de
mess enough of his own expedition to go down to posterity as a failure.
Some of the officers ran to get Ledyard a present of clothes and money.
As he jumped into the waiting sledge and looked back over his shoulder
at the group of faces smiling in the lighted doorway, he burst into a
laugh, but it was the laugh of an embittered man, whose life had
crumbled to ruin at one blow. The Cossacks whipped up the horses, and
he was off on the long trail back, five thousand miles, every mile a
sign post of blasted hopes. Without a word of explanation or the
semblance of a trial on the false charge, he was banished out of St.
Petersburg on pain of death if he returned.

Ragged, destitute, the best years of his life gone, he reached London,
heartbroken. "I give up," he told the English friends, who had backed
him with money, and what was better than money--faith. "I give up,"
{262} he wrote Jefferson, who afterward had Lewis and Clark carry out
Ledyard's plans.

The men of the African Geographical Society in London tried to cheer
him. When could he set out to explore the source of the Nile for them?

"To-morrow," answered Ledyard, with the heedlessness of one who has
lost grip on life. The salary advanced paid off the moss-grown debts
of his disappointed past, but he never reached the scene of his new
venture. He died on the way at Cairo, in November, 1788, for all hope
had already died in his heart. The world that has entered into the
heritage of his aims has forgotten Ledyard; for the public acclaims
only the heroes of success, and he was a hero of defeat. All that
Lewis and Clark succeeded in doing for the West, backed by the prestige
of government, Ledyard, the penniless soldier of fortune, had foreseen
and planned with Jefferson in the attic apartments of Paris.[3]

[1] The world owes all knowledge of Ledyard's intimate life to Jared
Sparks, who compiled his life of Ledyard from journals and
correspondence collected by Dr. Ledyard and Henry Seymour of Hartford.

[2] In Sauer's account of the Billings Expedition, some excuse is given
for the conduct of Billings on the ground that Ledyard had been
insolent to the Russians.

[3] Ledyard's _Journal of Cook's Last Voyage_, Hartford, 1783, and
Sparks's _Life of Ledyard_, Cambridge, 1829.

{263}

CHAPTER X

1779-1794

GEORGE VANCOUVER, LAST OF PACIFIC COAST EXPLORERS

Activities of Americans, Spanish, and Russians on the West Coast
of America arou