Peter the Great (38 page)

During the autumn, often escorted by Witsen, Peter made frequent excursions by carriage across the flat Dutch countryside. Rolling along through regions once at the bottom of a shallow sea, he looked out at a landscape dotted with windmills and brick church spires, meadows filled with grazing cows, and little brick towns with brick streets. The rivers and canals packed with boats and barges were a delight for Peter. Often, when the water was hidden by the flatness of the landscape, it seemed as if the brown sails and masts were moving independently across the wide fields.

Aboard a ptate yacht, Witsen took Peter to the island of Texel on the North Sea coast to watch the return of the Greenland whaling fleet. The place was remote, with long, rolling dunes and scrub trees growing at the edge of the white sand. In the harbor, Peter boarded one of the sturdy, three-masted vessels, examined everything and asked many questions about whales. To demonstrate, the whaler lowered a whaleboat and the crew demonstrated attacking a whale with a harpoon. Peter marveled at their precision and coordination. Then, although the ship reeked of whale blubber, the Tsar descended below
-
decks to see the rooms where the whales were butchered and the blubber was boiled for its precious oil.

Several times, Peter returned quietly to Zaandam to visit his comrades who were still working there. Menshikov was learning to make masts, Naryshkin was learning navigation, Golovkin and Kurakin were working on hull construction. Usually, he traveled there by water, or went sailing during his visit. Once, when he was sailing during a storm against advice, his boat capsized. Peter clambered out and patiently sat on the upturned bottom, waiting to be rescued.

Although his privacy was protected as long as he worked on the docks, it was impossible to isolate him when he sailed on the Ij. Small boats filled with curious people regularly tried to accost him. This always made Peter angry. Once, at the urging of several lady passengers, the captain of a mail boat tried to draw alongside Peter's craft. In a fury, Peter threw two empty bottles at the captain's head. He missed, but the mail boat reversed course and left him alone.

Early in his visit, Peter met the leading Dutch admiral of the day, Gilles Schey, a pupil of de Ruyter's. It was Schey who offered him the most striking and agreeable spectacle of his visit: a great sham naval battle on the Ij. The boat owners in northern Holland were invited to attend, and cannon were placed on all the craft able to carry them. Companies of volunteer soldiers were distributed among the decks and riggings of the larger boats, charged to simulate the fire of musketeers during the battle. On a Sunday morning, under a cloudless sky with a fresh wind, hundreds of boats assembled along the edge of a dike lined with thousands of spectators. Peter and members of his Embassy boarded the grand yacht of the East India Company and sailed toward the two fleets already ranged in opposing lines of battle. After a salute to the guest, the battle began. First, the two lines of ships fired salvos at each other, then a number of individual ship-to-ship engagements commenced. The battle, with its advance and retreat, its grappling and boarding, its smoke and noise, pleased the Tsar so much that he made his own ship steer for the place of hottest action. With the cannon thundering continually so that no one could hear, "the Tsar was in a state of rapture difficult to describe." In the afternoon, a number of collisions forced the Admiral to signal both sides to break off the action.

Peter dined often with Schey and tried to persuade the Admiral to come to Russia to supervise construction of the Russian fleet and to take command when it put to sea. He offered Schey all the titles he might want, a pension of 24,000 florins, more for his wife and children in case they preferred to remain behind in Holland, and promised to make the arrangements himself with William. Schey declined, which did not in any way diminish Peter's respect for him, and proposed another admiral to Peter as a man capable of supervising and commanding a navy. This was Cornelius Cruys, born in Norway of Dutch parents. With the rank of rear admiral, he was Chief Inspector of Naval Stores and Equipment of the Dutch Admiralty at Amsterdam, and in this capacity had already been advising the Russians in their purchases of naval equipment. He was exactly the kind of man Peter wanted, but, like Schey, Cruys showed little enthusiasm for Peter's offer. Only the united efforts of Schey, Witsen and other prominent persons who understood that Cruys in Russia would have a powerful influence on Russian trade persuaded the reluctant Admiral to accept.

Except for the time needed for his visit to The Hague and his trips to see various places and people in other parts of Holland, Peter worked steadily in the shipyard for four months. On November 16, nine weeks after the laying of his frigate's keel, the hull was ready for launching, and at the ceremony Witsen, in the name of the city of Amsterdam, presented the vessel to Peter as a gift. The Tsar, deeply moved, embraced the Burgomaster and immediately named the frigate
Amsterdam.
Later, loaded with many of the objects and machines Peter had purchased, she was dispatched to Archangel. Pleased as he was with the ship, Peter was even prouder of the piece of paper he received from Gerrit Pool, the master shipwright, certifying that Peter Mikhailov had worked four months in his dockyard, was an able and competent shipwright and had thoroughly mastered the science of naval architecture.

Nevertheless, Peter was disturbed by his instruction in Holland. What he had learned had been little more than ship's carpentry—it was better than the ship's carpentry he had landed in Russia, but it was not what he was seeking. Peter wanted to grasp the basic secrets of ship design; in effect, naval architecture. He wanted blueprints, made scientifically, controlled by mathematics, not simply a greater handiness with axe and hammer. But the Dutch were empirical in shipbuilding as in everything else. Each Dutch shipyard had its own individual rule-of-thumb design, each Dutch shipwright built what had worked for him before and there were no basic principles which Peter could carry back to Russia.

In order to build a fleet a thousand miles away on the Don with a force of largely unskilled laborers, he needed something which could be easily explained, understood and copied by men who had never seen a ship before.

Peter's growing dissatisfaction with Dutch methodology in shipbuilding expressed itself in several ways. First, he sent word back to Voronezh that Dutch shipwrights working there were no longer to be allowed to build as they pleased, but were to be placed under the supervision of Englishmen, Venetians or Danes. Second, now that his frigate was finished, he resolved to go to England to study English shipbuilding techniques. In November, in one of his interviews with William, Peter mentioned his desire to visit England. When the king returned to London, Peter sent Major Adam Weide after him with a formal request that the Tsar be allowed to come to England incognito. William's response elated Peter. The King replied that he was making a present to the Tsar of a superb new royal yacht, still unfinished, which, when completed, would be the most gracefully proportioned and fastest yacht in England. In addition, King William announced that he was sending two warships,
Yorke
and
Romney,
with three smaller ships, commanded by Vice Admiral Sir David Mitchell, to escort the Tsar to England. It was Peter's decision that he should come alone, except for Menshikov and several of the "volunteers," leaving Lefort and the majority of the Embassy in Holland to continue negotiating with the Dutch.

On January 7, 1698, after almost five months in Holland, Peter and his companions boarded the
Yorke,
Admiral Mitchell's flagship, and early the next morning set sail across the narrow strip of gray sea that separates the continent from England.

16

PETER IN ENGLAND

At
the time of Peter's visit, London and Paris were the two most populous cities in Europe. In commercial wealth, London ranked second to Amsterdam, which it was soon to succeed. What made London unique, however, was the degree to which it dominated the nation in which it lay. Like Paris, London was the national capital and seat of government, and, like Amsterdam, it was the country's greatest port, the center of its commerce, art and culture. In England, however, the size of the city dwarfed all else. London, counting its immediate environs, had 750,000 inhabitants; the next largest city in England, Bristol, had a mere 30,000. Or, to put it differently, one Englishman in ten was a Londoner; only one Frenchman in forty lived in Paris.

London in 1698 lay mainly on the north bank of the Thames, stretching from Tower Hill to the Houses of Parliament. The great boulevard of the city, spanned by a single bridge, London Bridge, was the Thames. The river, 750 feet across, flowed between marshy banks thick with reeds, interspersed with trim gardens and green meadows—its stone embankments came later. The Thames played a key role in the city's life. Always crowded with ships, it was used as a thoroughfare for getting from one part of the city to another. Hundreds of watermen rowing little boats provided a quicker, cleaner and safer service than could be had by traveling through the crowded streets. In autumn and winter, great mists and fogs swirled up from the Thames to roll through the streets, shrouding everything in a thick, brown, poisonous vapor created by the fog mixing with the smoke pouring from thousands of chimneys.

The London that Peter visited and explored on foot was rich, vital, dirty and dangerous. The narrow streets were piled with garbage and filth which could be dropped freely from any overhanging window. Even the main avenues were dark and airless because greedy builders, anxious to gain more space, had projected upper stories out over the street. Through these Stygian alleys, crowds of Londoners jostled and pushed one another. Traffic congestion was monumental. Lines of carriages and hackney cabs cut deep ruts into the streets, so that passengers inside were tossed about, arriving breathless, nauseated and sometimes bruised. When two coaches met in a narrow street, fearful arguments ensued, with the two coachmen "saluting each other with such diabolical titles and bitter execrations as if every one was striving which should go to the Devil first'." For short distances, to avoid the mud and pushing of the crowds, sedan chairs carried by two strong men were popular. Biggest of all were the overland coaches which rolled into London from the highroads, carrying commercial travelers and visitors from the country. Their destinations were the inns, where weary passengers could dine on cabbage and a pudding. Westphalian ham, chicken, beef, wine, mutton steaks and pigeons, and rise the next morning to a breakfast of ale and toast.

London was a violent city with coarse, cruel pleasures which quickly crushed the unprotected innocent. For women, the age of consent was twelve (it remained twelve in England until 1885).

Crimes were common, and in some parts of the city people could not sleep for the cries of "Murder!" rising from the streets. Public floggings were a popular sight, and executions drew vast crowds. On "Hanging Day," workmen, shop-keepers and apprentices left their jobs to jam the streets; joking and laughing, and hoping to catch a glimpse of the condemned's face. Wealthy ladies and gentlemen paid for places in windows and balconies overlooking the route from Newgate Prison to Tyburn, where executions took place, or, best of all, in wooden stands especially erected to provide an unobstructed view. The most ghastly execution was the penalty for treason: hanging, drawing and quartering. The condemned man was strung up until he was almost dead from strangulation, then cut down, disemboweled while still alive, beheaded, and his trunk was then chopped into quarters.

Sports were heavily stained with blood. Crowds paid to see bulls and bears set upon by enraged mastiffs; often, the teeth of the bear had been filed down and the cornered beast could only swat with his great paws at the mastiffs that leaped and tore at him. Cockfights attracted gamblers, and large purses were wagered on the specially trained fowl.

But, for all its violence, London was also a city where grace, beauty and civilized life were important. It was during this age that Sir Christopher Wren, the greatest of English architects, erected fifty-two new parish churches in London on sites wiped clean by the Great Fire. Their thin, glittering steeples gave London a breathtakingly distinctive skyline, dominated by Wren's masterpiece, the gigantic domed structure of St. Paul's Cathedral. The church was forty-one years in building; on the eve of Peter's arrival, the choir had just been opened for public worship.

For intelligent men, life in London centered on hundreds of coffee houses where the conversation could center on anything under the sun. Gradually, the different houses began to specialize in talk about politics, religion, literature, scientific ideas, business, shipping or agriculture. Choosing the house by the talk he wished to hear, a visitor could step in, sit by the fire, sip coffee and listen to every shade of opinion expressed in brilliant, learned and passionate terms. Good conversationalists could sharpen their wits, writers could share their dilemmas, politicians could arrange compromises, the lonely could find simple warmth. In Lloyd's coffee house, marine insurance had its beginnings. At Will's, Addison was to have his chair by the fire in winter and by the window in summer.

* * *

This was London in 1698. As for the larger polity, England itself, the seventeenth century was a time of transition from the small, relatively insignificant sixteenth-century island kingdom of Queen Elizabeth I to the great European power and world empire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When Elizabeth died in 1603, and with her the Tudor Dynasty, England was free of the ambitions of Spain, having beaten off Philip II and his armada. But England remained a peripheral factor in the affairs of Europe. The dynastic question was settled when King James VI of Scotland, son of Mary Queen of Scots, came down from Edinburgh to take the English throne as James I and begin a century of Stuart rule. During the first half of this century, England was absorbed in its own problems, trying to sort out the tangled strands of religious conscience and the relative power of crown and Parliament. When the debate burst into civil war, the second Stuart, Charles I, lost his head, and for eleven years England was ruled under the stern eye of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. Even when Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, religious tension remained acute. The nation was divided between Catholic and Protestant, and, among the Protestants, between Church of England and Nonconformists.