| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Making of John Ledyard: Empire and Ambition in the Life of an Early American Traveler. By Edward G. Gray. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. xiv, 224 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-300-11055-5.)
A decade ago, when I first became aware of John Ledyard, a biography was badly needed; the last had been Jared Sparks's The Life of John Ledyard (1828). I was not alone: in the last few years, there have been three biographies and then some. The year 2005 saw James Zug's American Traveler and Zug's edition of Sparks's biography and Ledyard's journal. In 2007, two biographies were published: Bill Gifford's John Ledyard and the book under review, Edward G. Gray's The Making of John Ledyard. But there are differences: Zug and Gifford wrote for a commercial audience and Gray for an academic one. That said, Gifford's and Zug's books are far more entertaining, adventures set within the general context of a familiar late eighteenth-century North Atlantic world.	1
Gray, however, is more concerned with Ledyard's place within the burgeoning field of North Atlantic studies. Yet like Zug and Gifford, Gray traces Ledyard's peculiar childhood— his parents a mixture of gentility and parvenu seamen—in Long Island and Connecticut, his brief career at Dartmouth (including an odd wilderness sojourn), his experiences in the Revolution, and finally his trip to London where he joined James Cook. Typically, Gray wisely treats the texts coming out of Cook's voyages skeptically, engaging late eighteenth-century print culture in ways Zug and Gifford do not.	. . .

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