In 1783 John Ledyard dedicated a book about his travels to Governor Trumbull, Connecticut’s Revolutionary War statesman. This seems odd. John served in the British Navy during the war, while his brother, William, for whom Col. Ledyard Highway and the town are named, was killed by the British at the Battle of Groton Heights. This is only one of many surprising facts about John.

John was born in 1751 in the Ledyard family home near Fort Griswold, worked briefly in his uncle’s law office, and then enrolled in Dartmouth to prepare for the ministry.

College wasn’t a happy experience. After a restless year spent annoying the faculty, John hollowed out a rough canoe and paddled down the Connecticut River from Hanover, New Hampshire, to Hartford. (Nearly 200 years later poet Robert Frost, another Dartmouth dropout, called John “the patron saint of runaway freshmen.”)

Following his “Great Escape,” John tried to establish a career. After failed attempts to secure a pastoral position and an unsatisfying stint as a merchant seaman, he sailed to England to enlist in the British Army. Four months later he transferred to the British Navy, but soon met Captain James Cook and it was at this point that John’s life really began.

John lobbied Cook to include him on an exploratory voyage commissioned by the British Admiralty to search for the Northwest Passage around North America. It was July 1776 and this would be Cook’s third and final expedition. The four-year journey touched on Tasmania, Tahiti, Hawaii, the coasts of Siberia and China, and the Pacific Coast of North America up to Alaska, where the attempt to find a waterway to the Atlantic was thwarted by an icebound Bering Strait. The expedition returned to England in 1780 without Cook who’d been killed in Hawaii.

John was an enthusiastic traveler with a keen eye, especially appreciative of the cultures of indigenous peoples. When he returned to Hartford in 1783 (after going AWOL from the British Navy), he wrote “A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean.” The book included an account of Capt. Cook’s death and sold like hotcakes.

By 1785 John was in Paris, socializing with Benjamin Franklin, the Marquis de Lafayette, and Thomas Jefferson. Encouraged by Jefferson and with some financial support from Lafayette, John developed a grand plan: cross Europe and Siberia, proceed south through Alaska, then trek east to Virginia. It was the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ahead of its time and on steroids.

John set out in 1787. After 4,000 punishing miles enduring heat, cold, and floods, he was deep into Siberia when he was arrested on the orders of Catherine the Great, who thought he was spying on the Russian fur monopoly. He was returned to Moscow and deported to Poland. Although his adventure came to a disappointing end, John had seen and learned a lot, and his letters during that journey reflect a respectful view of the ethnically diverse people of the Russian Empire.

Undaunted and as exuberant as ever, John made his way to London where he met a group of men who’d formed the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa. John was selected (or more probably volunteered) for an expedition across Africa from the Red Sea to the Atlantic, but he died in Cairo, possibly as a result of accidental poisoning.

John is buried somewhere beside the Nile in a location lost to history. He was eulogized in Thomas Jefferson’s autobiography as “a man of genius, of some science, and of fearless courage and enterprise.”

John, known as “Ledyard the Traveler,” is remembered by a bridge across the Connecticut River, a bank in Hanover, and the Dartmouth canoe club. Next month we’ll explore the life of Samson Occom, the Mohegan minister who helped found Dartmouth College.

Carol Sommer of Waterford is a self-proclaimed history nut. She writes a monthly history column inspired by local street signs.