The Shipwreck Cannibals

by Adam Nightingale

  The young tsar had already spent time in Sweden and the Dutch Republic. He had worked in the shipyards of the Dutch East India Company. He had studied under the master shipbuilder Class Paul. He had met with William of Orange. The Dutch welcomed him. They played the same game the English would play of knowing precisely who he was but pretending that they didn’t know until it was obvious that he wanted them to know; then they would formally acknowledge his royal presence and accommodate him. Occasionally the tsar’s anonymity would be taken at face value to his detriment. When in Riga, Peter the Great offended the Swedes when he paid a suspicious amount of attention to their ships and tried to sketch their fortifications. He was escorted from the harbour under armed guard. Whether the authorities were genuinely unaware of the tsar’s identity or feigned ignorance in order to clip his wings is not certain. It was an error that they later would pay for in blood. But such confrontations were the exception during Peter the Great’s tour of Europe. The tsar was accommodated. He was entertained and indulged. Generally speaking, his hosts were charmed and intrigued by him. They were also somewhat patronising and condescending regarding him. Peter Alekseevich could call himself what he wanted, see whatever and whomever he liked and study what he pleased. It made no difference. He might dress like a Western European and assimilate its wisdom but wasn’t he just another gift-wrapped barbarian whose reach exceeded his grasp? It was a colossal misjudgement. Peter the Great returned to Russia with a harvest of maritime knowledge, experience and equipment. The English even gave him a ship, the Royal Transport, one of the best in Europe. During his tour the tsar would also visit Germany, Austria, Poland and Italy. He would utilise every scrap of information acquired. He would spend money and blood resculpting his vast land-hemmed nation into a formidable naval power. And every kingdom and administration that had given him assistance, even those that would technically consider him an ally, would regret the indulgence that they had once shown him.

  Peter Alekseevich was 9 years old when he was crowned Peter I in 1682. The first decade or so of the young tsar’s reign was a compromise necessitated by the factions that sought to control the gigantic country. Peter was forced to rule in name only alongside his feeble half-brother Ivan under the governance of his indifferent half-sister Sophia, who was content to cede all her authority to her lover. It was a violent and divided season, but by the time Peter was 22 years old he had wrested power back from his sister and had had her exiled.

  The young Peter the Great was a progressive; openly contemptuous of ossified institutions. He was wild and hedonistic. He was arguably agoraphobic. He had a love of the grotesque; dwarves were part of his entourage and he was obsessed with deformed curiosities. He was arrogant, yet there was a humility of industry about him. It was important to the tsar that he mastered any task he might order a subordinate to do. He was a man completely at odds with the heritage bequeathed him. The Russia of the late seventeenth century was a superstitious, backward and feudal nation. In the minds of most Western Europeans, Russia had barely trotted out of the Middle Ages. Peter the Great was an avid student of European ideas, architecture, fashion and warfare. He was determined to modernise Russia, use his formidable character to drag it, wailing if necessary, into a new era and command the attention and respect of the nations he had worshipped from afar. He forcibly reformed many of Russia’s great institutions. He changed the Russian calendar to make it consistent with that of Western Europe. He banned the wearing of beards; on the surface a flippant reform but one that struck at the heart of the church where facial hair took on a totemic significance. He sent the sons of aristocrats to Western Europe to be educated. But Peter the Great understood that, for Russia to make any impression on the world stage, it was essential that it establish a credible and powerful naval presence in the Baltic. Without a navy, trade would be impossible. Sweden controlled the Baltic and, by extension, trade in that part of Europe. Sweden needed to be dealt with.

  Before it could tackle Sweden on the water, Russia had to establish a defensible port. Russia, for all its size, was obstructed by its neighbours from creating any coastal foothold from which it might launch any prospective naval endeavour. Access to the Black Sea and the Caucasus was controlled by the Turks who occupied territory essential to Peter the Great’s naval designs. In 1694 Peter the Great went to war with Turkey. The tsar’s objective was to take the citadel of Azov on the River Don. Peter the Great laid siege to the citadel. He was defeated. The crucial ingredient in Russia’s failure was their inability to stop the Turks resupplying Azov by water. In 1696 Peter the Great ordered a galley fleet to be constructed. It was a crude and basic flotilla but the fleet managed to stop Turkish resupply, allowing Peter the Great to besiege Azov for a second time without fear of relief. Azov fell. The tsar now had a scrap of land and a stretch of water from which he could start to build a better navy. A year after the fall of Azov, Peter began his tour of Europe.

  On 30 July 1700 Russia signed a peace treaty with Turkey. One of the conditions of peace was that Russia retained Azov. Less than a month after securing peace with Turkey, Peter the Great declared war on Sweden.

  The tsar did not believe in easing his people into change gradually. There was a new war with a formidable enemy, masters of an element alien to Russia. Building work began on the new capital of St Petersburg, an act of wilfulness that had a maritime logic to it but made little practical sense. The site of the new capital was marshland but situated on the River Neva. The Neva gave Russia entrance to the Gulf of Finland and by extension the rest of Europe. The tsar’s great building project should not have worked but St Petersburg rose, stone by stone, from the swamp, built on the corpses of conscript labour, seemingly forced into existence by a tsar’s will. Peter the Great would apply the same determination to building his navy.

  The pretext for war with Sweden was tenuous to say the least. Peter the Great elected to take offence at the Swedes for escorting him from Riga under armed guard. War would be reparation for slighted honour. A second reason mooted for war was the reclamation of land that Sweden had taken between 1598 and1613, an age of internal anarchy exploited by Russia’s neighbours, known as the Time of Troubles. Peter the Great believed that he had timed his war perfectly. Sweden’s king, Charles XII, was a youth and there were rumours of internal divisions. The War of Spanish Succession meant that the major powers of Western Europe were unlikely to interfere in a Baltic contest of arms. But the war went disastrously for Russia in its early stages. Peter the Great had formed a coalition with Poland and Denmark. The alliance collapsed. With a force of 40,000, Peter tried to take Narva, a Swedish-held port that would have given the tsar entry to the Baltic. The Russians were humiliated by a numerically inferior force. Around 8,000 of the tsar’s soldiers were killed and 150 Russian guns were captured. Narva remained in Swedish hands. Sweden invaded Russia. The armies of Charles XII intended to march on Moscow. Russia’s twin saving graces were its brutal weather, which destroyed supply lines and killed Russians and Swedes alike, and the immense Russian population from which Peter the Great could replace the dead lost at Narva and those killed by the elements. It bought the tsar enough time to regalvanise his forces and rethink his strategy. The tsar delivered a hammer blow to the Swedes at Polatva. It was a great victory but the tsar needed to duplicate his success on water for the war against the Swedes to mean anything at all. The naval victory Peter the Great was looking for arrived in 1714 at Hango Head.

  The Battle of Hango Head took place near the Cape of Hango in Finland. The battle was a galley action. Swedish ships were tricked into shallow waters where they could not manoeuvre. Flat-bottomed Russian galleys hemmed the Swedes in. Peter the Great’s forces boarded the Swedish vessels and took the ships plank by bloody plank in a gruelling bout of hand-to-hand fighting. Although gunpowder was expended, Hango Head was about as primitive a sea victory as Russia could have won, the methods of combat not dissimilar from those employed in the ancient battle of Salamis between the Persians and
the Greeks. The Russians lost more men than the Swede’s as they secured their victory but Hango Head was an arterial wound for Sweden. The Swedes lost two sloops, a frigate and half a dozen galleys, all taken as prizes by the Russians. The greater humiliation was the capture of Rear Admiral Nilsson Ehrenskiold. Peter the Great would boast that not even the generals prosecuting the war against Louis XIV had taken such a prestigious prisoner. The tsar sent news to St Petersburg to prepare a triumph for the new fleet’s return. Peter the Great returned home from battle and promoted himself to vice admiral of the Russian Fleet.

  When he undertook the task of building a navy, Peter the Great was trying to create something out of nothing, a thing that had no precedent in Russian history. Russians did not know the sea or care to understand it. Foreign help was essential to any Russian success in the Baltic. And although nobody would ever credit the tsar with authentic humility, he was pragmatic enough to know that he needed to import expertise if he was ever to accomplish his great design. Aside from gathering experience and information, Peter the Great’s trip to Europe had also been something of a headhunting expedition. The tsar was searching for talent, harvesting the best maritime hands and minds he could persuade to join him in Russia for his great adventure. The call had been put out. Skilled foreigners were welcome in Russia. And among the many foreigners that would serve in Peter the Great’s navy was a haunted shipwreck cannibal trying to escape his past.

  6

  Babel

  John Deane had been invited to serve in the Russian navy. He had taken the offer to distance himself from the stigma of Boon Island. There was no real monetary incentive for him to serve but he stayed in Russia for nearly a decade. Few foreigners that served in Peter the Great’s navy continued to serve for financial reward. Although the prospect of money might have attracted them in the first place, it became evident after a while that the pay was appalling compared to that offered in the navies of Western Europe. Soldiers of fortune stayed with Peter the Great largely because they had nowhere else better to go. The mercenaries so vital to the tsar’s success were mainly exiles of one sort or another. John Deane carried the cross of scandal, but among the other human flotsam that washed up on Russia’s shore were: John Perry, a one-armed sailor who had suffered court martial in England after the loss of a fire ship; Charles Van Werdan, a Swede who had turned against his own people; the brutal Italian Count de Buss; the drunkard Captain Black; the Norwegian privateer Vice Admiral Cruys; the incompetent Captain Little, who would later taint John Deane with the scent of his own scandal; and Peter Lacey, whom Deane would denounce in print as ‘an Irish papist’ who ‘perpetrated innumerable devastations’. John Deane was a stigmatised English patriot who would find himself serving with many of his nation’s natural enemies – the Dutch, the Irish and innumerable Jacobite Englishmen hounded out of their own country after the fall of James II.

  Peter the Great had fashioned a utopia for the gifted and dispossessed of Western Europe. As far as the tsar was concerned, he had delivered a long overdue rebuke to Russia for its poor treatment of foreigners. Prior to Peter the Great’s reforms, foreigners that had been resident in Russia’s former capital had been forced to live apart in an area just outside of Moscow called the German Suburb. Now they were welcome in St Petersburg, their status – at least on the surface – radically elevated. But the reality was that Peter the Great had inadvertently created something of a snake pit. His foreigners would mistrust and turn on one another with regularity, and bloody consequences. The lion’s share of Russians serving in Peter the Great’s navy, who were in theory supposed to learn from their foreign teachers and replicate their knowledge, were envious and contemptuous of their tutors. Many careers and lives would be broken on the wheel of petty grievance and old tribal enmities. Yet somehow the navy worked, so long as Peter the Great was its beating heart, and for a long season John Deane would prosper as he served among its ranks.

  John Deane had entered service in the Russian navy by 1714, the year of Hango Head. After the battle, the fortunes of foreign mercenaries were briefly favourable. Lieutenant Dunlop, an Irishman, was personally awarded 100 roubles by Peter the Great for volunteering to transport the tsar from ship to shore during a hard gale. Vice Admiral Cruys, who had been subject to a court martial the previous year, was recalled from exile in Kazan and made vice president of the College of Admiralty. Three Swedish vessels crewed by privateers were captured. Three ships arrived from England. But a 60-gun Russian warship exploded when it was struck by lightning during transportation across land. Unlike many of the tsar’s foreigners, John Deane did not fight at Hango Head.

  When the apocalyptic Russian winter fell, the rivers would freeze, the new harbours would become unnavigable and campaigning would cease until the spring thaw. This was a time to repair ships, drill crew and experiment with innovations. It was also a time to tacitly admit error and remove failing technology. In early 1714 poorly-designed boarding bridges that had been attached to Russian warships were taken away. In February the boarding bridges were sent to the port of Archangel by sledge. John Deane had not fought at Hango Head because he was part of the retinue sent to Archangel. Among the others were a mixture of under officers, lieutenants and seamen. Waiting for them at Archangel were four newly constructed ships: the Uriel, the Salafiel, the Varakiel and the Egudal. John Deane was given command of the Egudal.

  Deane spent most of 1715 in Archangel. Elsewhere the war could be measured in raids, skirmishes and building plans. The Swedes shelled Revel Bay. The Russians responded in kind. There was something of a manpower shortage among the Russians and ships lay in haven for the absence of competent sailors. Peter the Great made preparations to turn Rager-Wik into a haven. The Russians encountered an English and Dutch squadron under the command of Sir John Norris, a great friend to the Russians but not necessarily a military ally. Civilities were exchanged. The controversial Count de Buss, who had committed atrocities on Dutch flyboats carrying neutral flags, died and was replaced as rear admiral of the galleys by Captain Commodore Ismaivitz.

  In September 1715 John Deane was ordered to sail the Egudal from Archangel to the Baltic. The captains of the Salafiel, the Varakiel and the Uriel would do the same. Accompanying them was a transport yacht given as a present to the tsar by William of Orange.

  John Deane suffered an immediate setback. The Egudal sprang a leak. Deane was forced to return. The Uriel, the Salafiel and the Varakiel reached the safety of Norway and Copenhagen and wintered there. The royal yacht fared badly. Near the Swedish coast the yacht was cast away and lost. The Egudal was repaired and made seaworthy. John Deane set sail later than he would have liked. He set sail later than was reasonably safe to do so. Harsher than any New England winter, the Baltic elements were murderous at this time of year and Deane would pay the penalty in frozen flesh. As he sailed on, the furies of Boon Island raked his boat as the ice and the wind slaughtered his crew one by one. By the time he had delivered his vessel, half of his men were dead. But Deane was alive. For the second time he had proved that the cold could not kill him. His ship was intact. There would be no censure. He had obeyed orders under difficult conditions. This was Russia. The loss of life was just one of those things. Winter kills. John Deane had done nothing wrong. He would be allowed to progress.

  Half of John Deane’s crew froze to death transporting a Russian warship from Archangel to the Baltic. Illustration by Stephen Dennis

  The year 1716 began as the years always did, with promotions. But the initial military objective of the New Year was to coordinate the army and the navy. Part of the fleet was stationed at Revel. Under the command of the Dutchman Captain Commodore Sievers, as soon as the weather allowed, the Revel squadron was to meet up with the rest of the fleet and their Danish allies and sail to Copenhagen. The Russians and the Danish intended to advance together through Scania but the squadron discovered that the Swedish fleet was waiting near Copenhagen. Sievers and company returned to Revel. The Russian fleet that h
ad been sailing in the North Sea gathered at Flekkero, Norway. John Deane sailed into Flekkero in April. Sievers arrived in May. Deane set sail for Copenhagen with the squadron on 27 May. Two days later the squadron met the British fleet, commanded by Sir John Norris. The combined force sailed to Copenhagen.

  Rifts and fatal breaches of etiquette were rife in the Russian navy at this time. There was a mutiny about pay among seamen and under officers; eighty men deserted and fled to Holland. A Dutchman, Captain Black, saluted Sir John Norris by striking his pendent at the same time that the Englishman struck his own pendent. From a Russian perspective this was considered highly insulting to their English ally. In Holland it was not considered insulting at all. In Russia the insult carried the death sentence. The situation was further complicated by the fact that Captain Black was drunk when he committed his faux pas. Black was subject to a court martial. He escaped capital punishment but was confined at Revel where he drank himself to death.