He went first to New York, and walked up dusty stairs into counting houses and shipping offices. “Send a vessel to the northwest coast,” he said to those who would listen; “I have been to it with Captain Cook, it is a glorious, new land, and you may buy furs there for a song, and sell them in China at a great profit.” Shrewd eyes watched him as he sat talking, leaning forward on the edge of his chair; and the papers on which he had written his plans for an expedition crinkled between wary and unsympathetic hands. So this rolling stone wished to guide them to the beds of moss! One after another, his interviews ended in a scraping of chairs, a polite return of his papers, and the formality of bows at an opening door.
He had a better reception at Philadelphia, whither someone had sent him with a letter to the great banker, Robert Morris. “I have had two interviews with him at the Finance Office, and tomorrow I expect a conclusive one. What a noble hold he instantly took of the enterprise!” And later in the same letter, “Send me some money for Heaven’s sake, lest the laurel now suspended over the brows of your friend, should fall irrecoverably into the dust. Adieu.” John’s heart beats high, the dawn of fortune seems at hand, the eastern sky is gay. He goes to Boston, to New London, and to New York in search of a suitable ship, but all in vain, and as he searches, the season becomes too far advanced to think of prosecuting the northwest voyage; and presently the false dawn fades, Mr. Morris withdraws from the venture, and John finds himself in New London once again.
It was clear that he could hope for nothing from the merchants of the United States. “The flame of enterprise I kindled in America,” he wrote, “terminated in a flash.... Perseverance was an effort of understanding which twelve rich merchants were incapable of making.” His exasperation was natural enough, yet in justice to the American ship owner of the time, the economic disorder and poverty of the country should be noted, as well as the fact the owners were being asked to send a long and costly expedition round the Horn on the word of a solitary enthusiast. Would European merchants listen? The winter of 1784-85 found John at the great French port of L’Orient, living on a subsidy granted him by merchants interested in his scheme, but once again hope rose and perished like the seed upon thin ground.
From L’Orient he went to Paris, the Paris of 1785, the Paris of the Bastile, the great nobles, the philosophers of universal benevolence, and the usual Parisian miscellany of the world’s most artful and distinguished knaves. Into this picturesque world, so soon and so terribly to be rent apart, stepped the new adventurer, Mr. Ledyard the American traveller! He was practically penniless, yet he managed to subsist in a modest manner. “You wonder by what means I exist, having brought with me to Paris, this time twelve months, only three louis d’ors. Ask vice-consuls, consuls, ministers, and plenipotentiaries, all of whom have been tributary to me. You think I joke. No, upon my honour, and however irreconcilable to my temper, disposition and education, it is nevertheless strictly true.” He lived in a room in the village of St. Germain, and went to Paris afoot, a distance of some twelve miles. Other American adventurers were there, of the type that have long haunted Paris. John had no illusions about them. “Such a set of moneyless villains,” he remarked, “have never appeared since the epoch of the happy villain Falstaff. I have but five French crowns in the world, Franks has not a sol, and the Fitz Hughs cannot get their tobacco money.”
While in Paris, his dream of a trading voyage collapsed for the last time. Captain John Paul Jones listened to him, and fell in eagerly with his plans, but the necessary money could not be raised, and so ended the tale.
Poor as he is, Ledyard is still a personage, and walks boldly with the great. Lafayette befriends him. “If I find in my travels a mountain,” said John, “as much elevated above other mountains as he is above ordinary men, I will name it Lafayette.” He goes to breakfast at the house of the first American minister to France, and sees at the head of the table a tall angular man neatly and soberly dressed in black, a tall man with a bony but strong frame, angular features, light hazel eyes and sandy-reddish hair, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia. What a table it is,—French abbés and philosopher nobles, learned bigwigs of the day, visiting Americans, diplomats, and John Ledyard with the backs of both hands tattooed with the scrolls of Polynesia! John finds a sympathetic hearer in his host, for the great Virginian has a civilized man’s interest in scientific exploration and a patriotic American’s interest in American discovery. They stroll after breakfast, the statesman and the vagabond, and presently the minister suggests to his companion a voyage that fires his guest’s imagination even as the name of Captain Cook had kindled it just ten years before.
“I suggested to him,” runs the Virginian’s letter, “the enterprise of exploring the western part of our continent, by passing through St. Petersburg to Kamchatka, and procuring a passage thence in some of the Russian vessels to Nootka Sound,[1] whence he might make his way across the continent, and I undertook to have the permission of the Empress of Russia solicited.”
John listens, and listening, becomes once more the vagabond who ran away to see the world; then and there, the man flings off the disappointed trader. “He eagerly embraced the proposition,” wrote Jefferson. Yes, he will attempt just this thing, cross Europe and Asia, take ship to the northwest coast, and cross the wide American continent to Virginia. Did ever a man make such a resolve, and that man a penniless vagabond? Is it not genuinely so mad as to be magnificent?
“I die with anxiety,” he now wrote to a brother, “to be on the back of the American States, after having either come from or penetrated to the Pacific Ocean. There is an extensive field for the acquirement of honest fame.... It was necessary that a European should discover the existence of that continent, but in the name of Amor Patriae, let a native explore its resources and boundaries. It is my wish to be the man!”
Now came a false start from London, his last delay. “The great American traveller” sits writing at a table in his humble London lodging, perhaps again a room in Sailor Town. “I am still the slave of fortune and the son of care,” he writes later to his brother. “I think my last letter informed you that I was absolutely embarked on a ship in the Thames, bound to the northwest coast of America. This will inform you that I have disembarked from the said ship, on account of her having been unfortunately seized by the custom house ... and that I am obliged in consequence to alter my route, and, in short, everything, all my little baggage, shield, buckler, lance, dogs, squire, and all gone. I only am left, left to what?”