In his short life, John Ledyard saw more of the world than any other person of the 18th century. He sailed the seven seas and set foot on 6 continents. He sailed with Captain Cook, ran a fur-trading company with John Paul Jones and crossed Russian Siberia when it was still a vast expanse of white marked "unknown" on a map. With his capacious intellect, boundless imagination and sparkling, incisive prose, he made the traveling life seem glamorous. His tales of adventure captivated contemporaries like Thomas Jefferson and earned him the nickname "The American Marco Polo".
Featuring an introduction by his biographer, James Zug, this collection includes the journal from his voyage with Cook, his eye-witness account of Cook's murder on a Hawaiian beach (the only known account that blames Cook's death not on the Hawaiians but on Cook himself), dispatches from Siberia and the Barbary Coast and letters from nearly every point on the globe. The writings of this legendary explorer are the only edition in print, and have never-before been collected.
