He arrives in London just as the African Society is casting about for a man to explore the interior of Africa. John calls on good Sir Joseph Banks who has so often been his kind and generous friend. Will Mr. Ledyard go to Africa? Yes. And when will he be ready to set out? “Tomorrow morning.” He reaches Cairo in August, and joins a caravan about to journey to Sennaar. “From Cairo I am to travel southwest about three hundred leagues to a black king.” Presently he is attacked by illness, he takes some fearful medicine of the time, shakes his head, and closes his eyes. The fair-haired lad in the sulky, the runaway undergraduate in the great canoe, the sailor, the corporal of marines and “the Great American Traveller” had gone on the longest of his travels.
Because the last years of John Ledyard’s life found him fighting on towards a goal he almost, yet never quite, attained, there are those who see him as a mere picturesque vagabond whose life had no genuine success. What a misinterpretation! The runaway Yankee lad had set out to see the world, and he had done so; indeed, John Ledyard had probably seen more of the vast world than any other being of his time. The vast loneliness of the sea which comes when twilight fades and night begins, blue, cloudy islands seen at dawn, the sounds of rushing brooks in the quiet of green valleys, strange folk making strange music under the moon,—all this he had hungered to see, all this he had seen. He had achieved his ambition in spite of every barrier, he had girdled the earth on a sixpence and a ha’penny.
Even love itself had not held him from his road. In his letters, there is just one little phrase ... “domestic life ... matters I have thought nothing about since I was in love with R. E. of Stonington.” Mysterious R. E., by her Connecticut fireside, did she think of John trudging on, face to the wind and snow, resolutely shaping a reality out of his ambition and his dream?
When Mr. Jefferson became president, he often thought of the man he had met in Paris,—the first American to see the northwest coast, the man who had talked to him of the pine-crowded islets, and the inland mountains white with snow. John Ledyard the forerunner. And Mr. Jefferson, bending to his desk, continues to write his precise and careful letter of guidance for Messrs. Lewis and Clark whom he is sending to explore the west. Ledyard. Yes, indeed! I knew him well. A valiant fellow, gentlemen.