Again he was
checkmated, and fell back on Jefferson's plan to cross the two Siberias
on foot, and chance it over {257} the Pacific. His friends in London
gathered enough money to pay his way to St. Petersburg.
January of 1787 saw him in Sweden seeking passage across the Baltic.
Usually the trip to St. Petersburg was made by dog sleighs across the
ice. This year the season had been so open, neither boats nor dog
trains could be hired to make the trip. Ledyard was now thirty-six
years old, and the sum of his efforts totalled to a zero. The first
twenty-five years of his life he had wasted trying to fit his life to
other men's patterns. The last five years he had wasted waiting for
other men to act, men in New York, in Philadelphia, in Paris, in
London, to give him a ship. He had done with waiting, with dependence
on others. When boats and dog trains failed him now, he muffled
himself in wolfskins to his neck, flung a knapsack on his back, and set
out in midwinter to tramp overland six hundred miles north to Tornea at
the head of the Baltic, six hundred miles south from Tornea, through
Finland to St.
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