Restless wanderer's legend lives on

Although he died in 1789 at age 37 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Egypt, by many estimations John Ledyard qualifies as America's first explorer and travel writer.

Audacious, clever, resourceful, idealistic, impetuous, fiercely independent, a restless wanderer with a flair for the dramatic, this dashing Connecticut Yankee captured Colonial imaginations with his exploits, not to mention the admiration of such notables as Thomas Jefferson, John Paul Jones, Thomas Paine and the Marquis de Lafayette. Herman Melville referred to Ledyard in his novel "Moby-Dick," and Mark Twain lauded his spirit, prose and intellectual honesty.

In the 14 years between dropping out of college and his untimely demise, Ledyard's insatiable wanderlust led him to sail with Capt. James Cook around the Pacific, walk solo across Russia in the dead of winter and undertake an expedition to explore Africa.

And although history forgot him for more than a century, in the past decade, Ledyard has been rehabilitated, spawning three new biographies since 2005.

He was born in 1751 to a seafaring family from Groton, Conn. At age 21 in 1772, he was sent off to Dartmouth College, just two years after the Rev. Eleazer Wheelock established the institution in the New Hampshire wilderness. Mr. Ledyard arrived in Hanover with his typical elan, driving a two-wheeled carriage, but he quickly realized that the strictly regulated life was not for him. The following spring, he fled college. Fashioning a crude canoe from a log, Ledyard paddled 140 miles down the Connecticut River, making that waterway's first known descent by a white man. Ledyard found work on a ship hauling lumber to Gibraltar, where he eventually wormed his way into the British navy.

In July 1776, just as the nation of his birth was cutting its ties with Great Britain, Ledyard became a ship's marine on the Resolution for Captain Cook for his third voyage to the Pacific. During the voyage's attempt to find a sea passage around North America, Ledyard became the first American to see the continent's Pacific coast. Realizing the potential riches to be made in the fur trade, he determined that his fortune lay in developing an overland route across the continent.

When the voyage finally returned to England in 1780, Ledyard eventually made his way back to to Connecticut, where he wrote his account of the historic voyage during which Captain Cook had been killed. When his "Journal of Captain Cook's Last Voyage" was published in 1783, it was the first book protected by a U.S. copyright.

Ledyard already had moved on. He headed to Europe to find backers to establish a fur trade on the Pacific Coast. Arriving in Paris, he hooked up with John Paul Jones, Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson, then America's ambassador to France. Unable to secure backers, Ledyard instead determined to reach the Pacific by walking eastward across Russia, crossing to Alaska and pioneering a route across North America.

In 1786 he set out from London heading to Stockholm. From there he undertook a 1,200-mile trek around the Gulf of Bothnia in winter to Saint Petersburg, accompanied only by two dogs, both of whom died along the way.

Undeterred by his inability to secure permission from Czarina Catherine the Great, Ledyard set off to walk 3,500 miles across Siberia, a daunting expedition which he undertook entirely alone. He almost made it, stymied only when Catherine had him arrested the following year as a spy and eventually deported from her country.

Returning to London to discover that his book had earned him a degree of notoriety, Ledyard mounted an expedition to explore Africa's interior. But in Cairo, the weary world wanderer ran out of luck. Stricken by a digestive ailment, he tried to cure himself by swallowing sulfuric acid and tartar emetic. But he began vomiting so violently, he burst a blood vessel and died.

Although Ledyard eventually slipped into the back shelves of history, he remained a figure of adulation at Dartmouth, serving as the inspiration for its famous Outing Club.

In 2003, two Dartmouth juniors, Peter Bohler and Peter Brewitt, retraced Ledyard's 1787 trek from Stockholm to St. Petersburg.

Two years later, James Zug, a graduate of Dartmouth, published the first Ledyard biography in more than 150 years, "American Traveler: the Life and Adventures of John Ledyard, the Man who Dreamed of Walking the World" (by Basic Books).

Then last month "Ledyard -- In Search of the First American Traveler," written by another Dartmouth grad, Bill Gifford, was published by Harcourt. In July, Yale University Press will release "The Making of John Ledyard, Empire and Ambition in the Life of an Early American Traveler" by Edward G. Gray, of Florida State University.

Perhaps Ledyard anticipated this recent interest in him in a letter he wrote to his mother shortly before his death. "Born in obscure little Groton, formed by nature and education ... behold me the greatest traveller in history, exccentric (cq), irregular, rapid, unaccountable, curious and without vanity, majestic as a comet. I afford a new character to the world, and a new subject to biography."

In that, John Ledyard served as an early embodiment of the restless American spirit.