That there was any large profit in this minute study of ships and sailors may be confidently denied. Monarchs and statesmen have built fleets without knowing the difference between port and starboard. Peter was enjoying himself. But in his wild mind there was inevitably growing a recognition of his position and opportunities. He was now more than twenty years old, and intelligent. It was quite time that he recollected that the destiny of Russia was entrusted to him. Of its internal condition he does not seem to have had the glimmer of an idea, but it suited his passion to believe that Russia needed a fleet, and must first have a sea to put the fleet on. The powerful Swedes dominated the Baltic, so he turned south and decided to take Azoff, on the Black Sea, from the Tatars. He may have known that the country was disgusted and scandalised at his idleness, and that Sophia watched eagerly from her convent.
His expedition against Azoff was crudely conceived and a total failure. He saw at least that he and his amateur foreign friends were inadequate, and on his return to Moscow, he sent abroad for skilled men: sailors and shipwrights from Holland and England, soldiers and engineers from Austria and Prussia. Some came, and many of these, when they saw the crowds and the country, returned. All drank copiously. But Peter’s mighty energy was roused, and in a remarkably short time he had a sea-going fleet built on the Don, ready to co-operate with his land-attack upon Azoff. He took it, and returned in triumph to Moscow.
The one vague imperial idea in his wild and much-abused brain fed on his success and grew larger. Russia must have a mighty fleet, like Holland and England, and must learn this western art of doing things. He sent fifty officers abroad for education. But he must see these wonderful lands himself—he must know everything himself—and he began the preparations for the famous melodramatic journey which shocked Russia, and scandalised Europe, and undoubtedly brought great profit to him and his country. Boyish in all things, he would go incognito. Russian historians have invented a score of interpretations of every weird action of the hero. He hated pomp and ceremony, it is said; but the truth is that he sulked heavily when he was not recognised. The simple fact is that he had a boyish, impulsive, muddled mind, its great strength and originality marred by a wicked education and by debauch. He would pretend that it was a deputation of Russian envoys, and he made a sort of prince of his friend Lefort, giving him a suite of forty-four gentlemen and servants. He would hide his own figure—he was six feet eight inches in height, and wore disguises that would attract attention at a hundred yards—in the crowd under the modest title of Peter Mikhailoff, a non-commissioned officer of the Preobrajenshote regiment.
The journey was to start in February, after the carnival revels, about which a word may be said later. But a plot against his life was discovered at the last moment, and he delayed to punish it. A former servant of Sophia, named Tsikler, and some of the streltsui were implicated in it. The implication of the Miloslavskis brought on one of those blind rages in which he behaved as one demented. He had the body of Ivan Miloslavski, which had rotted in the grave for twelve years, dug up and brought on a sledge, drawn by twelve hogs, to Preobrajenshote. There it was placed, in an open coffin, under the scaffold on which Tsikler and his chief accomplice were hacked to pieces, so that the blood of the traitors might splash upon what was left of the mouldering remains of Sophia’s relative.
Leaving a large army to overawe Moscow, he set out in March, 1697. The journey has been described so often that only a few details concerning his behaviour need be noted here. From Sweden, where his incognito was respected with a cynical correctness which infuriated him, he passed to Germany, where the Elector of Brandenburg was eager to conciliate him. His conduct was rather worse than that of an undergraduate on a holiday, as he did not even know the elements of polite behaviour. The Elector sent his Master of Ceremonies, a grave and learned gentleman, to greet Peter at his lodging, since he refused to be recognised on the ship by the prince sent to receive him. Peter snatched Johann von Besser’s powdered wig and flung it away. “Who is this?” he demanded sullenly; and, when the old gentleman’s functions were explained to him, he broke out: “Let him bring me a wench, then.” Later, when a noble came to announce that the Elector could not call upon him, Peter, drinking heavily and slobbering over his friend Lefort, started angrily to his feet, grasped the noble by the throat, and almost suffocated him. In the street he met a lady of the court and startled her with a gruff “Halt”; then he curiously examined the watch at her wrist and let her go. One night, when he supped with the Elector, a servant dropped a plate. Peter sprang up, sword in hand, livid with excitement; and he was not pacified until the servant was flogged. They had, in the city, a wheel on which criminals were broken, but they protested, in answer to Peter’s wish to see it work, that they were without a criminal. “Let them have one of my men,” he said coolly.
His adventures at Koenigsberg would precede him, and he made his way loutishly from court to court until he reached Holland. Every one knows the idyllic picture of Peter the Great serving a long apprenticeship to shipbuilding in the village of Saardam. It is another exploded myth of our childhood. Peter remained there only a week, staying at the village inn (where he seduced the maid), smoking large pipes and drinking large pots with the boatmen. That he used an adze is certain, but there was little romance. His tall, slovenly form, very untidily dressed in Dutch fashion, attracted the stones of the little boys, and he moved on. He appeared in more polite quarters in a brown overcoat with horn buttons, coarse darned socks, and dirty shoes.
Some one suggested that he would see better shipbuilding at London, and he crossed, and bewildered London. He had a fine brown skin and large handsome eyes and thick hair, but, apart from his habitual untidiness of dress, he had a nervous malady which caused a twitching of the limbs and a remarkable habit of grimacing. He constantly took for it a powder made of the flesh and wings of the magpie. At table his habits were atrocious. In fact, he and his servant Menshikoff discovered a little tavern on Tower Hill where he could smoke his pipe and drink peppered brandy as if he were at home. At Deptford, where he lived in Evelyn’s house while he studied shipping, he made such filth and damage that Evelyn estimated the repairs at 1,750 dollars. Here, as elsewhere, his morals were notorious. Professor Morfill politely observes in his “History of Russia”: “The great monarch was somewhat irregular in these matters, it must be confessed.” The phrase would have sent the great monarch into convulsions of horse-laughter. There is grave reason to believe that such irregularities were not his worst vices.
The redeeming feature of his journey was that he learned a vast amount in those few months. Much of his learning was a result of sheer nervous instability and did more harm than good. He studied dentistry—the dentistry of the seventeenth century—and took implements home with him, to the terror of his friends. When his valet one day complained to him that his wife refused to discharge her conjugal duty on the ground of tooth-ache, the Tsar had the woman brought to him, and he extracted a tooth. He gathered also a box of surgical instruments, and often used them. On one occasion he tapped a poor woman of Moscow, who suffered from dropsy, and caused her death. He pried into everything, rushing from place to place and working with prodigious energy; though it is said that he ended every day of his life intoxicated. What came of it all for the development of Russia we shall see in the next chapter.
The voyage came to an abrupt end at Vienna in the late summer. There had, he heard, been a new revolt of the streltsui. General Shein had put it down, and severely punished the rebels, but Peter decided to return to Moscow. On the day after his return the nobles came respectfully to Preobrajenshote to do homage and share a banquet. Peter, half drunk, called for scissors, and soon the beards of his nobles—the beards which an almost sacred tradition imposed in Russia—were falling upon the floor. Was it a drunken man’s joke? Peter did far worse things in liquor. He cut right and left with his sword: he caned an offending servant until he died; he ran his sword through an abbot who offended him; he even one day knocked down and trampled on his intimate friend Lefort. But this was not a jest. The ukase went forth that in future Russians must shave. He was going to westernise Russia.
Some Russian historians, seeking to palliate the horror of what is to follow, apply to it in some measure the idea of reform. The streltsui were in the way of the reform of the army. They were undisciplined, obsolete, incompetent. Their last revolt had given him the right to destroy them, and he would. But there was much more than this. He was convinced that Sophia was at the bottom of the revolt, and he would make a terrible inquiry.