Baltic Fleet. In August of that year, the boat was placed in a special building inside the Fortress of Peter and Paul, where it remained for over two centuries. Today, Peter's boat is the most prized exhibit of the Navy Museum of the U.S.S.R. in the former Stock Exchange building on the point of Leningrad's Vasilevsky Island.
Thereafter, Peter went sailing every day. He learned to work the sails and use the wind, but the Yauza was narrow, the breeze was often too light to provide maneuverability and the boat constantly went aground. The nearest really large body of water, nine miles across, was Lake Pleschev, near Pereslavl, eighty-five miles northeast of Moscow. Peter might be an irresponsible youth larking about in the fields, but he was also a tsar and he could not travel so far from his capital without some serious purpose. He quickly found one. There was a June festival at the great Troitsky Monastery, and Peter begged his mother's permission to go there and participate in the religious ceremony. Natalya agreed, and once the service was over, Peter, now beyond the reach of any restrictive authority, simply headed northwest through the forest to Pereslavl. By prearrangement, Timmerman and Brandt were with him.
Standing on the lake bank, with the summer sun beating down on his shoulders and sparkling on the water, Peter looked out across the lake. Only dimly, in the distance, could he make out the farther shore. Here, he could sail for an hour, for two hours, without having to tack. He longed to sail at once, but there were no boats, nor did it seem possible to drag the English boat this far from Ismailovo. He turned to Brandt and asked whether it would be possible to build new boats here on the shores of the lake.
'Yes, we can build boats here,' replied the old carpenter. He looked around at the empty shoreline and the virgin forest. 'But we shall need many things.'
'No matter,' said Peter excitedly. 'We shall have whatever we need.'
Peter's intention was to help build the boats at Lake Pleschev. This meant not just another quick, unauthorized visit to the lake, but obtaining permission to live there for an extended period. He returned to Moscow and laid siege to his mother. Natalya resisted, insisting that he remain in Moscow at least until the formal celebration of his name day. Peter stayed, but the day afterward he and Brandt and another old Dutch shipbuilder named Kort hurried back to Lake Pleschev. They chose a site for their boatyard on the eastern shore of the lake, not far from the Moscow-Yaroslavl road, and began building huts and a dock beside which to moor the future boats. Timber was cut, seasoned and shaped. Working from dawn until dark, with Peter and other workmen sawing and hammering vigorously under the direction of the Dutchmen, they laid the keels for five boats—two small frigates and three yachts, all to have rounded bows and sterns in the Dutch style. In September, the skeletons of the boats began to rise, but none was finished when Peter was forced to return to Moscow for the winter. He left unwillingly, asking the Dutch shipwrights to stay behind and work as hard as possible in order to have the boats ready for spring.
The chance discovery of this boat and Peter's first sailing lessons on the Yauza were the beginning of two compulsive themes in his personality and his life: his obsession for the sea and his desire to learn from the West. As soon as he was tsar in power as well as name, he turned toward the sea, first south to the Black Sea, then northwest to the Baltic. Impelled by the will of this strange sea-dreamer, the huge landlocked nation stumbled toward the oceans. It was strange and yet it was also partly inevitable. No great nation had survived and flourished without access to the sea. What is remarkable is that the drive sprang from the dreams of an adolescent boy.
As Peter sailed on the Yauza with Brandt beside him at the tiller, his new fascination for the water coincided and intermingled with his admiration for the West. He knew that he was in a foreign boat, taking lessons from a foreign instructor. These Dutchmen who had repaired the boat and were showing him how to use it came from a technically advanced civilization, compared to Muscovy. Holland had thousands of ships and thousands of seamen; for the moment, Timmerman and Brandt represented all this. They became heroes to Peter. He wanted to be near the two old men so they could teach him. At that moment, they were the West. And, one day, he would be Russia.
By the end of 1688, Peter was sixteen and a half and no longer a boy. Whether wearing a robe of cloth of gold and sitting on the throne or digging trenches, pulling ropes and hammering nails in a sweat-stained green tunic while swapping early technical talk with carpenters and soldiers, physically he was a man. In an age when life was short and generations succeeded each other rapidly, men often became fathers at sixteen and a half. This was especially true of princes, for whom the need to provide for the succession was a first great responsibility. Peter's duty was clear: It was time to marry and beget a son. Peter's mother felt this keenly, and by this time even Sophia did not object. It was not simply a matter of Naryshkin versus Miloslavsky, it was a question of ensuring the Romanov succession. The Tsarevna could not marry; Tsar Ivan had produced only daughters.
Natalya also had more personal reasons. She was annoyed by her son's growing interest in foreigners; this preference far surpassed anything she had known in the moderately Westernized atmosphere of Matveev's house or the increasingly liberalized atmosphere of the court in the last years of Tsar Alexis. Peter was spending
Peter accepted his mother's wish without argument—not because he had suddenly become a dutiful son, but because the whole matter was of minimal interest to him. He agreed that the traditional collection of eligible young women be assembled at the Kremlin; he agreed that his mother should sort them out and choose the likeliest. Once this was done, he looked at the prospect, made no complaint and thereby ratified his mother's choice. Thus, painlessly, Peter acquired a wife and Russia a new tsaritsa.
Her name was Eudoxia Lopukhina. She was twenty—three years older than Peter—and was said to be pretty, although no portrait of Eudoxia at this age has survived. She was shy and totally deferential, which recommended her to her new mother-in-law. She was well born, being the daughter of an old, strongly conservative Muscovite family which traced its origins to the fifteenth century and was now linked by marriage with the Golitsyns, Kurakins and Romodanovskys. She was devoutly Orthodox, almost completely uneducated, shuddered at all things foreign and believed that, to please her husband, she had only to become his principal slave. Pink, hopeful and helpless, she stood beside her tall, young bridegroom and became his wife on January 27, 1689.
Even for a time when all marriages were arranged, the match was a disaster. Peter, whatever his physical readiness for fatherhood, was still bursting with the excitement of his new discoveries, still caring more about how things work than how people behave. Not many seventeen-year-old boys of any epoch, even if forced to marry, can be expected to abandon all they love and tamely settle into domesticity. And, certainly, Eudoxia was ill-equipped to perform such a miracle with Peter. Modest, conventional, scarcely more than a shy child, overwhelmingly aware of her husband's rank, eager to please but uncertain how to do it, she might have made a model tsaritsa for a conventional Muscovite tsar. She was prepared to give what she could, but her husband's wild, impetuous spark of genius left her confused, and his boisterous masculine world frightened her. She was prepared to assist at great ceremonies of state, but not at boat building. Her dislike of foreigners increased. She had been taught that they were evil; now they were stealing her husband from her. She could not talk to Peter; she knew nothing of carpentry or rigging. From the beginning, her conversation bored him; soon, so did her lovemaking; before long, he could barely stand the sight of her. Yet, they were married and they slept together, and within two years two sons were born. The eldest was the Tsarevich Alexis, whose tragic life would torment Peter. The second, an infant named Alexander, died after seven months. When this happened, scarcely three years after his marriage, Peter was so estranged from his wife and so unfeeling that he did not bother to attend the infant's funeral.
Even the honeymoon was brief. In early spring, only a few weeks after his marriage, Peter was restlessly watching the ice beginning to break on the Yauza at Preobrazhenskoe. Knowing that soon it would be melting on Lake Pleschev, he strained to get away from his wife, his mother and his responsibilities. At the beginning of April 1689, he burst free and hurried to the lake, anxious to see how Brandt and Kort had progressed. He found the lake ice breaking, most of the boats finished, ready to be launched and needing only some coils of good rope for rigging the sails. On the same day, he wrote exuberantly to his mother, asking for ropes, slyly stressing that the sooner the ropes arrived, the sooner he would be able to come home to her:
To my beloved little mother, Lady Tsaritsa and Grand Duchess Natalya Kyrilovna: Your little son, Pctrushka,
