John Ledyard's Insatiable Wanderlust

By Kale S. Bongers | Friday, April 22, 2005

BOOK REVIEW

American Traveler: The Life and Adventures of John Ledyard
James Zug '91
Basic Books, 2005

If not for Robert Frost, John Ledyard 1776, America's first great explorer, would likely reign as Dartmouth's most storied dropout. In some ways, Ledyard may still bear the distinction—though Frost may carry the standard for post-departure fame, no one can match the flair of Ledyard's dramatic exit from higher education. After a series of freshman year clashes with no less a figure than Eleazar Wheelock himself, Ledyard famously fashioned a dugout canoe out of a downed tree and cast off into the Connecticut River, bound 140 miles downriver for Hartford, Connecticut, and a "seven year's ramble" that lasted a good deal longer.

Ledyard, unlike Frost, never returned to Dartmouth, though his name still dots the Hanover landscape. The College could not contain Ledyard. Indeed, nothing could; Ledyard could not bear to remain anywhere. He was forever journeying onward, stopping only for death at age of thirty-seven on the banks of the Nile. He lived his 37-year life at a frenetic pace, more fully than many could in 80 or 90 years.

Ledyard was in some ways the quintessential early American: restless, ingenious, fiercely independent, and insatiably longing to see what lay over the next hill or beyond the horizon; he had what Dartmouth classmate John Sherburne called a "high unbending spirit," ill-prone to slight or boredom. Yet, in other ways, Ledyard could not be so easily classified. Thomas Jefferson, himself hardly an intellectual slouch, called Ledyard "a man of genius;" pamphleteer Thomas Paine and noted botanist Sir Joseph Banks paid him similar compliments. For a man of his time, he was exceedingly well-read; not surprisingly, he was particularly fond of Cervantes's Don Quixote. Yet such traits do not adequately describe the unique niche Ledyard occupied. He was, in many ways, a sort of Forrest Gump figure for his generation: an idealistic, everyman wanderer, who, often through a good deal of luck, found himself swept up in the great events (and among the great people) of his times. He sailed around the world on the last voyage of Captain Cook, became the first American to see the Pacific coast, corresponded with such luminaries as Jefferson, Banks, and John Paul Jones, hobnobbed with the likes of Benjamin Franklin and the Marquis de Lafayette, and was arrested at the hands of agents of Catherine the Great in an attempt to travel across Russia. He was freewheeling and spontaneous, sometimes dangerously so. In the dead of winter in 1787, almost on a whim, he decided to trek through Sweden and Finland to get to St. Petersburg; he took only two dogs (both of which perished en route) as his traveling companions. New places, new people and new treks drove Ledyard; he forever sought to go farther and see more than anyone before him.

Given such an eventful life, it is easy to see why Ledyard captured the public imagination, inspiring homages from Melville and Thoreau, among others, even decades after his untimely demise. He was, throughout his life, a man more of a reaction to prevailing culture than a product of it, what we would call a man ahead of his time. Ledyard, though proud of America, traveled "under the common flag of humanity," was an early advocate for the rights of the indigenous, and became one of the first professional explorers. Yet the details of Ledyard's life and his many unorthodoxies are not as important as what he represented. He was an unquenchable optimist, he was often short on details and planning, but long on dreams, the bearer of a nascent brand of American nationalism. In some ways, he was what Kipling described as his ideal man, one who could "talk with crowds and keep [his] virtue" and also "walk with kings—nor lose the common touch." Ledyard was equally at home among the American elite in Paris and among the Siberian natives he came to admire. A strange chameleon, he gaily fit into almost any situation.

Readers will appreciate Ledyard's distinctly American self-confidence, stubbornness, and bravery bordering on audacity, and will likely find themselves cheering the man on despite his many, all-too-human flaws: arrogance, dandyism, a thirst for fame, and a penchant for native women, to name but a few. His successes were few, his failures many: he failed to start an American fur trading company on the Pacific Coast, deserted the British navy when it suited him, never walked around the world, and died before completing his African trek. Yet despite his often spectacular disappointments, one cannot help but be impressed by his vision and the unswerving optimism (even innocence) he carried with him to the end.

James Zug '91 faced a difficult task in fitting this free spirit into a biography, yet he succeeds masterfully. American Traveler is a first-rate tale, which achieves that rarest biographical accomplishment—it allows the readers to catch its subject's dreams. Ledyard's tale is told gleefully, in a way befitting his unique persona. In Zug's recounting, the adventurer's story is told succinctly, much like a travel diary, ever focusing on the journey at hand and Ledyard's overarching dream rather than lapsing into unnecessarily flowery accolades of prose. Zug successfully makes Ledyard understandable to modern-day readers, and does so unobtrusively, through inflation-adjusted monetary sums and the application of modern medical diagnoses. Zug doesn't intend to distort or embellish Ledyard's importance, but rather is content to stoke the coals of memory in the hope that a flame will rise.

John Ledyard was the archetypical American explorer ever in search of the new frontier. In thinking of him today, one realizes just how fully he embodied, perhaps more than anyone, what it meant (and still means) to be an American. Still, readers can be glad that he isn't alive today—no doubt he'd be lost without some mysterious wilderness to turn to, disappointed with a world that's been mapped, imaged and contoured to the point of sterilization. Indeed, Ledyard would likely claim, as did Aldo Leopold, that all freedoms are useless without some uncharted country in which to use them. We nevertheless may be grateful that John Ledyard walked the earth when he did—perhaps, if only in this regard, he was not ahead of his time, but exactly where he was supposed to be.

John Ledyard's Insatiable Wanderlust

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