He counts his money, a familiar trick with him, shakes the clinking coins in his palm, arranges them in a row on the table, and finds he still has a few guineas left of the sum generously given him by Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, and certain other English gentlemen interested in the advance of geographic knowledge. He adds two final phrases to his letter before he seals it, and sends it off across the sea.
“I will only add that I am going in a few days to make a tour of the globe from London east on foot. Farewell. Fortitude! Adieu.”
It is the month of December, 1786, and from London, lost in smoky winter mist, the tall Yankee vagabond passes unperceived to dull Hamburg on the muddy Elbe, and thence to Copenhagen, and Stockholm of the Swedes. The fair-haired Northmen stare at a thin stranger with outlandish marks on his hands, who asks the way to Russian St. Petersburg. The winter route to Russia, they tell him, lies across the frozen gulf of Bothnia, the sledges strike off from Stockholm, and speed east over the ice to Abo, only fifty miles on the opposite shore; but this year the gulf is not solidly frozen, the ice is broken in midchannel; the horses cannot pass, and tremble, and turn about, and overturn their sleighs;—the traveller will have to wait till the spring frees the gulf of ice, and allows a boat to pass.
The words fall on the ear of a wanderer who will not wait. John Ledyard knows that he must reach St. Petersburg early in the spring, if he is to cross the Siberian wastes in the summer of this same year. A small delay means a year’s delay. Rather than wait or return, he will walk the fifteen hundred miles round the frozen sea. It is the very heart of winter, and the vagabond’s path will lead him north through Sweden into arctic Lapland, and south and east through the vast forests of Finland, now trackless in the depth of the snows. John Ledyard has no maps, no money, and no knowledge of the languages along his road.
Late in the month of January, 1787, a tall man wrapped in an English great coat trudges north from Stockholm into the grim wilderness of snow. To his right lies the great snow-covered plain of the frozen gulf, sweeping as far as eye can see to the level rim of the world; to the left is a broken country of hills and valleys covered with thick forests of birch and pine and fir, and channelled with frozen rivers running from the mountains to the frozen gulf. The winter wind howls north along the ice, gathering together great dunes of snow; there are crackings and boomings of the ice in the fitful silences. So thick lies the snow upon the pines, that not even one green twig protrudes from the huge, sagging pyramids. John Ledyard trudges on under the short-lived and sullen day of these high latitudes; the low sun casts his long shadow behind him on his broken footprints in the snow. In the clear green twilight, guided, perhaps, by the distant barking of a dog, he wanders from the way to some peasant’s snow-topped hut, and sups on bread, milk and salt herring with kind hosts gathered at the fire. He reaches Tornea in Lapland, turns south and east through the lakes and woods of Finland, and presently the giant sentries at St. Petersburg see John Ledyard trudging into town.
He reaches St. Petersburg before the twentieth of March. This unparalleled journey had taken him seven weeks, and he had managed to cover during each week a distance of some two hundred miles. He left no record of how he accomplished the journey—save to write in a letter these words “Upon the whole, mankind have used me well.”
“I had a letter from Ledyard lately dated at St. Petersburg,” said Jefferson. “He had but two shirts, and still more shirts than shillings. Still he was determined to obtain the palm of being the first circumnambulator of the earth. He says that having no money they kick him from place to place, and thus he expects to be kicked about the globe.”
The rest of the story is soon told. He obtained some kind of a passport from the Russian authorities, and began his journey to Siberia in the train of one Dr. William Brown, a Scotch physician in the employment of the Empress Catharine. With Brown he went three thousand miles to Barnaoul in the province of Kolyvan. From this city he made his way to Irkutsk—“going with the courier,” he wrote, “and driving with wild Tartar horses, at a most rapid rate, over a wild and ragged country, breaking and upsetting kibitkas[2], beswarmed with mosquitoes, all the way hard rains, and when I arrived in Irkutsk I was, and had been for the last forty-eight hours, wet through and through, and covered with one complete mass of mud.” From Irkutsk he joined an expedition going down the Lena, and alighted at Yakutsk, only some six hundred miles from the Pacific coast he sought. It was the eighteenth of September. Imagine his dismay when the Governor informed him that the winter was so close at hand, that he must not expect to gain Ohkotsk that year. “Fortune,” exclaimed John, with his trick of play book style, “thou hast humbled me at last, for I am at this moment the slave of cowardly solicitude lest in the heart of this dread winter, there lurk the seeds of disappointment to my ardent desire of gaining the opposite continent.” Not knowing what to do he joined a scientific expedition in charge of one “Captain” Billings, a fellow veteran of Cook’s third voyage, and returned with his former shipmate to Irkutsk.
Suddenly—terrible news! He is to be arrested on the absurd charge of being “a French spy,” and sent back to the frontier thousands of miles behind. The details of Ledyard’s arrest remain a mystery to this day, but there is little doubt that the underlying cause of it was Russian unwillingness to have a citizen of the United States prowling about the Russian American claims. Something had happened; perhaps the imperial authorities had suddenly heard of Ledyard’s attempt to begin a rival fur-trade. Whatever the answer may be, John was handed over to the custody of a sergeant, and dragged back across Siberia and Russia with lunatic speed.
“I had penetrated,” said the poor fellow, “through Europe and Asia almost to the Pacific Ocean, but in the midst of my career I was arrested as a prisoner to the Empress of Russia.... I was banished from the empire, and conveyed to the frontiers of Poland, six thousand versts from the place where I was arrested. I know not how I passed through the kingdoms of Poland and Prussia or thence to London where I arrived in the beginning of May, disappointed, ragged, penniless....”