In the spring of 1787, the American traveller, John Ledyard(1752-1789),
set out to traverse the globe by travelling from East to West across Europe,
Siberia, the Bering Straits, and finally the North-American continent.
Ledyard made it no further than the remote Siberian town of Yakutsk, but
during his time there and elsewhere in Siberia, he produced a series of
letters and a journal which, taken together, provide a rich portrait of
a little known frontier society. In addition, though, these writings reveal
the author's preoccupations--preoccupations, my paper argues, shaped by
the author's own peculiar predicament as a traveller. To illuminate that
predicament, my paper analyzes Ledyard's impression of Siberian society,
and evaluates those impressions in light of Ledyard's own experience as
a member of an Anglo-American society still shaped by patron-client relationships.
In more general terms, the paper suggests ways in which travel was implicated
in larger political and cultural processes, including the production novel
characters such as Ledyard himself.