Читать книгу The Book of Gallant Vagabonds - Henry Beston - Страница 9

He went first to New York, and walked up dusty stairs into counting houses and shipping offices. “Send a vessel to the northwest coast,” he said to those who would listen; “I have been to it with Captain Cook, it is a glorious, new land, and you may buy furs there for a song, and sell them in China at a great profit.” Shrewd eyes watched him as he sat talking, leaning forward on the edge of his chair; and the papers on which he had written his plans for an expedition crinkled between wary and unsympathetic hands. So this rolling stone wished to guide them to the beds of moss! One after another, his interviews ended in a scraping of chairs, a polite return of his papers, and the formality of bows at an opening door.

He had a better reception at Philadelphia, whither someone had sent him with a letter to the great banker, Robert Morris. “I have had two interviews with him at the Finance Office, and tomorrow I expect a conclusive one. What a noble hold he instantly took of the enterprise!” And later in the same letter, “Send me some money for Heaven’s sake, lest the laurel now suspended over the brows of your friend, should fall irrecoverably into the dust. Adieu.” John’s heart beats high, the dawn of fortune seems at hand, the eastern sky is gay. He goes to Boston, to New London, and to New York in search of a suitable ship, but all in vain, and as he searches, the season becomes too far advanced to think of prosecuting the northwest voyage; and presently the false dawn fades, Mr. Morris withdraws from the venture, and John finds himself in New London once again.

It was clear that he could hope for nothing from the merchants of the United States. “The flame of enterprise I kindled in America,” he wrote, “terminated in a flash.... Perseverance was an effort of understanding which twelve rich merchants were incapable of making.” His exasperation was natural enough, yet in justice to the American ship owner of the time, the economic disorder and poverty of the country should be noted, as well as the fact the owners were being asked to send a long and costly expedition round the Horn on the word of a solitary enthusiast. Would European merchants listen? The winter of 1784-85 found John at the great French port of L’Orient, living on a subsidy granted him by merchants interested in his scheme, but once again hope rose and perished like the seed upon thin ground.

From L’Orient he went to Paris, the Paris of 1785, the Paris of the Bastile, the great nobles, the philosophers of universal benevolence, and the usual Parisian miscellany of the world’s most artful and distinguished knaves. Into this picturesque world, so soon and so terribly to be rent apart, stepped the new adventurer, Mr. Ledyard the American traveller! He was practically penniless, yet he managed to subsist in a modest manner. “You wonder by what means I exist, having brought with me to Paris, this time twelve months, only three louis d’ors. Ask vice-consuls, consuls, ministers, and plenipotentiaries, all of whom have been tributary to me. You think I joke. No, upon my honour, and however irreconcilable to my temper, disposition and education, it is nevertheless strictly true.” He lived in a room in the village of St. Germain, and went to Paris afoot, a distance of some twelve miles. Other American adventurers were there, of the type that have long haunted Paris. John had no illusions about them. “Such a set of moneyless villains,” he remarked, “have never appeared since the epoch of the happy villain Falstaff. I have but five French crowns in the world, Franks has not a sol, and the Fitz Hughs cannot get their tobacco money.”

While in Paris, his dream of a trading voyage collapsed for the last time. Captain John Paul Jones listened to him, and fell in eagerly with his plans, but the necessary money could not be raised, and so ended the tale.

Poor as he is, Ledyard is still a personage, and walks boldly with the great. Lafayette befriends him. “If I find in my travels a mountain,” said John, “as much elevated above other mountains as he is above ordinary men, I will name it Lafayette.” He goes to breakfast at the house of the first American minister to France, and sees at the head of the table a tall angular man neatly and soberly dressed in black, a tall man with a bony but strong frame, angular features, light hazel eyes and sandy-reddish hair, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia. What a table it is,—French abbés and philosopher nobles, learned bigwigs of the day, visiting Americans, diplomats, and John Ledyard with the backs of both hands tattooed with the scrolls of Polynesia! John finds a sympathetic hearer in his host, for the great Virginian has a civilized man’s interest in scientific exploration and a patriotic American’s interest in American discovery. They stroll after breakfast, the statesman and the vagabond, and presently the minister suggests to his companion a voyage that fires his guest’s imagination even as the name of Captain Cook had kindled it just ten years before.

“I suggested to him,” runs the Virginian’s letter, “the enterprise of exploring the western part of our continent, by passing through St. Petersburg to Kamchatka, and procuring a passage thence in some of the Russian vessels to Nootka Sound,1 whence he might make his way across the continent, and I undertook to have the permission of the Empress of Russia solicited.”

John listens, and listening, becomes once more the vagabond who ran away to see the world; then and there, the man flings off the disappointed trader. “He eagerly embraced the proposition,” wrote Jefferson. Yes, he will attempt just this thing, cross Europe and Asia, take ship to the northwest coast, and cross the wide American continent to Virginia. Did ever a man make such a resolve, and that man a penniless vagabond? Is it not genuinely so mad as to be magnificent?

“I die with anxiety,” he now wrote to a brother, “to be on the back of the American States, after having either come from or penetrated to the Pacific Ocean. There is an extensive field for the acquirement of honest fame.... It was necessary that a European should discover the existence of that continent, but in the name of Amor Patriae, let a native explore its resources and boundaries. It is my wish to be the man!”

Now came a false start from London, his last delay. “The great American traveller” sits writing at a table in his humble London lodging, perhaps again a room in Sailor Town. “I am still the slave of fortune and the son of care,” he writes later to his brother. “I think my last letter informed you that I was absolutely embarked on a ship in the Thames, bound to the northwest coast of America. This will inform you that I have disembarked from the said ship, on account of her having been unfortunately seized by the custom house ... and that I am obliged in consequence to alter my route, and, in short, everything, all my little baggage, shield, buckler, lance, dogs, squire, and all gone. I only am left, left to what?”

He counts his money, a familiar trick with him, shakes the clinking coins in his palm, arranges them in a row on the table, and finds he still has a few guineas left of the sum generously given him by Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, and certain other English gentlemen interested in the advance of geographic knowledge. He adds two final phrases to his letter before he seals it, and sends it off across the sea.

“I will only add that I am going in a few days to make a tour of the globe from London east on foot. Farewell. Fortitude! Adieu.”

It is the month of December, 1786, and from London, lost in smoky winter mist, the tall Yankee vagabond passes unperceived to dull Hamburg on the muddy Elbe, and thence to Copenhagen, and Stockholm of the Swedes. The fair-haired Northmen stare at a thin stranger with outlandish marks on his hands, who asks the way to Russian St. Petersburg. The winter route to Russia, they tell him, lies across the frozen gulf of Bothnia, the sledges strike off from Stockholm, and speed east over the ice to Abo, only fifty miles on the opposite shore; but this year the gulf is not solidly frozen, the ice is broken in midchannel; the horses cannot pass, and tremble, and turn about, and overturn their sleighs;—the traveller will have to wait till the spring frees the gulf of ice, and allows a boat to pass.

The words fall on the ear of a wanderer who will not wait. John Ledyard knows that he must reach St. Petersburg early in the spring, if he is to cross the Siberian wastes in the summer of this same year. A small delay means a year’s delay. Rather than wait or return, he will walk the fifteen hundred miles round the frozen sea. It is the very heart of winter, and the vagabond’s path will lead him north through Sweden into arctic Lapland, and south and east through the vast forests of Finland, now trackless in the depth of the snows. John Ledyard has no maps, no money, and no knowledge of the languages along his road.

Late in the month of January, 1787, a tall man wrapped in an English great coat trudges north from Stockholm into the grim wilderness of snow. To his right lies the great snow-covered plain of the frozen gulf, sweeping as far as eye can see to the level rim of the world; to the left is a broken country of hills and valleys covered with thick forests of birch and pine and fir, and channelled with frozen rivers running from the mountains to the frozen gulf. The winter wind howls north along the ice, gathering together great dunes of snow; there are crackings and boomings of the ice in the fitful silences. So thick lies the snow upon the pines, that not even one green twig protrudes from the huge, sagging pyramids. John Ledyard trudges on under the short-lived and sullen day of these high latitudes; the low sun casts his long shadow behind him on his broken footprints in the snow. In the clear green twilight, guided, perhaps, by the distant barking of a dog, he wanders from the way to some peasant’s snow-topped hut, and sups on bread, milk and salt herring with kind hosts gathered at the fire. He reaches Tornea in Lapland, turns south and east through the lakes and woods of Finland, and presently the giant sentries at St. Petersburg see John Ledyard trudging into town.

He reaches St. Petersburg before the twentieth of March. This unparalleled journey had taken him seven weeks, and he had managed to cover during each week a distance of some two hundred miles. He left no record of how he accomplished the journey—save to write in a letter these words “Upon the whole, mankind have used me well.”

“I had a letter from Ledyard lately dated at St. Petersburg,” said Jefferson. “He had but two shirts, and still more shirts than shillings. Still he was determined to obtain the palm of being the first circumnambulator of the earth. He says that having no money they kick him from place to place, and thus he expects to be kicked about the globe.”

The rest of the story is soon told. He obtained some kind of a passport from the Russian authorities, and began his journey to Siberia in the train of one Dr. William Brown, a Scotch physician in the employment of the Empress Catharine. With Brown he went three thousand miles to Barnaoul in the province of Kolyvan. From this city he made his way to Irkutsk—“going with the courier,” he wrote, “and driving with wild Tartar horses, at a most rapid rate, over a wild and ragged country, breaking and upsetting kibitkas2, beswarmed with mosquitoes, all the way hard rains, and when I arrived in Irkutsk I was, and had been for the last forty-eight hours, wet through and through, and covered with one complete mass of mud.” From Irkutsk he joined an expedition going down the Lena, and alighted at Yakutsk, only some six hundred miles from the Pacific coast he sought. It was the eighteenth of September. Imagine his dismay when the Governor informed him that the winter was so close at hand, that he must not expect to gain Ohkotsk that year. “Fortune,” exclaimed John, with his trick of play book style, “thou hast humbled me at last, for I am at this moment the slave of cowardly solicitude lest in the heart of this dread winter, there lurk the seeds of disappointment to my ardent desire of gaining the opposite continent.” Not knowing what to do he joined a scientific expedition in charge of one “Captain” Billings, a fellow veteran of Cook’s third voyage, and returned with his former shipmate to Irkutsk.

Suddenly—terrible news! He is to be arrested on the absurd charge of being “a French spy,” and sent back to the frontier thousands of miles behind. The details of Ledyard’s arrest remain a mystery to this day, but there is little doubt that the underlying cause of it was Russian unwillingness to have a citizen of the United States prowling about the Russian American claims. Something had happened; perhaps the imperial authorities had suddenly heard of Ledyard’s attempt to begin a rival fur-trade. Whatever the answer may be, John was handed over to the custody of a sergeant, and dragged back across Siberia and Russia with lunatic speed.

“I had penetrated,” said the poor fellow, “through Europe and Asia almost to the Pacific Ocean, but in the midst of my career I was arrested as a prisoner to the Empress of Russia.... I was banished from the empire, and conveyed to the frontiers of Poland, six thousand versts from the place where I was arrested. I know not how I passed through the kingdoms of Poland and Prussia or thence to London where I arrived in the beginning of May, disappointed, ragged, penniless....”

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.