previous next

Ledyard, John 1751-

Explorer; born in Groton, Conn., in 1751; was educated at Dartmouth College for a missionary to the Indians, and spent several months among the Six Nations. Having a resistless desire for travel, he shipped at New London as a common sailor, and from England accompanied Captain Cook in his last voyage around the world as corporal of marines. He vainly tried to set on foot a trading expedition to the northwest coast of North America, and went to Europe in 1784. He started on a journey through the northern part of Europe and Asia and across Bering Strait to America in 1786-87. He walked around the whole coast of the Gulf of Bothnia, reaching St. Petersburg in the latter part of March, 1787, without money, shoes, or stockings. He had journeyed 1,400 miles on foot in less than seven weeks. Thence he went to Siberia, but was arrested at Irkutsk in February, 1788, conducted to the frontiers of Poland, and there dismissed with an intimation that if he returned into Russia he would be hanged. The cause of his arrest was the jealousy of the Russian-American Trading Company. Going back to London, Ledyard accepted an offer to engage in the exploration of the interior of Africa. He left England in June, 1788, and at Cairo, Egypt, was attacked by a disease which ended his life, Jan. 17, 1789.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)
hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
John Ledyard (2)
Lemuel Cook (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
1751 AD (2)
January 17th, 1789 AD (1)
June, 1788 AD (1)
February, 1788 AD (1)
March, 1787 AD (1)
1787 AD (1)
1786 AD (1)
1784 AD (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: