Called a "man of genius" by his close friend Thomas Jefferson, John Ledyard led, by any standard, a remarkable life. Between his birth to a sea captain's family in Connecticut in 1751 and his death along the Nile in Cairo in 1789, he became the original American explorer. Abandoning his studies at Dartmouth-then a fledgling school on the New England frontier-he carved a dugout canoe and paddled 140 miles down the Connecticut River. He sailed with Captain Cook on his third and last voyage, becoming the first American to see Alaska, Hawaii, and the Pacific Northwest. Twenty years before Lewis and Clark, he and Jefferson conceived the idea of walking around the world, including hiking across North America. Fifteen months into his around-the-world trek, he was arrested in deepest Siberia on the orders of Catherine the Great and escorted back to the Polish border. Ledyard formed fur-trading companies with John Paul Jones and Robert Morris, cadged money from Lafayette, persuaded Sir Joseph Banks's African Association to send him to find the source of the Niger River, and wrote a definitive account of the epic Cook voyage and Cook's infamous death in Hawaii. Combining rich scholarship-including newly discovered letters and official documents-with riveting storytelling, American Traveler conjures up the mad, romantic American adventurer in fabled cities with fascinating friends.

Whether skiing through Lapland in the dead of winter, basking in Tahiti's endless summer, or mingling with the brightest lights in Paris society, Ledyard blended the intellectual curiosity of the Enlightenment with a unique enthusiasm about other cultures. He was a Ben Franklin with wanderlust, an immensely influential man who traveled farther than any American before him and who pioneered a distinctly American archetype: the restless, visionary explorer.