The Last Voyage of Captain Cook
By James Zug
Called “a man of genius,” by Thomas Jefferson, John Ledyard was the first great American explorer. Ledyard (1751-1789) was a native of Groton, Connecticut. He fled Dartmouth College by canoe after his freshman year. After being pressganged into the British Navy, Ledyard sailed on the Resolution on Captain James Cook’s final voyage. During the epic, four-year expedition, Ledyard got a tattoo in Tahiti, venereal...
Called “a man of genius,” by Thomas Jefferson, John Ledyard was the first great American explorer. Ledyard (1751-1789) was a native of Groton, Connecticut. He fled Dartmouth College by canoe after his freshman year. After being pressganged into the British Navy, Ledyard sailed on the Resolution on Captain James Cook’s final voyage. During the epic, four-year expedition, Ledyard got a tattoo in Tahiti, venereal disease in Tonga, attempted to climb Mauna Loa in Hawaii and made a five-day solo hiking and kayaking tour of the Aleutians. By virtue of his presence on the Resolution, Ledyard became the first American citizen to see the west coast of North America, Alaska and Hawaii. His memoir of the Cook voyage was a bestseller after it was published in 1783. It was the only one written by an American and the only account of the third voyage that blamed Cook’s death not on the Hawaiian islanders but on Cook himself.
After his return Ledyard formed fur-trading companies with Robert Morris and John Paul Jones and became lifelong friends with Thomas Jefferson, Marquis de Lafayette and Sir Joseph Banks. Ledyard concocted the plan of walking around the world outfitted with two dogs for company, an axe to cut firewood and a peace pipe with which to make friends. He traveled from London through Europe—including a dangerous, solo, mid-winter trek in Lapland—and across Russia in an amazing, fifteen-month trip that ended when Catherine the Great arrested him in far eastern Siberia. He died in Cairo at the age of thirty-seven on his way to find the source of the Niger River.
Combining rich scholarship—including previously unknown documents—and riveting storytelling, American Traveler was the first new biography of John Ledyard in sixty years. It was published in April 2005 by Basic Books and was a May selection for the History Book Club. It was also named an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Book Review.
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Kirkus Reviews
“A fast-paced account of America’s first great explorer. John Ledyard was born in 1751 in Connecticut, died in Cairo, and traveled almost everywhere else imaginable in the intervening thirty-seven years. The heart of journalist Zug’s bio details Ledyard’s travels, of course, but the author is to be commended for paying scrupulous attention to Ledyard’s early life as well. In the opening chapter, on Ledyard’s childhood, Zug (Squash, 2003, etc.) manages to give a real flavor of colonial life: in just nine pages, we get religion, children’s games, family networks, and romance. Chapter two, chronicling Ledyard’s brief stint at Dartmouth, begins to suggest Ledyard’s temperament. In college, Ledyard read Virgil, directed a play, and went backpacking on what would one day be the Appalachian Trail. But the highlight of his academic career was his exit—after only one year, Ledyard simply took off, running the Connecticut River in a canoe and winding up back at his grandfather’s farm in Hartford. At loose ends, the young man decided to travel—”I allot myself a seven year’s ramble more,” he wrote to a cousin. This “ramble” turned out to be more than postcollege aimlessness; it was a vocation. Zug chronicles the travels, which took Ledyard to the Sandwich Islands with Captain Cook and along the Alaskan coast to look for the Northwest Passage. He spent time in Lapland, St. Petersburg, and Paris, where he was virtually adopted by Thomas Jefferson. The character that emerges is a complicated one: Ledyard was sometimes manic and sometiems overwhelmed by despair; he was a rough explorer, but he loved clothes (in all his letters he described his wardrobe before saying anything about his itinerary or adventures). He was courageous and sociable, but a loner. And he wanted to be famous. Thanks to Zug’s fascinating re-creation of his adventuring, Ledyard is well on his way.
Your average bear has never heard of Ledyard, true enough, but this brisk biography should catch the Early-America-Founding-Fathers craze.”
— Kirkus Reviews, 15 January 2005