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, although 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 somany 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 convoy 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.

Natalya’s death plunged Peter into grief. For several days, he could not speak without bursting into tears. Gordon went to Preobrazhenskoe to find Peter “exceeding melancholy and dejected.” The Tsaritsa’s funeral was a magnificent state pageant, but Peter refused to attend. Only after her burial did he come to her grave to pray, alone. To Fedor Apraxin in Archangel he wrote:

I dumbly tell my grief and my last sorrow about which neither my hand nor my heart can write in detail without remembering what the Apostle Paul says about not grieving for such things, and the voice of Edras, “Call me again the day that is past.” I forget all this as much as possible, as being above my reasoning and mind, for thus it has pleased the Almighty God, and all things are according to the will of their Creator. Amen. Therefore, like Noah, resting awhile from my grief, and leaving aside that which can never return, I write about the living.

The rest of the letter went on to give instructions about the ship being built at Archangel, clothing for the sailors and other practical matters. At twenty-two, life moves swiftly and wounds heal quickly. Within five days, Peter appeared at Lefort’s house. There were no ladies, no music, no dancing and no fireworks, but Peter did begin to talk about the world.

Within the family, Natalya’s place in Peter’s affections was taken by his younger sister, Natalya, a cheerful girl who, without understanding all of her brother’s objectives, always supported him wholeheartedly. She belonged to his generation, and she was curious about everything that came from abroad. Nevertheless, with the Tsaritsa’s death, all the strong members of Peter’s family were gone: his father and mother dead, his half-sister Sophia locked into a convent. His wife, Eudoxia, was there, but he seemed utterly oblivious to her feelings or even her existence. Gone with the Tsaritsa were the last bonds of restraint on Peter’s actions. He had loved his mother and tried to please her, but increasingly he had been impatient. In recent years, her constant effort to restrict his movements and curtail his desire for novelty and contact with foreigners had weighed on him. Now, he was free to live as he wished. For Natalya’s life, although influenced by her years in Matveev’s Westernized house, had remained essentially that of a Muscovite woman of the older type. Her passing was the breaking of the last powerful link which had bound Peter to the traditions of the past. It was only Natalya who had kept Peter in touch with Kremlin ritual; after her death, he quickly ceased to take part in it. Two and a half months after Natalya’s death, Peter appeared with Ivan in the great court Easter procession, but this was the last time he participated in Kremlin ceremonies. After that, no one possessed the strength to force him to do what he was not inclined to do.

In the spring of 1694, Peter returned to Archangel. This time, twenty-two barges were needed to carry the 300 people of Peter’s suite down the river. The barges also carried twenty-four cannon for the ships, 1,000 muskets, many barrels of powder and even more barrels of beer. In high spirits at the thought of going to sea again, Peter promoted several of his older comrades to high naval ranks: Fedor Romodanovsky was made an admiral, Ivan Buturlin a vice admiral and Patrick Gordon a rear admiral. None except Gordon had ever been on a boat, and Gordon’s nautical experience had been as a passenger on ships crossing the English Channel. Peter himself took the title of skipper, intending to captain the Dutch frigate ordered from Witsen.

In Archangel, Peter gave thanks at the Church of the Prophet Elijah, and then rushed to the river to see his ships. His little yacht, St. Peter, lay at the jetty, rigged and ready for sea. The Dutch frigate had not arrived, but the new ship which he had begun the summer before was finished and waiting in stocks for him to launch. Peter grabbed a sledgehammer, knocked away the props and delightedly watched the hull splash down into the water. While the new ship, christened St. Paul, was being fitted with masts and sails, Peter decided to pass the time by visiting the Solovetsky Monastery, which lay on an island in the White Sea. On the night of June 10, he boarded the St. Peter, taking with him the Archbishop Afanasy, a few comrades and a small group of soldiers. They left on the tide, but at the mouth of the Dvina the wind dropped, and it was not until the following morning that they sailed, on a freshening wind, out into the White Sea. During the day, the sky darkened and the wind began to rise. Eighty miles out from Archangel, a full gale burst over the tiny ship. Howling wind ripped the sails from masts and booms, and mountainous green seas rolled over the deck. The yacht pitched and rolled in giant waves, threatening to capsize; the crew, experienced sailors, huddled together, praying. The passengers, assuming that they were doomed, crossed themselves and prepared to drown. Drenched, the Archbishop struggled to pass among them on the rolling deck, giving the Last Sacrament.

Peter, braced at the helm in the wind and spray, received the Last Sacrament, but did not give up hope. Each time the ship rose on one great wave and fell into the deep trough that followed, Peter struggled with the rudder, trying to keep the bow into the wind. His determination had an effect. The pilot crept aft and shouted in Peter’s ear that they should try to make for the harbor of Unskaya Gulf. With the pilot assisting him at the helm, they steered through a narrow passage, past rocks over which huge seas were boiling and hissing, into the harbor. At about noon on June 12, after twenty-four hours of terror, the little yacht anchored in calm waters off the small Pertominsk Monastery.

The entire ship’s company rowed ashore to give thanks for their salvation in the monastery chapel. Peter rewarded the pilot with money and presented the monks with gifts and additional grants of revenue. Then, as his personal thanksgiving, he made with his own hands a wooden cross ten feet high and carried it on his shoulder to the spot on the shore where he had landed after his ordeal. It bore his inscription in Dutch: “This cross was made by Captain Peter in the summer of 1694.”^*

Outside the anchorage, the storm raged for three more days. On the 16th, the wind dropped, and Peter again set sail for the Solovetsky Monastery, the most famous in northern Russia. He spent three days at Solovetsky, pleasing the monks by his devotions before their holy relics. His return to Archangel was on calm seas, and his arrival was hailed with jubilation by his anxious friends, who knew about the storm and feared for the survival of the St. Peter and its passenger.

A few weeks later, the new ship which Peter had launched was ready for sea. Now, with the smaller St. Peter, Peter had two ocean-going ships, and when the new Dutch-built frigate arrived from Amsterdam, his flotilla would increase to three. This happy event took place on July 21, when the frigate Holy Prophecy sailed into the estuary of the Dvina and anchored off Solombola. Under the command of Captain Jan Flam, who had already made thirty voyages to Archangel, she was a sturdy, round-nosed Dutch warship with forty-four cannon ranged along her upper and middle decks. Burgomaster Witsen, hoping to please the Tsar, had seen to it that the cabins were wood-paneled, with elegant polished furniture, silk hangings and handsomely woven carpets.^*

Peter was wild with excitement. He rushed to the river when the ship was sighted, hurried on board and climbed or crawled through every inch of rigging and lower deck. That night, the new skipper of the Holy Prophecy celebrated on board, and the following day he wrote ecstatically to Vinius:

Min Her:

What I have so long desired has come about. Jan Flam has arrived all right with forty-four cannon and forty sailors, on his ship. Congratulate all of us! I shall write more fully by the next post, but now I am beside myself with joy and cannot write at length. Besides, it is impossible, for Bacchus is always honored in such cases and with his vine leaves he dulls the eyes of those who wish to write at length.

Skipper of the Ship Holy Prophecy

Within a week, the new frigate was ready to sail under the command of her new captain. Peter had arranged that his small Russian flotilla should accompany to the Arctic Ocean a convoy of Dutch and English merchantmen returning home. Before sailing, Peter had arranged that thedisposition of the fleet and the signals for directing its movements should be according to techniques which he himself had devised. The newly commissioned St. Paul, with Vice Admiral Buturlin aboard, was in the van, followed by four Dutch ships laden with Russian cargoes. Then came Peter’s new frigate, with Admiral Romodanovsky and the Tsar himself as captain (although Jan Flam was at his elbow). After this, four English merchantmen and, in the rear, the yacht St. Peter, bearing General Gordon, the new rear admiral. Gordon’s seamanship was meager; he almost steered his ship aground on a small island, thinking that the crosses in a cemetery on shore were the masts and yardarms of the vessels ahead of him.

Peter’s flotilla escorted the convoy as far as Svyatoy Nos on the Kola Peninsula, east of Murmansk. Here, the White Sea broadened out into the gray waters of the Arctic Ocean. Peter had hoped to sail farther, but a strong wind was blowing, and after his earlier experience, he allowed himself to be persuaded to turn back. Five guns were fired to signal that the escort was turning back, and the Western ships disappeared over the northern horizon. Peter’s three small ships returned to Archangel, the Tsar held a farewell banquet and, on September 3, reluctantly started back for Moscow.

In September of that year, 1694, a wide valley near the village of Kozhukhovo on the bank of the Moscow River was the site of Peter’s last and greatest peacetime army maneuvers. This time, 30,000 men were involved, including infantry, cavalry, artillery and long columns of supply wagons. The combatants were divided into two armies. One, commanded by Ivan Buturlin, consisted of six Streltsy regiments plus numerous squadrons of cavalry. The opposing side was commanded by Fedor Romodanovsky, the mock King of Pressburg, who commanded Peter’s two Guards regiments, the Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky, plus two additional regular regiments and a number of companies of militia summoned from towns as far from Moscow as Vladimir and Suzdal. In essence, the war game revolved around an assault by Buturlin’s army on a riverbank fort to be defended by Romodanovsky’s force.

Before the maneuvers began, Moscow was treated to the excitement of seeing the two armies in parade uniforms, accompanied by scribes, musicians and the special troop of dwarf cavalry, marching through the city streets on their way to the maneuver ground. As the Preobrazhensky Regiment approached, Muscovites gasped: In front of the troops, dressed as a regular artilleryman, marched the Tsar. For a population accustomed to glimpsing tsars at a distance in all their majesty, it was an unbelievable sight.

In the maneuvers, the fighting was conducted with zest, inspired by the natural rivalry between the Streltsy regiments and the Guards, both determined to prove their merit before the Tsar. Bombs and cannon were fired, and although there was no ball and shot, faces were burned and bodies maimed. The assaulting army threw a bridge across the Moscow River and began to mine the Pressburg fort. Peter had counted on a long siege in which all the Western arts of mining and countermining under fortifications could be practiced, but, unfortunately, Bacchus also was on the scene, and most days ended with huge banquets and drinking bouts. After one of these, the attacking force, flushed with confidence, decided to make a sudden assault. The defenders, equally flushed, were in no state to resist, and the fort was easily taken. Peter was furious at this hasty conclusion. The following day, he ordered the victors out of the fort and all prisoners returned, and commanded that the fort not be stormed again until the walls had been properly mined and had properly caved in. He was obeyed, and this time it took three weeks to subdue the fort in the textbook manner.

The Kozhukhovo maneuvers were concluded late in October, and as the regiments returned to their barracks for winter, Peter began to discuss with his advisors how he might best employ them in the coming year. Perhaps the moment had come to stop playing at war; perhaps it was time to turn this new weapon he had forged against the Turks, with whom Russia was still technically at war. That some action of this kind was being considered that winter is revealed in a letter written by Gordon in December 1694. “I believe and hope,” the Scot wrote to a friend in the West, “that this coming summer we shall undertake something for the advantage of Christianity and our allies.”

* A few years later, Peter ingeniously used his near-miraculous escape in this storm to reinforce his case that he must visit the West, an idea which most Russians opposed. He was dining with a group at the home of Boris Sheremetev when he revealed that during the height of the tempest he had vowed to St. Peter, his patron saint, that if his life was saved he would travel to Rome to give thanks at the tomb of his namesake apostle in the Holy City. Now, he declared, he had to fulfill his vow.
Peter’s visit to Rome, scheduled for the last part of the Great Embassy, never took place. He was en route in 1698 when he was called hurriedly back to Moscow by news of the last revolt of the Streltsy.

* Along with her cannon and luxurious furnishings, the Holy Prophecy brought another Western gift to Russia. When the ship anchored at Archangel, the great red-white-and-blue banner of Holland floated from her stern. Peter, admiring the ship and everything about her, immediately decided that his own naval flag should be modeled after it. Accordingly, he took the Dutch design—three broad horizontal stripes, red on top, white in the middle and blue on the bottom—and simply changed the sequence. In the Russian flag, white was on top, then blue, then red. This naval flag quickly became the flag of the Russian empire (as distinct from the imperial standard of the tsar, which was the double eagle) and remained so until the fall of the dynasty in 1917.