Peter the Great (35 page)

It was to this dockyard, a special seaman's paradise within the larger paradise that was all of Amsterdam, that Peter came to spend four months.

Peter's return to Amsterdam had been forced by the crowds in Zaandam, but he would have returned in any case to greet his own Great Embassy, which was just arriving. The ambassadors had been received in royal style at Cleves near the frontier, and four large yachts and numerous carriages had been placed at their disposal. The city fathers of Amsterdam, understanding the potential significance of this Embassy in terms of future trade with Russia, decided to receive it with extraordinary honors.

The reception included ceremonial visits to the City Hall, the Admiralty and the docks, special performances of opera and ballet, and a major banquet which ended with a display of fireworks set off from a raft in the Amstel. During these festivities, Peter had a chance to talk to the extraordinary man who was Burgomaster of Amsterdam, Nicholas Witsen. Cultured, wealthy, respected for his character as well as his achievements, he was an explorer, a patron of the arts and an amateur scientist, as well as a public official. One of his passions was ships, and he took Peter to see his collections of ship models, navigational instruments and tools used in shipbuilding. Wisten was fascinated by Russia and for a long time, along with his other duties, and interests, Witsen had acted as the unofficial minister of Muscovy in Amsterdam.

During the months that Peter was in Amsterdam, the Tsar and the Burgomaster spoke daily and Peter turned to Witsen with the problem of the crowds in Zaandam and Amsterdam. How could he work quietly, learning to build ships, surrounded by curious, staring strangers? Witsen had an immediate suggestion. If Peter remained in Amsterdam, he could work in the shipyards and docks of the East India Company, which were enclosed by walls and barred to the public. Peter was delighted by the idea, and Witsen, a director of the company, undertook to arrange it. The following day, the board of directors of the East India Company resolved to invite "a high personage present here incognito" to work in its shipyard and, for his convenience, to set aside for him the house of the master ropemaker so that he could live and work undisturbed inside the shipyard. In addition, to assist him in learning shipbuilding, the board ordered the laying of the keel of a new frigate, 100 feet or 130 feet long, whichever the Tsar preferred, so that he and his comrades could work on it and observe Dutch methods from the very beginning.

That night, at the formal state banquet given the Embassy by the city of Amsterdam, Witsen told Peter of the decision reached by the directors earlier in the day. Peter was enthusiastic and, although he loved fireworks, he could scarcely restrain himself through the rest of the meal. When the last skyrocket had burst, the Tsar jumped to his feet and announced that he was leaving for Zaandam right then, in the middle of the night, to fetch his tools so that he could work in the morning. Attempts by both Russians and Dutchmen to stop him were useless, and at eleven p.m. he boarded his yacht and sailed away. The following morning, he was back and went straight to the East India Company shipyard in the Ostenburg section. Ten Russian "volunteers" including Men-shikov went with him, while the rest of the "volunteers" were scattered by Peter's command around the harbor, learning the trades of sailmaker, ropemaker, mast turning, the use of block and tackle, and seamanship. Prince Alexander of Imeritia was dispatched to The Hague to study artillery. Peter himself enrolled as a carpenter under the master shipwright, Gerrit Claes Pool.

The first three weeks were spent in collecting and preparing the necessary timbers and other materials. So that the Tsar could see exactly what was being done, the Dutch gathered and laid out all the pieces before even laying the keel. Then, as each piece was fastened into place, the ship was assembled rapidly, almost like a huge model made from a kit. The frigate, 100 feet long, was called
The Apostles Peter and Paul,
and Peter worked enthusiastically on every stage of its assembly.

Every day, Peter arrived at the shipyard at dawn, carrying his axe and tools on his shoulders as the other workmen did. He allowed no distinction between himself and them, and strictly refused to be addressed or identified by any title. In his afternoon leisure hours, he liked sitting on a log, talking to sailors or shipbuilders or anyone who addressed him as "Carpenter Peter" or "Baas [Master] Peter." He ignored or turned away from anyone who addressed him as "Your Majesty" or "Sire." When two English noblemen came to catch a glimpse of the Tsar of Muscovy working as a laborer, the foreman, in order to point out which one was Peter, called to him "Carpenter Peter, why don't you help your comrades?" Without a word, Peter walked over and put his shoulder beneath a timber which several men were struggling to raise and helped lift it into place.

Peter was happy with the house assigned to him. Several of his comrades lived there with him in the manner of a group of common workmen. Originally, the Tsar's meals were prepared by the staff of the inn at which the Embassy was staying, but this bothered him; he wanted an entirely independent household. He had no fixed hours for meals; he wished to be able to eat whenever he was hungry. It was arranged that he should be supplied with firewood and foodstuffs and then left alone. Thereafter, Peter lighted his own fire and cooked his own meals like a simple carpenter.

But although he was in a foreign land, wearing the clothes and practicing the trade of a laborer, neither Peter nor his countrymen ever forgot who he really was or the awesome power he wielded. His viceroys in Moscow were reluctant to act without his consent, and every post brought him thick bundles of letters asking for guidance, requesting favors or passing on news. Peter himself, in a shipyard a thousand miles from his capital, took far more interest in his own government than ever before. He insisted on being informed of even the smallest details of those public affairs which he had once so happily neglected. He wanted to know everything that was happening: How are the Streltsy behaving? What progress is being made on the two Azov forts? What about the harbor and the forts at Tagonrog? What is happening in Poland? When Shein wrote about a victory over the Turks outside Azov, Peter celebrated by giving a magnificent banquet for the principal merchants of Amsterdam, followed by a concert, a ball and fireworks. When Peter learned of the climactic victory Prince Eugene of Savoy won over the Turks at Zenta, he sent the news to Moscow along with the fact that he had given another banquet to honor this success. He tried to reply every Friday to the letters from Moscow, although, as he wrote to Vinius, "sometimes from weariness, sometimes from absence, somet
imes from Khmelnit
sky [drink], we cannot accomplish it."

On one occasion, Peter's power over two of his subjects, both noblemen serving with the Embassy in' Holland, was stayed. Hearing that these Russians had criticized his behavior, saying that he should make less of a spectacle of himself and act more in keeping with his rank, Peter flew into a fury. Presuming that he wielded in Holland as he did in Russia the power of life and death over his subjects, he ordered the pair placed in irons as a preliminary to their execution. Witsen interfered, asking Peter to remember that he was in Holland, where no execution could take place except by sentence of a Dutch court. Gently, Witsen suggested that the men be freed, but Peter was adamant. Finally, he reluctantly agreed to a compromise which saw the two unfortunates exiled to the farthest overseas colonies of Holland: one to Batavia, the other to Surinam.

Outside the shipyard, Peter's curiosity was insatiable. He wanted to see everything with his own eyes. He visited factories, sawmills, spinning mills, paper mills, workshops, museums, botanical gardens and laboratories. Everywhere he asked, "What is that for? How does it work?" Listening to the explanations, he nodded: "Very good. Very good." He met architects, sculptors and Van der Heyden, the inventor of the fire pump, whom he tried to persuade to come to Russia. He visited the architect Simon Schnvoet, the museum of Jacob de Wilde, and learned to sketch and draw under the direction of Schonebeck. He engraved a plate depicting a tall young man, who closely resembled himself, holding the cross high, standing on the fallen crescent and banners of Islam. At Delft, he visited engineer Baron von Coehorn, the Dutch Vauban, who gave him lessons in the science of fortifications. He visited Dutchmen in their homes, especially Dutchmen engaged in the Russian trade. He became interested in printing when he met the Tessing family, and granted one of the brothers the right to print books in Russian and to introduce them into Russia.

Several times, Peter left the shipyard to visit the lecture hall and dissecting room of Professor Fredrik Ruysch, the renowned professor of anatomy. Ruysch was famous throughout Europe for his ability to preserve parts of the human body and even whole corpses by injection of chemicals. His magnificent laboratory was considered one of the marvels of Holland. One day, Peter was present in front of the body of a small child so perfectly preserved that it seemed alive and smiling. Peter gazed at it a long time, marveling, and finally could not resist leaning forward and kissing the cold forehead. Peter became so interested in surgery that he had difficulty leaving the laboratory; he wanted to stay and observe more. He dined with Ruysch, who advised him on his choice of surgeons to take back to Russia for service with his army and fleet. He was intrigued by anatomy and thereafter considered himself qualified as a surgeon. After all, he was able to ask, how many others in Russia had studied with the famous Ruysch?

In later years, Peter always carried two cases with him, one filled with mathematical instruments to examine and verify construction plans presented to him, the other filled with surgical instruments. He left instructions that he was to be informed whenever an interesting operation was to be performed in a hospital in his vicinity, and he was usually present, frequently lending assistance and acquiring sufficient skill to dissect, to bleed, to draw teeth and to perform minor operations. Those of his servants who fell ill tried to keep it a secret from the Tsar lest he appear at their bedsides with his case of instruments to offer—and even insist on their acceptance of—his services.

In Leyden, Peter visited the famous Dr. Boerhaave, who supervised a celebrated botanical garden. Boerhaave also lectured on anatomy, and when he asked Peter what hour he would like to visit, the Tsar chose six o'clock the following morning. He also visited Boerhaave's dissection theater, where a corpse was lying on a table with some of its muscles exposed. Peter was studying the corpse with fascination when he heard grumbles of disgust from some of his squeamish Russian comrades. Furious, and to the horror of the Dutch, he ordered them to approach the cadaver, bend down and bite off a muscle of the corpse with their teeth.

In Delft, he visited the celebrated naturalist Anton von Leeuwenhoek, inventor of the microscope. Peter spent more than two hours talking with him and looking through the miraculous instrument by which Leeuwenhoek had discovered the existence of spermatozoa and had studied the circulation of blood in fish.

On free days in Amsterdam, Peter wandered the city on foot, watching the citizens bustling by, the carriages rattling over the bridges, the thousands of boats rowing up and down the canals. On market days, the Tsar went to the great open-air market, the Botermarket, where goods of every kind were piled up in the open or under arcades. Standing next to a woman buying cheeses, or a merchant choosing a painting, Peter observed and studied. He especially enjoyed watching street artists performing before a crowd. One day, he watched a celebrated clown juggling while standing on top of a cask, and Peter stepped forward and tried to persuade the man to come back with him to Russia. The juggler refused, saying he was having too much success in Amsterdam. In the market, the Tsar witnessed a traveling dentist who pulled aching teeth with unorthodox instruments such as the bowl of a spoon or the tip of a sword. Peter asked for lessons and absorbed enough to experiment on his servants. He learned to mend his own clothes and, from a cobbler, how to make himself a pair of slippers. In winter, when the skies were eternally gray and the Amstel and the canals were frozen, Peter saw women dressed in furs and woolens and men and boys in long cloaks and scarves go speeding by on ice skates with curved blades. The warmest places, he found, and the places where he was happiest, were the beer houses and taverns where he relaxed with his Dutch and Russian comrades.

Observing Holland's immense prosperity, Peter could not escape asking himself how it was that his own people, with an endless stretch of steppe and forest at their disposition, produced only enough to feed themselves, whereas here in Amsterdam, with its wharves and warehouses and forest of masts, more convertible wealth had been accumulated than in all the expanse of Russia. One reason, Peter knew, was trade, a mercantile economy, the possession of ships; he resolved to dedicate himself to achieving these things for Russia. Another reason was the religious toleration in Holland. Because international trade could not flourish in an atmosphere of narrow religious doctrine or prejudice, Protestant Holland practiced the widest religious toleration in the Europe of that day. It was to Holland that the dissenters fled from James I's Calvinist England in 1606, from there to sail a decade later to Plymouth Bay. It was to Holland also that the French Protestant Huguenots swarmed by the thousands when Louis XTV revoked the Edict of Nantes. Throughout the seventeenth century, Holland served as Europe's intellectual and artistic clearinghouse as well as its commerical center. It was to defend their religious liberties as much as their commercial supremacy that the Dutch resisted so fiercely the aggrandizements of Louis XIV's Catholic France. Peter was intrigued by this atmosphere of religious toleration. He visited many Protestant churches in Holland and asked questions of the pastors.