Eighteenth-century sailor and explorer John Ledyard was inspired with a spirit of adventure by his seaman uncle and father. He followed the call of the unknown from the Connecticut town of his birth in 1751, to the far reaches of the globe.

Young Ledyard braved trackless forests to recruit Indian students for the new college of Dartmouth, and sailed to Europe and North Africa as a youthful seaman. In 1776, he signed on as a corporal of Marines for the last voyage of the great Captain Cook, bound for the Pacific and the Northwest Passage. His four-year voyage on the Resolution took him from the balmy islands of the Pacific to the ice floe of the Arctic and the bustling ports of China.

Four years later, having survived the violence that killed Cook in the Hawaiian Islands, Ledyard dedicated his life to two ambitions: to learn the fascinating connection between the peoples of Asia, the Pacific and America and to develop the potentially enormous Alaskan fur trade. Before his mysterious death in the Egyptian desert, Ledyard's dream led him through the courts  of Europe, to the American wilderness and across the steppes of Russia.

Based on Ledyard's own writings, this is the insiring story of a daring explorer whose bold plan to cross the North American continent and whose vision of the possibilities of the Northwest were later proven by men who shared his dream of America's greatness.

From the dust jacket