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A Journal of Captain Cook's Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, and in Quest of a North-West Passage Between Asia & America, Performed in the Years 1776, 1777, 1778, and 1779

The American explorer and adventurer John Ledyard was born in Groton, Connecticut, in 1751. After studying briefly at Dartmouth College, he went to sea as a common sailor. He was forced to join the British Navy, and from June 1776 to October 1780 was a marine on Captain James Cook’s third voyage to the Pacific. This book recounts his observations of Alaska, Kamchatka, southern China, and the islands of the South Pacific. Ledyard later conceived of a plan to cross Russia, continue across the Bering Strait to Alaska, and eventually reach Virginia by traversing all of North America. He set out from St. Petersburg in June 1787 and made it as far as Irkutsk before he was arrested as a French spy and deported from Russia. He died in Cairo, aged 37, while attempting to organize an expedition across Africa from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. Ledyard was one of the first individuals to hypothesize that the aboriginal peoples of Asia and the Americas are closely related to each other.