Word: ledyard
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Snubbed in the will, Ledyard headed north to the new Dartmouth College, which was not yet two years old. The entire institution consisted of only three log cabins buried in the rustic Hanover, N.H., woods. (It’s not much more of a happening place today.) But Ledyard sought to spice up life at the Big Green. He nettled the college president with cheeky requests for fencing lessons, and he audaciously organized a camping trip through knee-deep snow in the middle of winter. During a mysterious two-and-a half-month disappearance, Ledyard somehow managed to spend...
This undignified departure closed the door on a ministerial career, but, as Zug rightly points out, Ledyard would never have lasted long in such a strict, ordered profession. He joined a sea voyage to England in 1775, deserted, and was pressed into service in the Royal Navy as the Revolutionary War loomed on the horizon. In 1776, Ledyard seized the chance to serve on the renowned Captain James Cook’s third expedition, which hoped to discover a Northwest Passage to link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans...
...island women would have sex for trinkets and clothes; when the ships reached the frigid Alaskan waters, some men had trouble staying warm in their few remaining clothes. Cook’s men infected the natives with devastating venereal diseases, which were transmitted back in a vicious cycle. Ledyard was infected. In Hawaii, the natives “aplly’d to us, for help in their great distress: they had a Clap, their Penis was much swell’d, & inflamed,” a lieutenant reported...
...Ledyard, the trip wasn’t entirely a failure. In Alaska, he encountered an outpost of Russian traders who introduced him to otter furs, which would become his own lifelong obsession. When the ships later sailed to China, Ledyard discovered that otter furs fetched a fortune?...
Cook’s two ships returned to England sans Cook, and Ledyard went back to his garrison. Feeling trapped in the rigid military, Ledyard deserted when his unit was stationed in Long Island for the Revolution. “Bound by the conventional and the ordinary, he would revolt,” Zug writes. Having quickly spent his navy pay, the poor Ledyard wrote a popular memoir of his voyage with Cook in an effort to drum up support among potential donors for a fur-trading expedition. Ledyard stirred up an interested group, but corruption abounded and Ledyard...