Ledyard was born in Groton, Connecticut, in November 1751. He was the first child of Abigail and Capt. John Ledyard. A day or so after the child was born Capt. John boarded his ship and sailed for the West Indies. Three years later Ledyard joined his grandfather in Hartford, Connecticut, where he attended school. His grandfather died just before Ledyard turned 20. Ledyard briefly attended Dartmouth College, arriving on 22 April 1772. He left for two months without permission in August and September of that year, led a mid-winter camping expedition, and finally abandoned the college for good in May 1773. Memorably, he fashioned his own dugout canoe, and paddled it for a week down the Connecticut River to his grandfather's farm. Today, the Ledyard Canoe Club, a division of the Dartmouth Outing Club, sponsors an annual canoe trip down the Connecticut River in his honor. At loose ends, he decided to travel; "I allot myself a seven year's ramble more," he wrote to a cousin. He shipped as a common seaman on a year-long trading voyage to Gibraltar, the Barbary Coast, and the Caribbean. On his next voyage, he jumped ship in England, but was soon impressed and forced to join the British Navy as a marine.
Captain Cook's third voyage
In June 1776, Ledyard joined Captain James Cook's third and final voyage as a British marine. The expedition lasted until October 1780. During these four years, its two ships stopped at the Sandwich Islands, Cape of Good Hope, the Prince Edward Islands off South Africa, the Kerguelen Islands, Tasmania, New Zealand, the Cook Islands, Tonga, Tahiti, and then Hawaii. It continued to the northwest coast of North America, making Ledyard perhaps the first U.S. citizen to touch its western coast, along the Aleutian islands and Alaska into the Bering Sea, and back to Hawaii where Cook was killed. He attempted to climb from Kealakekua Bay to Mokuaweoweo, the summit of Mauna Loa, but had to turn back. The return voyage touched upon Kamchatka, Macau, Batavia, around the Cape of Good Hope again, and back to England. Still a marine in the British Navy, Ledyard was sent to Canada to fight in the American Revolution. Instead he deserted, returned to Dartmouth, and began to write his Journal of Captain Cook's Last Voyage. It was published in 1783, five years after he had visited Hawaii, and was the first work to be protected by copyright in the United States. Today, this work is annotated in rare-book bibliographies as the first travelogue describing Hawaii ever to be published in America.
Fur trade
As Ledyard had noticed that sea otter furs from the American northwest commanded extremely high prices in Macau, he lobbied during the early 1780s for the formation of fur-trading companies. Ledyard suggested trading furs for Chinese silk and porcelain, which could then be sold in the United States. Although his partnership with Philadelphia financier Robert Morris was not successful, it did lay the pattern of the subsequent China trade. Ledyard left the United States in June 1784 to find financial backers in Europe. In Paris he partnered with John Paul Jones; however this venture, too, failed to reach fruition.
Back in London, Ledyard came across the African Association, then recruiting explorers for Africa. Ledyard proposed an expedition from the Red Sea to the Atlantic. He arrived in Alexandria in August 1788, but the expedition was slow to start. Late in November 1788, Ledyard accidentally poisoned himself with vitriolic acid and died in Cairo, Egypt on 10 January 1789. John Ledyard was buried in the sand dunes lining the Nile in a modestly marked grave, the location of which is unknown today.
