramped two hundred miles a week for seven weeks from the time
he left Stockholm. When he marched into St. Petersburg on the 19th of
March, men hardly knew whether to regard him as a madman or a wonder.
Using the names of Jefferson and Lafayette, he jogged up the Russian
authorities by another application for the passport. The passport was
long in coming. How was Ledyard to know that Ismyloff, the Russian fur
trader, whom he had met in Oonalaska, had written letters stirring up
the Russian government to jealous resentment against all comers to the
Pacific? Ledyard was mad with impatience. Days slipped into weeks,
weeks into months, and no passport came. He was out of clothes, out of
money, out of food. A draft on his English friends kept him from
destitution. Just a year before, Billings, the astronomer of Cook's
vessel, had gone across Siberia on the way to America for the Russian
government. If Ledyard could only catch up to Billings's expedition,
that might be a chance to cross the Pacific. As if to exasperate his
impatience still more, he met a Scotch physician, a Dr. William Brown,
now setting out for Siberia on imperial business, who offered to carry
him along free for three thousand of the seven thousand miles to the
Pacific. Perhaps the proceeds of that English draft helped him with
the slow Russian authorities, but at last, on June 1, he had his
passport, and was off with Dr. Brown. His entire earthly possessions
at this time consisted of a few guineas, a suit of {259} clothes, and
large debts. What was the crack-brained enthusiast aiming at anyway?
An empire half the present size of the United States.
From St. Petersburg to Moscow in six days, drawn by three horses at
breakneck pace, from Moscow to Kazan through the endless forests, on to
the Volga, Brown and Ledyard hastened. By the autumn they were across
the Barbary Desert, three thousand miles from St. Petersburg. Here
Brown remained, and Ledyard went on with the Cossack mail carriers.
All along the endless trail of two continents, the trail of East and
West, he passed the caravans of the Russian fur traders, and learned
the astonishing news that more than two thousand Russians were on the
west coast of America. Down the Lena next, to Yakutsk, the great
rendezvous of the fur traders, only one thousand miles more to the
Pacific; and on the great plain of the fur traders near Yakutsk he at
last overtook the Billings explorers on their way to America. Only one
guinea was left in his pocket, and the Cossack commandant reported that
the season was too far advanced for him to cross the Pacific. What did
it matter? He would cross the Pacific with Billings in spring. He was
nearer the realization of his hopes than ever before in his life; and
surely his success in tramping twice the length of Sweden, and in
crossing two continents when almost destitute augured well for his
success in crossing from the Pacific to the Missouri.
Not for a moment was his almost childlike confidence {260} disturbed by
a suspicion of bad faith, of intentional delay in issuing the
passports, of excuses to hold him back at Yakutsk till the jealous fur
traders could send secret complaints to St. Petersburg. Much less was
he suspicious when Billings, his old friend of Cook's voyage, himself
arrived, and invited him on a sled journey of exploration up the Lena
while waiting.[2]
On sledges he went up the Lena River with a party of explorers. On the
night of February 24 two or three of the officers and Ledyard were
sitting in the mess room of Irkutsk playing cards. They might laugh
_at_ Ledyard. They also laughed _with_ him. Wherever he went, went
gayety. Gales of boisterous laughter were on the wind. Hopes as
tenuous as the wind were in the air. One of the great Bering's sons
was there, no doubt telling tales of discovery that set each man's
veins jumping. Suddenly a tremendous jingling of bells announced some
midnight arrival post-haste at the barracks' door. Before the card
players had risen from their places, two Cossacks had burst into the
room stamping snow from their feet. Marching straight over to Ledyard,
they seized him roughly by the arms and arrested him for a French spy,
displaying the Empress's written orders, brought all the way from St.
Petersburg. To say that Ledyard was dumfounded is putting it mildly.
Every man in the room knew that he was not a French spy. Every man
{261} in the room knew that the arrest was a farce, instigated by the
jealous fur traders whom Ismyloff's lying letters had aroused. For
just a second Ledyard lost his head and called on Billings as a man of
honor to confute the charge. However Ledyard might lose his head,
Billings was not willing to lose his. He advised Ledyard not to
provoke conflict with the Russian authorities, but to go back to St.
Petersburg and disprove the charge. Was it a case of one explorer
being jealous of another, or had Billings played Ledyard into the fur
traders' trap? That will never be known. Certain it is, Billings made
mess enough of his own expedition to go down to posterity as a failure.
Some of the officers ran to get Ledyard a present of clothes and money.
As he jumped into the waiting sledge and looked back over his shoulder
at the group of faces smiling in the lighted doorway, he burst into a
laugh, but it was the laugh of an embittered man, whose life had
crumbled to ruin at one blow. The Cossacks whipped up the horses, and
he was off on the long trail back, five thousand miles, every mile a
sign post of blasted hopes. Without a word of explanation or the
semblance of a trial on the false charge, he was banished out of St.
Petersburg on pain of death if he returned.
Ragged, destitute, the best years of his life gone, he reached London,
heartbroken. "I give up," he told the English friends, who had backed
him with money, and what was better than money--faith. "I give up,"
{262} he wrote Jefferson, who afterward had Lewis and Clark carry out
Ledyard's plans.
The men of the African Geographical Society in London tried to cheer
him. When could he set out to explore the source of the Nile for them?
"To-morrow," answered Ledyard, with the heedlessness of one who has
lost grip on life. The salary advanced paid off the moss-grown debts
of his disappointed past, but he never reached the scene of his new
venture. He died on the way at Cairo, in November, 1788, for all hope
had already died in his heart. The world that has entered into the
heritage of his aims has forgotten Ledyard; for the public acclaims
only the heroes of success, and he was a hero of defeat. All that
Lewis and Clark succeeded in doing for the West, backed by the prestige
of government, Ledyard, the penniless soldier of fortune, had foreseen
and planned with Jefferson in the attic apartments of Paris.[3]
[1] The world owes all knowledge of Ledyard's intimate life to Jared
Sparks, who compiled his life of Ledyard from journals and
correspondence collected by Dr. Ledyard and Henry Seymour of Hartford.
[2] In Sauer's account of the Billings Expedition, some excuse is given
for the conduct of Billings on the ground that Ledyard had been
insolent to the Russians.
[3] Ledyard's _Journal of Cook's Last Voyage_, Hartford, 1783, and
Sparks's _Life of Ledyard_, Cambridge, 1829.
{263}