every officer of the sea or land service should enter in the lowest rank
of his profession, that he might obtain a practical knowledge of every
task or manoeuvre which it was his duty to see properly executed; and he
felt that his nobility might scarcely be brought to submit to what in
their eyes would be a degradation, except by the personal example of the
czar himself. Meanwhile he had not been negligent of the other arm of
war; for a number of Dutch and Venetian workmen were employed in
building gunboats and small ships of war at Voronitz, on the river Don,
intended to secure the command of the Sea of Azof, and to assist in
capturing the strong town of Azof, then held by the Turks. The
possession of this place was of great importance, from its situation at
the mouth of the Don, commanding access to the Mediterranean Sea. His
first military attempts were accordingly directed against it, and he
succeeded in taking it in 1696.

In the spring of the ensuing year, the empire being tranquil and the
young czar's authority apparently established on a safe footing, he
determined to travel into foreign countries, to view with his own eyes,
and become personally and practically familiar with the arts and
institutions of refined nations. There was a grotesqueness in his manner
of executing this design, which has tended, more probably than even its
real merit, to make it one of the common-places of history. Every child
knows how the Czar of Muscovy worked in the dock-yard of Saardam in
Holland, as a common carpenter. In most men this would have been
affectation; and perhaps there was some tinge of that weakness in the
earnestness with which Peter handled the axe, obeyed the officers of the
dock-yard, and in all points of outward manners and appearance, put
himself on a level with the shipwrights who were earning their daily
bread. It seems, however, to have been the turn of Peter's mind always
to begin at the beginning; a sound maxim, though here, perhaps, pushed
beyond reasonable bounds. And his abode and occupations in Holland
formed only part of an extensive plan. On quitting Russia he sent sixty
young Russians to Venice and Leghorn to learn ship-building and
navigation, and especially the construction and management of galleys
moved by oars, which were so much used by the Venetian republic. Others
he sent into Holland, with similar instructions; others into Germany, to
study the art of war, and make themselves well acquainted