wild attempt to cross Siberia and America alone appealed to the
English. Half a dozen men, friends of Cook, took the venture up, and
Ledyard found himself in the odd position of being offered a boat by
the country whose navy he had deserted. Perhaps because of that
desertion all news of the project was kept very quiet. A small ship
had slipped down the Thames for equipments, when the government got
wind of it. Whether the great Hudson's Bay Company of England opposed
the expedition as intrusion on its fur preserve, or the English
government objected to an American conducting the exploration for the
expansion of American territory, the ship was ordered back, and Ledyard
was in no position to confront the English authorities. Again he was
checkmated, and fell back on Jefferson's plan to cross the two Siberias
on foot, and chance it over {257} the Pacific. His friends in London
gathered enough money to pay his way to St. Petersburg.

January of 1787 saw him in Sweden seeking passage across the Baltic.
Usually the trip to St. Petersburg was made by dog sleighs across the
ice. This year the season had been so open, neither boats nor dog
trains could be hired to make the trip. Ledyard was now thirty-six
years old, and the sum of his efforts totalled to a zero. The first
twenty-five years of his life he had wasted trying to fit his life to
other men's patterns. The last five years he had wasted waiting for
other men to act, men in New York, in Philadelphia, in Paris, in
London, to give him a ship. He had done with waiting, with dependence
on others. When boats and dog trains failed him now, he muffled
himself in wolfskins to his neck, flung a knapsack on his back, and set
out in midwinter to tramp overland six hundred miles north to Tornea at
the head of the Baltic, six hundred miles south from Tornea, through
Finland to St. Petersburg. Snow fell continually. Storms raged in
from the sea. The little villages of northern Sweden and Finland were
buried in snow to the chimney-tops. Wherever he happened to be at
nightfall, he knocked at the door of a fisherman's hut. Wherever he
was taken in, he slept, whether on the bare floor before the hearth, or
among the dogs of the outhouses, or in the hay-lofts of the cattle
sheds. No more waiting for Ledyard! Storm or shine, early and late,
he {258} tramped two hundred miles a week for seven weeks from the time
he left Stockholm. When he marched into St. Petersburg on