Peter the Great (24 page)

Boris Golitsyn, traveled to the lake to persuade him of the importance of the event did Peter reluctantly consent to lay down his tools and go with them to Moscow. Within a week, he was back at the lake.

In August, he persuaded his mother and sister Nayalya to visit his boatyard and fleet. His wife, Eudoxia, came with the other ladies, and during the month they were there Peter enthusiastically maneuvered his little flotilla of twelve ships before their eyes. Sitting on the small hill that rises from the shore, the ladies could see the Tsar, dressed in a crimson coat, standing on deck, waving his arms, pointing and shouting orders—all thoroughly mysterious and disquieting to women not far removed from the terem.

Peter remained at the lake that year until November. When he did finally return to Moscow, an attack of
dysentery
kept him in bed for six weeks. He became so feeble that there were fears for his life. His comrades and followers were alarmed: If Peter died, nothing could prevent the return of Sophia and exile or even death for themselves. But the Tsar was only twenty-one, his constitution was strong, and toward Christmas he began to recover. By late January he was once again spending his evenings in the German Suburb. Near the end of February, Lefort gave a banquet in Peter's honor, and at dawn the next day, without having slept, Peter rode off to Pereslavl to work on his boats through the whole of Lent.

His visits that year, 1693, were to be Peter's last extended periods at Lake Pleschev. Twice, in subsequent years, he passed by the lake on his way to the White Sea, and still later he went there to check on artillery materials for the Azov campaign. But after 1697 he did not return until he was en route to Persia in 1722. After a quarter of a century, he found boats and buildings neglected and rotted. He gave orders that what remained should be carefully preserved, and for a while an effort was made by the local nobility. In the nineteenth century, every spring, all the clergy of Pereslavl would board a barge and, attended by a crowd of people in many boats, sail to the middle of the lake to bless the water in memory of Peter.

10

ARCHANGEL

Like
a giant closed up in a cave with only a pinhole for light and air, the great land mass of the Muscovite empire possessed
but
a single seaport: Archangel, on the White Sea. This unique harbor, remote from the Russian heartland, is only 130 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Six months of the year, it is frozen in ice. Yet, despite its drawbacks, Archangel was Russian. It was the one place in the entire realm where a young monarch intoxicated by the idea of ships and oceans could actually see great ships and breathe salt air. No tsar had even been to Archangel, but no tsar had ever been interested in ships. Peter himself explained it in his preface to the
Maritime Regulations,
written twenty-seven years later, in 1720:

For some years I had the fill of my desires on Lake Pleschev, but finally it got too narrow for me.
...
I then decided to see the open sea, and began often to beg the permission of my mother to go to Archangel. She forbade me such a dangerous journey, but, seeing my great desire and unchangeable longing, allowed it in spite of herself.

Before Natalya bowed to his pleas, however, she extracted from her son—"my life and my hope"—a promise that he would not sail on the ocean.

On July 11, 1693, Peter left Moscow for Archangel with more than 100 people, including Lefort and many of his Jolly Company, as well as eight singers, two dwarfs and forty Streltsy to act as guards. The distance from the capital was 600 miles as the crow flies, but as humans traveled, by road and river,
it
was almost 1,000 miles. The first 300 were up the Great Russian Road,' past the Troitsky Monastery, Pereslavl and Rostov, across the Volga at Yaroslavl to the busy town of Vologda, the southern transshipment center for the Archangel trade, where they boarded a fleet of large, colorfully painted barges which had been prepared for them. The rest of the trip lay down the River Suhona to its junction with the River Dvina, and from there, north on the Dvina itself to Archangel. The barges moved slowly, even though they were
traveling downstream. In spring when the river was in flood from melting snows, Peter's boats could have floated easily, but now it was midsummer, the rivers had dropped and sometimes the barges scraped bottom and had to be dragged. In two weeks, the flotilla reached Kholmogory, the administrative capital and seat of the archbishop of the northern region. Here, the Tsar was welcomed with clanging churchbells and banquets; with difficulty he broke away and continued the last few miles downriver. At last, he saw the watchtowers, the warehouses, the docks and anchored ships which made up the port of Archangel.

Archangel did not lie directly on the coast of the White Sea. Rather, it was situated thirty miles up the river, where the ice formed even more quickly than in the salt water of the ocean itself. From October to May, the river running past the town was frozen hard as steel. But in the spring, when the ice began to melt first along the White Sea coasts, then along the rivers inland, Archangel began to stir. Barges loaded in the interior of Russia with furs, hides, hemp, tallow, wheat, caviar and potash floated in an endless procession north down the Dvina. At the same time, the first merchant ships from London, Amsterdam, Hamburg and Bremen, convoyed by warships to guard against the roving French corsairs, pushed their way through the melting ice floes around the North Cape to Archangel. In their holds, they brought wool and cotton cloth, silk and lace, gold and silver objects, wines, and chemicals for dying cloth. In Archangel, during the hectic summer months, as many as a hundred foreign ships might be seen lying in the river, discharging their Western cargoes and taking on Russian ones.

The days were feverishly busy, but life was pleasant for foreigners during an Archangel summer. In late June there were twenty-one hours of sunlight a day, and people slept little. The town was splendidly supplied with fresh fish and game. Salmon was brought from the sea to be smoked or salted and sent to Europe or the interior, but there was plenty to eat fresh in Archangel. The rivers were stocked with fresh-water fish, including perch, pike and delicious small eels. Poultry and wild deer were numerous and cheap, and a partridge the size of a turkey could be had for two English pence. There were hares, ducks and geese. Because so many ships arrived from Europe, Dutch beer, French wine and cognac were plentiful, althou
gh Russian customs duties made them
expensive. There were a Dutch Reformed church and a Lutheran church; there were balls and picnics and a constant stream of new captains and officers.

For a young man like Peter, fascinated by the West and Westerners and magnetized by the sea, everything here was exciting: the ocean itself stretching over the horizon, the tide rising and falling twice a day, the smell of salt sea air and of rope and tar around the wharves, the sight of so many ships at anchor, their great oaken hulls, their tall masts and furled sails, the bustle of the busy port with small boats crisscrossing the harbor, the wharves and warehouses piled with interesting goods, the merchants, sea captains and sailors .from many lands.

Peter could see most of the activity in the port from the house prepared for him on Moiseev Island. Already, on the first day of his arrival, he was anxious to put to sea, his promise to Natalya forgotten. He hurried to the quay where lay a small twelve-gun yacht, the
St. Peter,
which had been built for him. He boarded her, studied her hull and rigging and waited impatiently for a chance to test her qualities beyond the mouth of the Dvina on the open sea.

His opportunity came soon after. A convoy of Dutch and English merchantmen was sailing for Europe. Peter aboard the
St. Peter
would escort it through the White Sea to the edge of the Arctic Ocean. On a favorable wind and tide, the ships weighed anchor, unfurled canvas and steered down the river, past the two low forts which guarded the approaches from the sea. By midday, for the first time in history, a Russian tsar was on salt water. As the low hills and forests receded into the distance, Peter was surrounded only by the dancing waves, the ships rising and falling on the deep green water of the White Sea, the creak of timbers and the whistle of wind in the rigging.

All too soon for Peter, the convoy reached the extreme northern point where the White Sea, still relatively landlocked, broadens out into the vast Arctic Ocean. Here Peter reluctantly turned back. On returning to Archangel, knowing that word of his voyage would soon reach Moscow, he wrote to his mother. Without actually mentioning the trip, he sought to calm her in advance:

You have written, O Lady, that I have saddened you by not writing of my arrival. But even now I have no time to write in detail because I am expecting some ships, and as soon as they come— when no one knows, but they are expected soon as they are more than three weeks from Amsterdam—I shall come to you immediately
, traveling day and night. But I
beg for mercy for one thing: Why do you trouble yourself about me? You have deigned to write that you have given me unto the care of the Virgin. When you have such a guardian for me, why do you grieve?

It was a resourceful argument, but it made no difference to Natalya. She wrote to Peter, begging him to remember his promise to remain on shore and urging him to return to Moscow.

She even enclosed a letter from his three-year-old son, Alexis, endorsing her plea. Peter replied several times that she must not worry: "If you are grieved, what pleasure have I? I beg you make my wretched self happy by not grieving about me" and "You have deigned to write to me
...
to say that I should write to you oftener. Even now I write by every post and my only fault is that I do not come myself."

In fact, Peter had no intention of quitting Archangel until the expected fleet of Dutch merchantmen arrived from Amsterdam. Meanwhile, his days passed joyfully. From the window of his house on Moiseev Island he could see ships arriving and departing on the river. Eagerly, he boarded and inspected every ship in port, questioning the captains for hours, climbing the masts to study the rigging and examining the construction of the hulls. The Dutch and English captains lavished hospitality on the youthful monarch, inviting him to drink and dine with them on board. They talked of the wonders of Amsterdam, the great shipbuilding center of Zaandam, the courage of Dutch seamen and soldiers in resisting the ambitions of Louis XIV of France. Soon, Holland became Peter's passion, and he walked the streets of Archangel dressed in the costume of a Dutch sea captain. He sat in taverns smoking a clay pipe and emptying bottle after bottle with grizzled Dutch captains who had sailed with the legendary admirals Tromp and de Ruyter, and with Lefort and his comrades he attended endless dinners and dances at the houses of foreign merchants. And he also found time to work at forge and lathe. It was during this visit that he began turning the elaborate ivory chandelier made from walrus tusks that now hangs in the Peter Gallery of the Hermitage. He went frequently to the Church of the Prophet Elijah, and worshippers learned to accept the sight of the Tsar reading the epistle or standing and singing with the choir. He liked the Archbishop of Kholmogory, Afanasy, and enjoyed talking to him after his midday dinner.

Even as the summer was ending, Peter had decided to return to Archangel the following year, but there were things he wanted to change. It depressed him that, except for his own small yacht, there was in this Russian port no Russian ship manned by Russian seamen. With his own hands, he laid the keel of a vessel larger than the little
St. Peter,
and commanded that it be finished during the winter. In addition, wanting a truly ocean-going Western ship, he asked Lefort and Vinius to order a Dutch-built frigate from Nicholas Witsen, Burgomaster of Amsterdam.

In mid-September, the Dutch merchant co
nvoy arrived. Peter welcomed it
and at the same time said goodbye to Archangel with a huge celebration organized by Lefort. There were banquets lasting a week, balls and salvos of artillery from the forts and the ships at anchor. The return to Moscow was slow. The barges were moving upriver now, dragged not by animals but by men pulling ropes along the shore. While the watermen strained and the barges moved slowly, the passengers got out and walked along at the edge of the forest, sometimes shooting wild ducks and pigeons for their dinner. Whenever the flotilla passed a village, the priest and peasants came to the royal barge to present fish, gooseberries, chickens and fresh eggs. Sometimes, standing on the barges at night, the travelers would see a wolf on the bank. By the time they reached Moscow in mid-October, the first snow had fallen in Archangel. The harbor was closed for winter.

That same winter, after his return to Moscow, Peter suffered a heavy blow. On February 4, 1694, after an illness of only two days, his mother, the Tsaritsa Natalya, died at forty-two. Natalya had not been well since her month-long visit to Peter's regatta at Lake Pleschev in 1693. In the winter, she was dangerously stricken. Peter was at a banquet when he received a message that his mother was failing; he jumped up and hurried to her bedchamber. He had spoken with her and received her last blessing when the Patriarch appeared and began to berate him for ' coming in the Western clothes which Peter now customarily wore; it was disrespectful and insulting to the Tsaritsa, the Patriarch declared. Furious, Peter replied that a patriarch, as head of the church, should have weightier matters to attend to than the business of tailors. Not wanting to continue the argument, Peter stormed out. He was at his house in Preobrazhenskoe when the news came that his mother was dead.