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
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,
On January 7, 1698, after almost five months in Holland, Peter and his companions boarded the
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.
