LEDYARD Ships

He's real, He's here, Ledyard lives! Amazon and Barnes & Noble are now shipping my book, Ledyard: In Search of the First American Explorer.

Nutshell: It's a biography of John Ledyard, who lived an extraordinary life in the late 18th century. After dropping out of Dartmouth by canoe (for which he remains legendary on that isolated campus), he sailed with Captain Cook on his third and fatal voyage, during which Ledyard became one of the first whites to set foot on the West Coast of North America. Later, in Paris, he befriended Thomas Jefferson, who was fascinated by his tales. Together they hatched a plan to cross the North American continent. Ledyard attempted the trek himself, but somehow got it in his head to travel east, across Siberia where he'd find a boat to take him over to Alaska, he hoped. No such luck: Catherine the Great had him arrested as a spy, which he probably was. He ended up dying in Cairo at the age of 37, vomiting to death in a convent.

Ledyard was more than just a headstrong adventurer; he was a spirited free-thinker, a man ahead of his time. "Little attentive to differences of rank," an English friend marveled, "he seemed to consider all men his equals." He mocked his Connecticut relatives' obsession with the virtue of celibacy, and as he traveled the world, he left no native woman unloved — if he could help it. His journal of Cook's voyage is notable because he fails to presume the superiority of Christian, western men to the "natives" they encountered. And a few months before he died, he left this pearl, which perhaps ought to be inscribed above the front door to the White House: "Methinks every Man who is called to preside officially over the Liberty of a free People should once—it will be enough—actually be deprived unjustly of his Liberty that he might be avaricious of it more than of any earthly possessions."

Why They Climb

I like to hike up mountains as much as -- more than -- the next guy, but something about actual mountaineering scares and awes me. Mainly the consequences. I don't like looking down between my feet and seeing, say, a village, a couple thousand feet down. Or a glacier where nobody will ever find my corpse. I'm not a huge fan of heights. Yet the people who climb mountains fascinate me; there was one guy, about my age, who worked with my father a long time ago. He was a cool dude, and a climber, always disappearing to scale peaks in the Andes or Wyoming, which is how he died, at age 37, leaving a beautiful opera-singer wife and a two-year-old son. Anyway, I thought of him as I read The Boys of Everest, Clint Willis' intriguing new book about British climbing pioneer and certifiable badass Chris Bonington and the climbers who followed him, often to their deaths. Read my Washington Post review here.