Prologue

3

Under the gray roof of a wintry sky, two sloops furled their topgallant sails and bore towards land. The sailors stared at the deeply forested hills and snow-capped mountains in the distance and the streams in the foreground that cascaded through moss-covered cliffs into the sea.

Three times in this voyage, they had made landfall on unknown shores only to find no inhabitants, and however mighty the king and country under which they sailed, they still needed native people to supply food and water, advice about tides and shoals, and knowledge about what lay beyond the horizon.

"It was a matter of doubt with many of us whether we should find any inhabitants here," wrote John Ledyard, "but we had scarcely entered the inlet before we saw that hardy, that intrepid, that glorious creature man approaching us from the shore." As the sailors drew closer, they also smelled land. The breeze brought wet soil, cedar, spruce, yew and woodsmoke to the sailors. It had been two months since they had walked on solid ground, and now they were about to land on the west coast of North America.

Native people usually gave the ships a tumultuous reception. Everywhere from Tonga to Tahiti to Hawaii, throngs of men and women swarmed onto the ships, climbed into the rigging, wandered below decks, gestured, laughed, stole, ate and even offered sex. On this day on this new shore, however, the natives gave a more formal welcome. More than thirty dugout canoes appeared. Each was forty or fifty feet long, made of cedar and carrying two or three dozen people. The Native Americans encircled the sloops, but not a single one could be persuaded to board.

Facing this restrained response, the mariners feared an attack and loaded their muskets. The natives instead performed a singular ceremony. One man stood upright in his canoe-a remarkable feat, considering the heavy western swell and his thin canoe-and gave an oration punctuated by the tossing of feathers and red ochre powder into the sea and the shaking of a wooden, pebble-filled rattle. He was "dressed like a harlequin in many-colored garments," wrote a sailor. "He changed these garments, holding different masks before his face, and went through all kinds of farcical acting." Reaching the heart of the ritual, he started to sing. The men on board the ships found the song astonishingly polished. According to the captain of the expedition, it was "a very agreeable air, with a degree of softness and melody which we could not have expected." His aria became a thundering anthem, as the entire procession joined in, everyone keeping time by lightly tapping their paddles on the sides of their canoes. The song resembled a chant, with each line ending, as the captain wrote, "in a loud and deep sigh uttered in such a manner as to have a very pleasing effect." The sailors, "greatly astonished at the exactness of their rhythm and the charm of their song," put down their guns and watched as these strange people, with painted faces, white powdered hair and fur-clad bodies, sang their way into something almost familiar. Their songs reminded one officer, the son of a highly regarded music critic, of a village church service: "What they sung was composed of a few notes, and wild as could have been expected, yet was solemn and in unison, and what I thought most extraordinary, they were all well in tune with each other. The words were at times given out by one man, as a parish clerk gives out the first line of a psalm." He added that "the halloo is a single note in which they all join, swelling it out in the middle and letting the sound die away. In a Calm with the hills around us, it had an effect infinitely superior to what might be imagined from any thing so simple."

Moved by this striking welcome, the sailors returned the favor. "We judg'd they might like our musick, & we orderd the Fife & drum to play a tune," wrote a lieutenant. The natives' reaction was as astonishing as their welcome had been. "These were the only people we had seen that ever paid the smallest attention to those or any of our musical Instruments, if we except the drum, & that only I supposed from its Noise & resemblance to their own drums; they Observd the Profoundest silence, & we were sorry that the Dark hind'red our seeing the effect of this musick on their coutenances." After the band stopped, the natives sang another song. In reply, the sailors added the French horn to their band and played a benedictory tune.

Night fell and the concert ended. The fleet of natives departed for the shore. Five canoes filled with unarmed men stayed and quietly circled the ships. The natives and sailors watched each other under the glimmering light of a nearly full moon. It was a cold night. "The Ther'[momete]r in the morning being 34," wrote the lieutenant, "the Decks & shore coverd with a hoar frost."

A day later, March 31, 1779, the two ships moved into a small cove in the tightly bound bay. Unfathomably deep, "far beyond the limits of European Geography," wrote one sailor, the bottom of the bay could not be reached by the ships' anchors. The mariners fastened hawser lines, both stern and bow, to trees on the shore. Under the watchful eye and helping hand of the natives, the sailors disembarked onto the tiny, rock-strewn beach. At that moment, John Ledyard became the first American citizen to touch the west coast of North America.

3

Tethered to old and new worlds, his ship moored on unknown shores, his eyes glimpsing vast sights, his ears hearing songs strange and beautiful, his hands grasping the hands of the native people of his homeland, John Ledyard that day changed the history of the United States.

Known as Ledyard the Traveler, John Ledyard inaugurated a tradition of Americans roaming the world's wild, unmapped regions.

He had the uncanny ability to appear in the most exciting places with the most amazing people of his time. He sailed with Captain James Cook on Cook's third voyage and wrote vividly of Cook's murder on a Hawaiian beach. He formed fur-trading companies with Robert Morris, the Philadelphian financier, and John Paul Jones, America's notorious sea captain. He helped launch the China trade and the Northwest fur trade, bringing the U.S. economy into the Pacific for the first time. He visited Egypt before Napoleon's invasion opened the country up to Western travelers. Sir Joseph Banks, the celebrated botanist, engaged Ledyard as the first explorer for his African Association, a society for which such legends as Mungo Park and Johann Burckhardt later traveled. He delighted Paris's pre-revolutionary expatriate society in the 1780s, becoming close friends with the Marquis de Lafayette and the U.S. ambassador, Thomas Jefferson. He so thoroughly convinced Jefferson of the need to explore the American continent that Jefferson asked him to do the job twenty years before Lewis & Clark. The plan called for Ledyard to go overland through Russia, cross at the Bering Strait and head south through Alaska and across the American West to Virginia. This expedition failed after fifteen months of traveling when Catherine the Great had him arrested in eastern Siberia, but Ledyard's trip across Russia was historic: it was one of the three failed attempts that preceded the Lewis & Clark expedition and one of the first known attempts by a person to walk around the world.

With his magnetism, resourcefulness, unbridled imagination and rare ability to endure hardship, Ledyard epitomized the bold new American republic. He used a capacious intellect to theorize about his travels, regularly debunking the beliefs of the day. He published a classic memoir of Cook's fatal expedition, his 1783 Journal of Captain Cook's Last Voyage, a book famous for being the sole account that blamed Cook as much as the islanders for his death on a Hawaiian beach in 1779. His focus was not on landscape but the people in it. His letters and journals sparkled with descriptions of customs and habits. He compiled lists of vocabularies of various languages in hopes of unraveling the mysteries of migration. Almost alone among travelers of his age, he wrote from the viewpoint of indigenous men and women.

An early version of Ernest Shackleton, Ledyard brimmed with courage but failed at his appointed tasks. He was incurably restless and hot tempered. He left Dartmouth at the end of his freshman year. An eldest son, he abandoned his widowed mother and six siblings, leaving them without support. He deserted from the British navy. He did not fulfill his goal of setting up a fur-trading company in the Pacific Northwest, he did not cross the American continent and he did not reach the source of the Niger. He courted women on three continents but never married. He did not have a job for the last six years of his life, living off the largesse of friends. He got into fistfights in London, started a shoving match in Tonga and challenged a Siberian provincial governor to a duel.

Despite his impulsive, elusive personality, Ledyard created a lasting legacy. He was more than a footnote to the Lewis & Clark expedition or the China trade, more than a curious American artifact on the Cook voyages or an also-ran in the annals of European exploration in Africa. As the first American to report on exactly where North America ended, he generated a continental dream. Like the photographs of earth the astronauts brought back in the 1960s, Ledyard's writings changed how America viewed itself. The United States was not a baker's dozen of struggling British colonies on the eastern seaboard, but one nation, immense and inevitably stretching coast to coast.

Fame not fortune was his shibboleth. He was well educated and well connected and shamelessly courted the rich and powerful to make a name for himself. He viewed his 1783 Journal largely as a marketing tool. Like any modern professional explorer, he constantly looked for sponsorship and spent more time courting donors than actually exploring.

In his lifetime he became a legendary figure. When he died newspapers across America and Europe published his obituary and he was mourned around the world. His public moniker-Ledyard the Traveler-was suffused with a romantic tinge because he had lived up to his well-tended reputation. He supped with cannibals and kings. He sailed the South Seas and became the first American to return to the country with a Tahitian tattoo. He touched at fabled cities like Cape Town, Cairo, and St. Petersburg and lands like Hawaii and Alaska that would one day remember him as the first American to step on their soil. He had astounding adventures-paddling the Connecticut River in a dugout canoe and hiking through Lapland in the dead of winter-but he always looked toward the next challenge.

While he was a patriotic American and loved "the Genius of my noble country," he also articulated an early manifesto for a boundary-less, global citizenship: "For no State's, no Monarch's Minister am I, but travel under the common flag of humanity, commissioned by myself to serve the world at large." Such was his faith in native peoples that for his attempt to circumambulate the globe he outfitted himself with just two dogs for company, an axe to cut firewood, and a peace pipe to make friends.

He completed the prerequisites for enduring fame by dying young on the trail towards further glory. When he succumbed to a combination of dysentery and exhaustion along the banks of the Nile in January 1789, John Ledyard became immortalized as America's first great explorer.