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.