to
a little boat laid up on the banks of a canal which ran through his
pleasure-grounds. It had been built by a Dutch carpenter for the
amusement of his father. This boat had a keel,--a new thing to him,--and
attracted his curiosity, Lefort explained to him that it was constructed
to sail against the wind. So the carpenter was summoned, with orders to
rig the boat and sail it on the Moskva, the river which runs through
Moscow. Peter was delighted; and he soon learned to manage it himself.
Then a yacht was built, manned by two men, and it was the delight of
Peter to take the helm himself. Shortly five other vessels were built to
navigate Lake Peipus; and the ambition of Peter was not satisfied until
a still larger vessel was procured at Archangel, in which he sailed on a
cruise upon the Frozen Ocean. His taste for navigation became a passion;
and once again he embarked on the Frozen Ocean in a ship, determined to
go through all the gradations of a sailor's life. As he began as drummer
in Lefort's regiment, so he first served as a common drudge who swept
the cabin in a Dutch vessel; then he rose to the rank of a servant who
kept up the fire and lighted the pipe of the Dutch skipper; then he was
advanced to the duty of unfurling and furling the sails,--and so on,
until he had mastered the details of a sailor's life.

Why did he condescend to these mean details? The ambition was planted in
him to build a navy under his own superintendence. Wherefore a navy,
when he had no seaports? But he meant to have seaports. He especially
needed a fleet on the Volga to keep the Turks and Tartars in awe, and
another in the Gulf of Finland to protect his territories from the
Swedes. We shall see how subsequently, and in due time, he conquered the
Baltic from the Swedes and the Euxine from the Turks. He did not seem to
have an ambition for indefinite territorial aggrandizement, but simply
to extend his empire to these seas for the purpose of having a free
egress and ingress to it by water. He could not Europeanize his empire
without seaports, for unless Russia had these, she would remain a
barbarous country, a vast Wallachia or Moldavia. The expediency and the
necessity of these ports were most obvious. But how was he to get them?
Only by war, aggressive war. He would seize what he wanted, since he
could attain his end in no other way.

Now, I do not propose to whitewash this enlightened but unscrupulous
robber. On no recognized principl