the governors, out of spiteful jealousy, took on themselves to issue proclamations forbidding all intercourse with them, or any sale of provisions. The heat brought on diseases: starvation aided the fatal work, and by the end of eight months the twelve hundred colonists had dwindled to a hundred and fifty, whom Paterson brought home. He had lost his wife and child, and was very ill himself, taking many months to recover the fatal fever. Fifteen hundred colonists arrived just after their departure, to go through the like miseries, and three hundred Campbells came out a little later; but the Spaniards, finding that the unhappy colony was entirely neglected, began to attack it, seized a ship wrecked on the coast, and made the crew prisoners. The company sent a petition to the King by Lord Basil Hamilton, but William declined to receive it. Lord Basil at last knelt suddenly before him and forced it on him. "The young man is too bold," said William; "if a man can be too bold in the cause of his country." However, the King, unwilling to embroil himself with Spain, or to offend the English merchants, would do nothing; and the Spaniards, attacking New Edinburgh from the Pacific side, besieged it for six weeks, during which the colonists held out gallantly, but were obliged to surrender at last, when so much reduced that they had not strength among them to weigh the anchor of the ship that carried them away, without the help of the Spanish victors. It was in these days that England had a strange, uncouth visitor. Muscovy, as Russia was then usually called, was scarcely known, except as a savage and cold country, whence furs might be obtained, and merchants came to the great German fairs. Queen Elizabeth had had an interchange of civilities with the Tzar, Ivan the Terrible, but had happily demurred to his request that she would send him a wife. Since his time there had been a great revolution, in which the house of Romanoff had come to the throne. They were of Polish origin, and thus had more affinity with the other sovereigns of Europe than their predecessors; but the Church of Muscovy had been an offshoot from Constantinople, preserving the original Liturgy and Scriptures as translated into Slavonic by Cyril and Methodius, and were not in communion with the Western Church. The population of the north-west was Slavonic, beyond, lay free, wild Tartars, and to the south, Cossacks. The title Tzar appears to be a Slavonic word meaning Lord, the same as the last syllable of Nebuchadnezzar; but it was latterly spelt Czar, confused with Cæsar, and supposed to be equivalent to Emperor. The Romanoffs have always been a remarkable family; but there is among them a certain hereditary affection of the brain, so that instances of great ability and of imbecility seem to occur in each generation, and likewise of insanity, sometimes ferocious; and there have been very few members of the house who have reached a prosperous old age. САМЕО XVII, Peter the Great. САМЕО Peter's Accession. 1697. The Tzar Alexis died in 1676, leaving a numerous family. The eldest son, Feodor, reigned after him, and died in 1681. The next brother, Ivan, was imbecile, and his sister Sophia assumed the chief power as guardian of her brothers; but when she found that the third brother, Peter, was extremely able and restless, she tried first to occupy him with idle and licentious diversions, and gave him a set of young idle comrades, who were called Tzar Peter's amusers. His high spirit however led them all; he made them practise military exercises, and study hard with him, and, though they all occasionally had a wild and rude orgie of revelry, on the whole they lived an abstemious life, and accustomed themselves to hardship. At seventeen, Peter resolved to take his place, and going up to his sister, who was taking the lead in a state procession, he commanded her to leave it to him. She refused, and he withdrew for the time; but a warning reached him that she was sending the Strelitz Guards to seize him. He escaped to a very strong convent, with his mother and wife, and thence sent messengers to summon the boyars, or nobles, who had become disgusted with Sophia's government, and willingly joined him. Sophia was sent to a convent, where she spent the remainder of her life. This was in 1689, and from that time began the sole rule of Peter; his brother Ivan, though called Czar, being a mere name till his death in 1696. Peter was a tall, powerful man, with eyes full of the fire of genius and enterprise, a wonderful power of energy and ability, but together with the intellect and designs of an Alfred or Charlemagne, he had the habits and manners of a barbarian, and, at times, the temper of a madman. He was certainly the most extraordinary person then living in Europe, and the fixed design of his whole life was to lift his country into the rank of civilized nations, and make it a power in Europe. In the first design he half succeeded; the second he entirely accomplished. After the first three years, during which he was establishing his rule, he began his improvements. His navy was his first thought, and this required the more remarkable effort on his part, because he had as curious an antipathy to water as if he had been an evil spirit. It is said that when a little child of five years old he had been asleep in his mother's lap in a carriage, and was suddenly wakened by the noise of a waterfall, close to which the road lay. The shock and terror brought on a severe illness, and he was afterwards seized with a convulsive shuddering whenever he was obliged to pass the smallest stream; but he cured this by resolutely plunging into cold water every morning, though it may be feared that he did not continue the habit after his aversion was conquered! His father, Alexis, had obtained Dutch shipbuilders for the sake of the trade with Persia on the Caspian and the Volga, but in a revolt some of these had been killed, and others had contrived to cross Persia and reach the East Indian settlements; but one carpenter, named Brandt, was still in Russia. One day, laid up in the curiosities of the summer palace, he came upon a decayed old sloop, and asked his mathematical teacher, a German named Timmerman, why it was so unlike all the vessels he had ever seen on the river Moskwa. Timmerman explained that it was an English craft, meant for sea-going, with Isails or oars when the wind was adverse. Peter was full of eagerness to make trial of it, but it required refitting, and with some difficulty Brandt was hunted up. The sloop was put in order, and launched on one of the Russian lakes, where Peter, to the terror of his mother, took a trip in her, and learnt to steer her himself. Brandt built three more vessels, and in one of them the Tzar embarked at Archangel, escorted by a Dutch man-of-war, and took an experimental voyage on the Arctic Ocean, learning every detail of the management of the ship. The original boat went by the name of the Little Grandsire. His next endeavour was to raise a disciplined army, and here he went greatly by the advice of a Swiss gentleman named Lefort, whose wanderings had brought him to Russia. Though without more special military training than through having, for a few years, served as a volunteer in the Dutch army, he had the general knowledge of an educated and able man, and was able to assist the Tzar materially in forming a regular army. The boyars had been used each to bring their own tumultuous followers, and no one would obey any other less noble, or with a shorter pedigree than himself. Peter's brother, Feodor, had burnt all the genealogical trees, and caused the Patriarch to pronounce an anathema upon any person who revived disputes on family precedence, and Peter disposed of the remaining scruples by entering the army as a private, and working upwards through all the grades, scrupulously obeying his superior officer in each. His chief general was a Scotsman named Gordon, and Lefort was appointed Admiral of the Fleet that was coming into existence on the great rivers. Army and navy together took Asof, and obtained the command of its sea. Gordon was an excellent officer, and obtained the services of a great number of the Huguenots whom Louis XIV.'s persecution had driven from their homes. From Gordon and Lefort, Peter derived his ideas of the habits of the civilized nations, and he was determined to force his people into them. Church and people were alike almost barbarous, and they were to be raised by the strong hand of one as savage as themselves in all but intellect and energy, subject to the most furious passions, and of such an excitable constitution as to be liable at the least shock, even at the sudden appearance of a black beetle, to fall into frightful convulsions. In 1697, he sent out sixty of the young boyars of Lefort's regiment to Venice and Leghorn to study navigation, forty to Holland to study shipbuilding, and others to Germany to enter the armies there and learn discipline and strategy. By and by he resolved to learn these same lessons personally, and he announced his intention of travelling in Europe. His people were aghast; no Tzar had ever dreamt of such a CAMEO Shipbuilding. proceeding before, and the Russian despised as much as he disliked foreign customs, looking, moreover, on all who did not belong to the orthodox Eastern Church as no better than heathens. His wife, Eudoxia, to whom he had been married at sixteen, joined in the outcry, and so offended him that he entirely separated from her. There was even a conspiracy for assassinating him and replacing Sophia on the throne, but this he disconcerted so effectually that he was able safely to leave the Empire in the hands of a regent, Prince Romanodosky. Lefort was to travel as an ambassador to the German Courts, with a suite of two hundred boyars, in the national garb-long caftans, and tall sable-skin caps with pearls and diamonds, scimitars by their sides, and thick beards. Only Lefort and Peter wore the ordinary dress of Western gentlemen; and the Tzar, calling himself Timmerman, had only two personal attendants besides a dwarf. The party started in the April of 1697, and travelled first through Esthonia and Livonia, provinces long disputed between Muscovy, Poland and Sweden, but at that time held by the last mentioned. Peter wished to survey the fortifications of Riga; but the governor, probably guessing who Herr Timmerman was, refused, and he was so much affronted as to declare that he hoped one day to refuse the same thing to the King of Sweden. There was an alarm that the Swedes meant to make him prisoner, and he crossed the Dwina in a boat in great danger from floating masses of ice, and only joined the embassy again at Mittau. At Konigsberg he was received with great state by the Elector Frederick William, and his suite was much admired, especially a Georgian prince in the Persian dress. There were great revellings, which were only too congenial to Peter, and on some remonstrance of Lefort, he rushed on his friend with his sword, but was withheld from doing any harm, and afterwards expressed great contrition, saying, Alas! while I want to reform my subjects, I cannot reform myself!" He does not seem to have here preserved his incognito; but he afterwards hurried on before his attendants to Holland; and there, in the clothes of a Dutch skipper, repaired to the village of Saardam, the chief building-dock of the Dutch navy. Here he took a small lodging, where he cooked his own meals and mended his own clothes. He bought a boat, and made the sail himself, and after watching the work in the dockyards he got taken on as a carpenter, by the name of Peter Michaeloff-Peter Bas (the present American boss) was what the workmen called him, and he lived on good terms with them. Some memorials of his work are still preserved at Amsterdam, and there is in especial a perfect model of a Dutch house with all its furniture, which was made for him, but, for some reason, never sent. He also took lessons in surgery and anatomy, besides going to the Hague to have an interview with William III., in one of whose yachts he passed over to England, where, to be nearer the building-yards, he hired Mr. Evelyn's house at Says Court, and there pursued his studies, learning astronomy, mathematical, principles of ship-building and navigation. An engineer, who attended him constantly, affirmed that there was nothing belonging to a ship-of-war to which he had not laid his hand, from the casting of cannon to the twisting of cables; and he also studied the niceties of watch-making. Poor Evelyn, however, was not equally delighted with his inmates. His servant wrote that the Muscovites were "right nasty," and they treated the beautiful house and gardens like the semi-savages they were; so that, when Sir Christopher Wren and Mr. London, the King's gardener, surveyed the place afterwards, they obtained a grant of £150 for damages from the Treasury. There was a splendid holly-hedge, cherished for years by Evelyn, through which Peter delighted in driving a wheel-barrow. Peter went to the English Church, and was very curious about the Quakers. He visited Archbishop Tenison, went to Oxford, looked into both Houses of Parliament, and was especially delighted with the Tower, alike with the Armoury and the Mint. He took a good many Englishmen, both men of science and artificers, into his service; and, at the end of his visit, was indulged with a naval review and sham fight, which delighted him so much, that he exclaimed, with considerable truth, that an English Admiral was happier than a Muscovite Tzar. William III. gave him a beautiful yacht called the Royal Transport, so perfectly fitted that he was in raptures, and he sent it off to Archangel with a freight of artisans to teach his subjects. In return he gave the King a splendid diamond wrapped in a greasy piece of brown paper. Perhaps William did not object as much as some sovereigns would have done. Peter then went to Vienna, and had an interview with the Emperor Leopold, both standing the whole time to satisfy Leopold's punctilious notions. The Tzar intended to have gone on to Venice, but letters from Moscow informed him of an outbreak of the Strelitzes to restore Sophia, on the plea that they did not know whether he were dead or alive. General Gordon had put this down in a sharp fight, in which three thousand were killed, after which he hanged every tenth man of the survivors, so that all was quiet by the time the Tzar suddenly appeared at Moscow before any one knew that he was on his way home. He was beginning his new reforms, when, to his great grief, death deprived him of Lefort, hitherto his right hand, with whose advice probably he might have proceeded more judiciously and less violently in his reforms. He made the calendar begin from the 1st of January instead of the Ist of September; he established a post-office, had roads made, built hospitals, and did all he could to force his unwilling country into conformity with the rest of Europe. Especially, he insisted that all CAMEO Peter in England. 1697. |