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REVIEWS
THE MAKING OF JOHN LEDYARD: EMPIRE AND AMBITION IN THE LIFE OF AN EARLY AMERICAN TRAVELER
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by Edward G. Gray
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| Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, 2007.Illustrations, maps, notes, index. 240 pages. $35.00 cloth. |
| This book explores the remarkable life of John Ledyard (1751–1789), who, from modest origins as the son of a Connecticut sea captain engaged in the perilous West Indies trade, became a well-connected traveler whose search for fame through adventure helped a fledgling American republic to define its place in the world. The book has a two-fold structure. On the one hand, it is a conventional academic biography, with Ledyard's story told chronologically in ten well-written and rigorously researched chapters that supersede other treatments of the traveler, including two recent biographies written for the commercial market. Edward Gray charts how, from age eleven (following his father's death), Ledyard was raised by the family patriarch, Squire John, and attended the newly established Dartmouth College, where he had a formative encounter with its Puritan work-study program. It was here that Ledyard also developed his taste for exploration, disappearing for a while into "Indian Country," and soon dropping out of college — in debt — to lead an itinerant life that took him to some far reaches of the earth. Along the way, he became acquainted with some of the most famous and powerful people of his age — Captain James Cook (Ledyard, as a marine, joining Cook's third voyage to the Pacific); Philadelphia merchant Robert Morris (to whom Ledyard looked for help in establishing a Pacific fur trade); members of American and French high society in Paris on the eve of the French Revolution (especially Thomas Jefferson, who described Ledyard as a man with a "roaming disposition" and encouraged him to attempt a mammoth solo trek across Russia and North America on foot); Joseph Banks (Britain's patron of science and exploration); and members of the African Association, under whose auspices Ledyard sought to find the direction of the Niger River, only to die en route, apparently after a violent rage (p. 125). |
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On the other hand, as Ledyard left only "a slight imprint on the historical record," Gray is forced to situate and interpret his life in more roundabout — anecdotal and synecdochical — ways (p. 7). In chapter 4, and partly to make up for the paucity of information about Ledyard's time with Cook, Gray makes a lively excursion into the role of journal-keeping in Enlightenment exploration and the bearing it has on how we read Ledyard's unauthorized account of Cook's voyage, published in 1783. And in chapter 9 (the best chapter of the book for me), Gray discusses how, at Yakutsk, in the frigid Siberian fringes of imperial Russia, Ledyard found his worldview (and especially the part that ideas of empire and class played in it) turned inside out by his encounter with a confusing multicultural world of luxury, riot, and excess. |
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This book will be of particular interest to scholars in the fields of early American history and North Atlantic studies, but it deserves a wider readership. Let me highlight just three of its many strengths. First, it underscores the importance of the idea of moral virtue (and related ideas of duty, equality, work, common sense, and human nature) in early American republicanism — particularly how this idea (or complex of ideas) emanated from overseas travel and a global outlook as well as from American soil and philosophical thought. Second, and perhaps most suggestively, Gray uses the theme of embodiment as an integrating framework for the book, demonstrating the significant bearing that physical appearance, bodily comportment, and the theatricality of action had on Ledyard's reading of social situations, written observations, and capacity for self re-invention. Gray provides the rudiments of what we might call an ethnomethodology of imperial travel, drawing out how, for Ledyard, the presentation of self in different places "demanded changes of costume" (p. 130). Ledyard traversing the wilds of Russia with the length of an English foot tattooed on his body so that he could determine latitude without having to carry astronomical gear, and thus without drawing attention to himself, is a particularly compelling vignette in this regard. And third, in portraying Ledyard not as a national hero or icon of Manifest Destiny but as a voyager whose life is a story of ambition and failure, Gray makes an important contribution to a growing international literature on imperial networks, which complicates and questions bounded and teleological models and narratives of nation, empire, and identity. While Gray concludes, perhaps rightly, by cautioning that "the project of creating empire was not the work of single-minded, heroic men," we should not downplay the ways and extent to which individuals like Ledyard — albeit through their immersion in networks of power and patronage —made meaningful connections between places, discourses, and practices (p. 193). The Making of John Ledyard was about the making of connections that helped to transform — how fully and directly can be debated — an older British Atlantic world into a new American age. |
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| Daniel Clayton
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| University of St. Andrews |
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