ments of sleep and hunger." From Barnaoul, he proceeded to Irkutsk, riding post with the courier who carried the mail. He experienced much kindness, and made curious observations, on the way; but the expedition abounded in accidents and fatigues. He sojourned at Irkutsk about ten days. The journal which he prepared there is full of interesting remark and information. The statements and opinions of his biographer, in connexion with it, are also worthy of attention and praise. On the 28th of August, he quitted Irkutsk, in a kibitka, with "furious unbroke Tartar horses," that ran away with him ad libitum. We shall use the text of Mr. Sparks, in tracing him further as far as Yakutsk, unfortunately the limit of his journey:—

"In company with Lieutenant Laxman, a Swedish officer, Ledyard embarked on the river Lena, at a point one hundred and fifty miles distant from Irkutsk, with the intention of floating down its current to Yakutsk. This river navigation was fourteen hundred miles. Where they entered their boat, the stream was no nore than twenty yards broad, with here and there gentle rapids, and high, rugged mountains on each side. They were carried along from eighty to a hundred miles a day, the river gradually increasing in size, and the mountain scenery putting on an infinite variety of forms, alternately sublime and picturesque, bold and fantastic, with craggy rocks and jutting headlands, bearing on their brows the verdure of pines, firs, larches, and other evergreens, and Alpine shrubs. All the way to Yakutsk, the river was studded with islands, recurring at short intervals, which added to the romantic effect of the scenery, and made a voyage down the Lena notwithstanding its many privations, by no means an unpleasant trip to a true lover of nature, and a hardy veteran traveller. The weather was growing cold and heavy fogs hung about the river till a late hour in the morning. They daily passed small towns and villages, where they went ashore for provisions, or refreshment, as occasion required.

"On the eighteenth of September he arrived at Yakutsk, after a fatiguing voyage of twenty-two days, in a small bateau on the Lena. During this period, he had passed from a summer climate to one of rigorous cold. When he left Irkusk, it was just in the midst of harvest time, and the reapers were in the fields; but when he entered Yakutsk, the snow was six inches deep, and the boys were whipping their tops on the ice. He debarked from his bateau two miles above the town, and there mounted a sledge, drawn by an ox, with a Yakuti Indian on his back, and guided by a cord passing through the cartilage of his nose."

It was his wish to press forward to Okotsk, distant between six and seven hundred miles, lest the winter should prevail before he reached that place, whence he meant to secure a passage to the American continent in the spring. The Russian commandant declared any ulterior movement to be impossible, and compelled him to acquiesce in its postponement. We cannot refrain from copying that part of his journal which relates to this event; it will conciliate the esteem, and may touch the heart, of every reader:

66

What, alas, shall I do," exclaims he, "for I am miserably prepared for this unlooked for delay. By remaining here through the winter, I cannot expect to resume my march until May, which will be eight months. My funds! I have but two long frozen stages more, and I shall be beyond the want, or aid of money, until, emerging from the deep deserts, I gain the American Atlantic States; and then, thy glowing climates, Africa, explored, I will lay me down, and claim my little portion of the globe I have yiewed; may it not be be

fore. How many of the noble minded have been subsidiary to me, or to my enterprises; yet that meagre demon, Poverty, has travelled with me hand in hand over half the globe, and witnessed what-the tale I will not unfold! Ye children of wealth and idleness, what a profitable commerce might be made between us. A little of my toil might better brace your bodies, give spring to mind and zest to enjoyment; and a very little of that wealth, which you scatter around you, would put it beyond the power of anything but death to oppose my kindred greetings with all on earth, that bear the stamp of man. This is the third time, that I have been overtaken and arrested by winter; and both the others, by giv ing time for my evil genius to rally his hosts about me, have defeated the enter prise. Fortune, thou hast humbled me at last, for I am this moment the slave of cowardly solicitude, lest in the heart of this dread winter, there lurk the seeds of disappointment to my ardent desire of gaining the opposite continent. But I submit."

These sad presentiments were miserably realized. Notwithstanding the imperial passport which he carried, secret ministerial instructions to detain him, had preceded his arrival. Some idea of the nature of the season which he spent, may be collected from this passage of his journal :

"The people in Yakutsk have no wells. They have tried them to a very great depth, but they_freeze even in summer; consequently they have all their water from the river. But in winter they cannot bring water in its fluid state; it freezes on the way. It is then brought in large cakes of ice to their houses, and piled up in their yards. As water is wanted, they bring these pieces of ice into the warm rooms, where they thaw, and become fit for use. Milk is brought to market in the same way. Á Yakuti came into our house to-day with a bag full of ice. 'What,' said I to Laxman, has the man brought ice to sell in Siberia? It was milk. Clean mercury exposed to the air is now constantly frozen. By repeated observations, I have found in December, that two ounces of quicksilver openly exposed have frozen hard in fifteen minutes. It may be cut with a knife, like lead. Strong cogniac brandy coagulated. A thermometer, filled with rectified spirits of wine, indicated thirty-nine and a half degrees on Reaumur's scale. Captain Billings had, on the borders of the Frozen Ocean, the winter before last, forty-three degrees and three fourths by the same thermometer. In these severe frosts the air is condensed, like a thick fog. The atmosphere itself is frozen; respiration is fatiguing; all exercise must be as moderate as possible; one's confidence is in his fur dress. It is a happy provision of nature, that in such intense colds there is seldom any wind; when there is, it is dangerous to be abroad. these seasons, there is no chase; the animals submit themselves to hunger and security, and so does man. All nature groans beneath the rigorous winter."

In

It was at Yakutsk, that he penned his exquisite and celebrated eulogy on Woman-a simple, unstudied, private effusion, with which the sex have more reason to be pleased than with all the most elaborate and finely-turned compliments that gallantry or flattery ever produced. It has been often printed, but sometimes incorrectly. His biographer has transcribed it from the original manuscript, and we must assist in multiplying the true copy of what is so beautiful and just:

"I have observed among all nations, that the women ornament themselves more than the men; that, wherever found, they are the same kind, civil, obliging, humane, tender beings; that they are ever inclined to be gay and cheerful, timorous and modest. They do not hesitate, like man, to perform a hospitable or generous action; not haughty, nor arrogant, nor supercilious, but full of courtesy and fond of society; industrious, economical, ingenuous; more liable in general to err than man, but in general, also, more virtuous, and performing more

good actions than he. I never addressed myself in the language of decency and friendship to a woman, whether civilized or savage, without receiving a decent and friendly answer. With man it has often been otherwise. In wandering over the barren plains of inhospitable Denmark, through honest Sweden, frozen Lapland, rude and churlish Finland, unprincipled Russia, and the wide spread regions of the wandering Tartar, if hungry, dry, cold, wet, or sick, woman has ever been friendly to me, and uniformly so; and to add to this virtue, so worthy of the appellation of benevolence, these actions have been performed in so free and so kind a manner, that, if I was dry, I drank the sweet draught, and, if hungry, ate the coarse morsel, with a double relish."

Ledyard had not been quite two months at Yakutsk, when Captain Billings arrived there from his expedition to the river Kolyme and the Frozen Ocean. The Captain was one of our traveller's companions during the whole of Cook's last voyage, and might well be "surprised at meeting his old acquaintance in the heart of Siberia," not having heard from him since their separation at the close of the voyage. After they had passed about five weeks together at Yakutsk, Billings persuaded Ledyard to return to Irkutsk with him, a distance of fifteen hundred miles, which they accomplished in seventeen days, travelling in sledges up the river Lena, on the ice. Ere a month more had elapsed, Ledyard was arrested as a French spy! by "an absolute order from the Empress ;" hurried into a kibitka with two guards, conducted with all speed to Moscow, and thence to the frontiers of Poland, where his ferocious attendants released him, with the suggestion that he might go where he pleased, but if he returned again to the dominions of the Empress, he would be hanged! This transportation, as it may be called, was effected in six weeks, over a space of six thousand versts, three versts being equal to two English miles. Independently of the consideration of the nature of the season and regions in which he was thus ignominiously dragged, an idea may be formed of the sufferings which were inflicted on him, from a single passage of one of his letters scrawled on the route :

"I am at the city of Neeshna, in a vile, dark, dirty, gloomy, damp room; it is called quarters, but it is a miserable prison. The soldiers, who guard me, are doubly watchful over me when in a town, though at no time properly so, through their consummate indolence and ignorance. Every day I have it in my power to escape them, but, though treated like a felon, I will not appear like one by flight. I was very ill yesterday; I am emaciated; it is more than twenty days since I have eat any thing, that may be called food, and during that time have been dragged along from day to day in some wretched open kibitka. Thus am I treated in all respects (except that I am obliged to support myself with my own money) like a convict, and presented by my snuffbox of a sergeant as a raree-show, at every town through which we pass."

As the reader of even our slender outline, must have imbibed an interest, not only in the general character, but the particular sensations and thoughts of our traveller, on such an occasion as this melancholy outrage, we shall quote a passage of his jour

nal, which his biographer presumes was written soon after he left Irkutsk :

"My ardent hopes are once more blasted, the almost half accomplished wish. What secret machinations have been at work? What motive? But so it suits her royal Majesty of all the Russias, and she has nothing but her pleasure to consult; she has no nation's resentment to apprehend, for I am the minister of no state, no monarch. I travel under the common flag of humanity, commissioned by myself to serve the world at large; and so the poor, the unprotected wanderer must go where sovereign will ordains; if to death, why then my journeying will be over sooner, and rather differently from what I contemplated; if otherwise, why then the royal dame has taken me much out of my way. But I may pursue another route. The rest of the world lies uninterdicted. Though born in the freest of the civilized countries, yet, in the present state of privation, I have a more exquisite sense of the amiable, the immortal nature of liberty, than I ever had be fore. It would be excellently qualifying, if every man, who is called to preside over the liberties of a people, should once-it would be enough-actually be deprived of his liberty unjustly. He would be avaricious of it, more than of any other earthly possession. I could love a country and its inhabitants, if it were a country of freedom. There are two kinds of people I could anathematize, with a better weapon than St. Peter's; those who dare deprive others of their liberty, and those who suffer others to do it."

We know not who can resist this strain, or help execrating the power by which so atrocious a wrong to so admirable a spirit, and so great an injury to the cause of science, were committed. All that we had read of the Russian government, of any period, had not inspired us with so keen a dislike to its arbitrary and selfish essence, as was engendered by the simple narrative of Ledyard's treatment. A recent British tourist in Russia, Captain Jones, speaking of the Emperor Alexander's journeys of obser vation to the distant provinces of his empire, says,

"Truth is too deeply entrenched and veiled, for even his imperial exertions to explore; and he returns to his capital, fatally impressed with an assurance, that all are going on well and contentedly, when, perhaps, it is not too much to say, that more abuse and discontent reign in his dominions, and amongst his fifty-three millions of subjects, than in all the rest of Europe put together; with this dan gerous and remarkable difference, that the abuses are nearly open to every body, except himself, while the discontent is silent and smothered. In 1821, there was a revolt of from five to seven thousand peasants in this neighbourhood, (Taganrog,) who suffered the greatest hardships and privation, before a military force could subdue them; many died from want, and many afterwards by the knout. It is doubtful, if this ever reached the Emperor's ears; at all events, it has been most carefully concealed from the rest of the empire.'

Before we took up the book of Mr. Sparks, we indulged the surmise, that the expedition of Ledyard might never have been known to the Empress Catherine, any more than the insurrection and treatment of the seven thousand peasants, were to her grandson; for the abuses of authority, in the imperial name, could not have been less frequent during her reign, than in that of Alexander; but this charitable supposition was destroyed by a letter of Count Ségur, to Mr. Jefferson, which Ledyar biographer has adduced. The Empress herself spoke to Ségur on the subject of Ledyard, observing, that she had issued her

prohibition, because she would not "render herself guilty of the death of this courageous American, by furthering a journey so fraught with danger, as that he proposed to undertake alone, across the unknown and savage regions of north-western America." La douce humanité toujours dans la bouche! The Count, much as he admired, or rather worshipped Catherine,—was not the dupe of this pretext. He intimates, that she only attempted to disguise, by it, "her unwillingness to have the new possessions of Russia, on the western coast of America, seen by an enlightened citizen of the United States." Mr. Sparks adopts Ségur's interpretation, and annexes this natural comment. "Moreover, the plea of humanity sounds strangely enough, when contrasted with the barbarous manner in which Ledyard was transported across the frightful deserts of her imperial majesty's dominions. Such evidence of tender-heartedness, he would gladly have declined; and taken in exchange for them, any treatment he_might receive from the savages of north-western America."

Ledyard reached Konigsberg, absolutely destitute, and in bad health. He was so fortunate as to dispose there, of a draft for five guineas, on his old benefactor, Sir Joseph Banks-a sum by which he was enabled to pursue his journey to England. Once more do we find him in the British capital, after an absence of fifteen months; and, to use his own words, again "disappointed, ragged, penny less, but with a whole heart." Mr. Jefferson, in his letter prefixed to the Travels of Lewis and Clark, expresses the opinion, that the rapid transportation from Siberia, broke down Ledyard's constitution; but the traveller himself wrote, after his arrival in London-"A few days' rest among the beautiful daughters of Israel, in Poland, re-established my health; and I am now in as full bloom and vigour, as thirty-seven years will afford any man." He had scarcely enjoyed, in London, time enough to choose his lodgings, when Sir Joseph Banks proposed to him, on behalf of the African Association, an expedition into the interior of Africa. He replied, that he had always determined to traverse the continent of Africa, as soon as he had explored the interior of North America. Sir Joseph gave him a note of introduction to the Secretary of the Association, with whom he sought an immediaté interview. "Before I had learned from the note, the name and business of my visiter," says the Secretary, (Mr. Beaufoy,) in an official report, "I was struck with the manliness of his person, the breadth of his chest, the openness of his countenance, and the inquietude of his eye." Being asked when he would set out-"to-morrow morning”was his answer. His biographer dwells upon this phrase, as an stance of extraordinary decision and fortitude of character. The frequency of his disappointments, the freshness of his sufferings, the magnitude of the labours and perils inseparable from