Island of the Blue Foxes
Page 3
PETER SPENT FOUR MONTHS working in the Amsterdam shipyards and touring the other cities of the Dutch Republic. On November 16, 1697, the frigate Peter was working on was launched to great ceremony and then presented to him by the VOC as a gift. The ship, which Peter renamed Amsterdam in honor of his hosts, was eventually loaded with all of the examples of European industry that the Russian contingent had been buying and set sail for still the only Russian port in Europe, Arkhangelsk, on the White Sea.
In January 1698, Peter and a handful of chosen compatriots set off for England at King William’s invitation, leaving most of his embassy in Amsterdam. He was to be presented with a new yacht as a gift from the king, and he wanted to compare English shipbuilding techniques to those of the Dutch. The city of London also amazed him—at around 750,000 people, it was on par with Amsterdam and Paris. The Thames was crowded with vessels of all sizes. England and the Dutch Republic fought three wars during the seventeenth century, grappling for supremacy of the world’s trade routes to India and the spice islands. As in Amsterdam, by this time much of London’s wealth was arriving from destinations outside Europe: from America, the Caribbean, India, Indonesia, and even China.
Peter was particularly interested in how the British tax system and economy provided the government with revenues for constructing and maintaining the mighty navies that were bringing the wealth of the world to its shores. He was searching for evidence of how to transform his mostly rural nation with an agrarian economy into something resembling a modern European nation with a skilled urban population. Peter spent months working in and touring the king’s shipyards and, along with his Russian cohorts, earned a reputation for rowdy, unrefined behavior. Peter’s strong opinions were noted, as were his insatiable curiosity and fiery temper. He also toured the royal mint and later used its example as a foundation for his reforms of the Russian currency. Here and in Amsterdam, he interviewed and hired skilled craftsmen and engineers, physicians, and tradesmen such as stonemasons, locksmiths, and shipwrights as well as mariners and navigators. The wages he offered were good enough to induce many to leave home and move to Russia.
In mid-July, as he was readying to depart Vienna, Peter received news of the Streltsy’s uprising and the march on the Kremlin with the support of his half-sister Sophia. He canceled the final destination of his tour, Venice, and rushed back through Poland to Moscow—riding day and night, stopping only to change horses, no doubt thinking about the great beards he was about to shave.
AFTER COUNTERING THE UPRISING on his return to Moscow, Peter began implementing his ideas about how a modern state should be structured and governed. He had dwelled on the institutions lacking in his home that he admired in Holland, Germany, and England. The new beard laws and the beard tax were just the first of many actions that he intended to shake Russia from its somnolence. The next twenty-five years of Peter’s long reign would be taken up with two main priorities, the first of which was a series of radical institutional changes to Russian society, remodeling it along European lines.
During the decades after his return from the Great Embassy, he adopted the clothes, style, friends, and habits of foreigners; had many foreign friends and advisers; and strove for many years to stamp out the Orthodox belief that foreigners were a source of heresy and contamination. He trimmed the power of the Orthodox Church, introduced calendrical reform, expanded and restructured the army, standardized the coinage, introduced official stamped paper for legal documents, and created state awards. A lifelong pipe smoker, a habit he picked up from his German and Dutch friends, Peter also legalized tobacco. At one time during his grandfather’s reign, smoking had been punishable by death, with the penalty later liberalized to having one’s nostrils slit. Since no one was going to be slitting the czar’s nostrils, the church put up little fight against decriminalizing tobacco. He founded the Academy of Sciences, staffed chiefly with foreign intellectuals. Peter was also against strict arranged marriages, a tradition that he had personally experienced that was not in evidence in Holland, Germany, or England. He had been married according to this tradition by his mother when he was a teenager and unable to resist. Peter determined to be rid of his then wife, Eudoxia Lopukhina, a mournful and pious woman whom he rarely saw or spoke with; he had not written her a single note during his eighteen-month absence in Europe and did not rush to see her upon his return. He had her put in a nunnery and removed from the palace and public life. In 1703 he met Martha Skavronskaya, a Lithuanian peasant in domestic service who became his mistress, then wife, and finally Empress Catherine.
After the political and social reforms, the second major accomplishment of Peter’s reign was to launch the war with Sweden, the Great Northern War, a long string of battles of conquest that secured lands along the eastern Baltic coast and tilted the nation westward toward Europe. In this new territory, in 1703, Peter founded a new city. Situated on the eastern coast of the Gulf of Finland, at one time part of Russia but more recently controlled by Sweden, the city was to be a model for Russia. He named it Saint Petersburg. Peter was so anxious that the city be built on a new modern plan, and be built quickly, that he passed an edict that no stone construction would be permitted elsewhere in Russia; all Russian stonemasons had to work on his new city until it was completed. Here he headquartered the Russian Navy and expanded it, using the host of artisans and tradesmen he had recruited during his Great Embassy. The new city became the center of his government and court. On September 10, 1721, Russia and Sweden ended the twenty-one-year Great Northern War when they signed the Treaty of Nystad, the same year that Peter added the honorific emperor of all Russia to his official title. During the war, Russia had conquered much of the eastern Baltic and Finland, and Peter agreed to pay a large sum in silver to Sweden in exchange for keeping Estonia, Livonia, Ingria, and southeastern Finland as part of the Russian Empire.
PETER LED AS ACCOMPLISHED, and colorful, a life to rival that of any grand monarch. He had done more than any other Russian leader to restructure the nation and set it on a modern path, and he still had grand plans. Not for nothing was he called Peter the Great. But in the summer of 1724, after decades in power, he became seriously ill, was perhaps even dying, despite his relative youth. His physicians opened his abdomen and pierced his bladder, releasing four pounds of urine that had been painfully building inside him. He rallied in the fall, but by December he was again bedridden and in daily pain.
Peter could have looked back on a career of unparalleled accomplishment and success—a life of drama and adventure that had seen Russia transformed from an ignorant medieval backwater to one of Europe’s preeminent nations. Yet he was not content to linger on past glories. He was dreaming of one long-desired geographical and scientific ambition, a final act that would elevate even further the Russian state in the estimation of European nations and the scientific community as well as consolidate his grasp on the farthest-flung reaches of his vast and sprawling empire. As he lay in the imperial splendor of his apartments in the palace, grounded by his illness, he was thinking about something new, a final brilliant cap to an illustrious career and life. He scrawled out a set of instructions—a command that would have repercussions for many decades and lead to one of the greatest scientific expeditions in history and the discovery of a sea route to a new land. In his final days, one of Peter’s great interests was in geography and determining the extent and resources of the farthest districts of his empire as well as a longtime pet interest: the relationship between Asia and North America. This was a great geographical mystery that lay, in this era before the American Revolution and Captain Cook’s voyages, in one of the final uncharted parts of the globe, the North Pacific Ocean.
In the waning days of 1724, Peter spoke to his closest adviser from his deathbed. He outlined his ideas and plans to his attendants and, “concerned that his end was near,” was eager to get the expedition under way. Calling the general-admiral Count Apraxin (Fedor Matveevich) to his bedside, he said:
Bad health has
obliged me to remain home. Recently I have been thinking over a matter which has been on my mind for many years but other affairs have prevented me from carrying it out. I have reference to the finding of a passage to China and India through the Arctic Sea. On the map before me there is indicated such a passage bearing the name of Anian. There must be some reason for that. In my last travels I discussed the subject with learned men and they were of opinion that such a passage could be found. Now that the country is in no danger from enemies we should strive to win for her glory along the lines of the Arts and Sciences. In seeking such a passage who knows but perhaps we may be more successful than the Dutch and English who have made many attempts along the American coast.
He handed over to the count the instructions written in his own hand, on December 23, 1724, although he did not sign the official document for another month, on January 26, 1725. Peter’s instructions were concise, considering their long-term impact on world history:
I. To build in Kamchatka or in some other place one or two decked boats.
II. To sail on these boats along the shore which runs to the north and which (since its limits are unknown) seems to be a part of the American coast.
III. To determine where it joins America. To sail to some settlement under European jurisdiction, and if a European ship should be met with learn from her the name of the coast and take it down in writing, make a landing, obtain information, draw a chart and bring it here.
One month after drawing up these plans for the first major Russian exploration, later to be called the First Kamchatka Expedition, one that would fill the geographical gaps left by other European nations and become a symbol of the awakening of the Russian Empire, Peter the Great died on February 8, 1725, at age fifty-two. His widow, Catherine, became the new empress, and she continued to support her husband’s dream. Peter had chosen a twenty-year veteran of his navy and the Great Northern War to lead the expedition, a mature and respected Danish commander named Vitus Bering.
CHAPTER 2
THE FIRST KAMCHATKA EXPEDITION
A PAINTING LONG THOUGHT to be of Vitus Jonassen Bering depicts a jowly man with friendly eyes and a curious disposition. The portrait seems at odds with the life and deeds of the famous commander, who spent most of his life at sea or exploring Siberia, and is now thought to be a portrait of his great-uncle Vitus Pedersen Bering, a famous Danish historian and poet. Facial reconstruction of Vitus’s exhumed remains by a Danish-Russian archaeological team in 1991 revealed he was a heavily muscled man of about five feet, six inches in height, weighing 168 pounds. He stood out for his rugged appearance, with prominent cheekbones and long wavy hair. He was a handsome man in good health throughout his life.
Bering was one of the many talented foreigners attracted to Russian service by Peter the Great’s expansion of the Russian Navy. He was born on August 5, 1681, in the town of Horsens, a Baltic port on the east side of Jutland whose fortunes had faded along with military losses to Sweden throughout the seventeenth century. His father was a customs officer and church warden, respectably middle class. But there was little future for a young, ambitious man in the town. Love of ships and the sea led him to sail as a fifteen-year-old ship’s boy, along with his older brother, on a voyage one year before Peter the Great set off on the Great Embassy. For eight years Bering sailed on Dutch and Danish merchant ships on voyages as far as India, Indonesia, North America, and the Caribbean. He learned navigation, cartography, and command and spent time at an officers’ training institute in Amsterdam. In 1704 the young Bering met Cornelius Ivanovich Cruys, a Norwegian who had been hired by Peter the Great in 1697 to help create a new Russian navy. Bering was fortunate and probably pleased when Cruys offered him a position in the Russian Imperial Navy at the start of the Great Northern War between Russia (joined at times by Denmark, Saxony-Poland, and Prussia) and the Swedish Empire, at the time Denmark’s archenemy. It was an auspicious time to be a skilled and intelligent mariner. Bering was later fond of claiming “with praise how from his youth, everything had come his way.” He enjoyed a successful career in the Russian Navy, ascending through the ranks, from sublieutenant to lieutenant in 1707, to captain lieutenant in 1710, to captain fourth rank in 1715, and finally to captain second rank in 1720. Then his luck ran dry for a short spell.
Bering, whom a later companion described as “by faith a righteous and devout Christian, whose conduct was that of a man of good manners, kind, quiet” and who was “universally liked by the whole command, both high and low,” never distinguished himself in any sea battles. He was competent and trustworthy, and his most significant act of distinction came in 1711 when, during a failed campaign against the Turks, he ran his ship, Munker, through the Sea of Azov, across the Black Sea, through the Bosporus Strait to the Mediterranean, and all the way north to the Baltic Sea, where he remained stationed throughout the war. The strenuous and dangerous voyage demonstrated leadership, daring, and initiative—traits that would serve him well as commander of two of history’s longest and most complicated land and sea expeditions.
Through mutual friends in the Lutheran community predominant along the Baltic coast, he met Anna Christina Piilse in Viborg, and they were married in 1713. She was twenty-one years old, eleven years younger than Bering, the eldest daughter of a wealthy German-speaking merchant family who lived along the Neva River, near the new city of St. Petersburg. They would eventually have nine children, four of whom survived to adulthood. They did not see each other frequently during the war when Bering was at sea, preparing Anna Christina for the many years Bering would be away leading expeditions to the Pacific Ocean. They were an upwardly mobile couple concerned with their position in society; Bering’s career was important. All was well during the war while Bering was rising in the ranks, but when he failed to gain a promotion in recognition of his war service, he slipped behind many of his colleagues. Worse was to come. Anna’s younger sister Eufemia became engaged to Thomas Saunders, an officer originally from Britain who was a rear admiral in the Russian Navy, a rank superior to the one Bering had attained and one that came with a noble title. Soon the older sister would be of obviously inferior social status to the younger, and her husband would be of lower rank than his brother-in-law. This was not good for family harmony and was a real setback for Vitus and Anna. They pondered the distressing turn of events and decided that the only way to preserve their honor and save face was for Bering to resign from the navy. Bering sent off an official request for retirement to be effective before Eufemia’s marriage. He was bestowed the rank of captain first class in retirement in February 1724, and he and Anna moved from St. Petersburg back to Viborg with their two children. However, since he had no pension and now no income and had a family to support, the retirement didn’t last long, and within six months he asked to be reinstated. Since Eufemia was in St. Petersburg, Anna decided to remain in Viborg, where she would be spared the humiliation of accidentally encountering her higher-ranked younger sister. Bering reported to duty, commanding a ninety-gun ship in the Baltic fleet. But Peter the Great and his advisers had plans afoot that would change Bering’s life.
With the war officially ended in 1721, Peter could devote some attention to the vast and sprawling but little-documented province east of the Urals. He was worried that other European powers would begin exploring Siberia and undermine Russia’s claim. He was particularly concerned when the French Academy of Sciences approached him in 1717 and asked for permission to explore Siberia. He turned them down, much as he would have wanted more knowledge of this little-known region of his domain; it would have been an intolerable blow to his and Russia’s pride if the exploration of their own territory had to be entrusted to foreigners.
SPANISH CONQUISTADORES HAD DEFEATED mighty nations in Central and South America—the Aztec, the Maya, and the Inca—and incorporated those lands into an enormous global empire that eventually stretched both east and west, from Europe to the Philippines. The French had colonized eastern North America. The English had fo
unded colonies in North America and had a global trading empire. The Dutch had founded New Netherlands and conquered the Portuguese seaborne empire in Indonesia. The Dutch and English East India Companies were warring to control Indonesia and the Indian Ocean trade; the British were on their way to conquering India. Spanish ships had explored north along the western North American coast from Mexico as far as present-day British Columbia. But the interior of North America and its Pacific and northern coasts were mostly a giant terra incognita, as was the northeastern coast of Asia. Peter felt that Russia could make a mark for itself there, perhaps not only conquering new territory or establishing valuable trade routes and consolidating his empire, but also in the realm of science and geography. He sought to claim for Russia some part of the international prestige that would be reflected or bestowed for contributing to global knowledge—to be acknowledged not merely as a user but a contributor to knowledge through the creation of a detailed map of Siberia.
While gaining respect from other nations, at the same time Peter wanted to establish a profitable trade relationship with China that would help develop the vast province of Siberia. Peter had repeatedly attempted to improve Russia’s trade relationship with China and had met with little success. He knew from his youthful journey to Amsterdam and London that the key to wealth was a strong economy and that the way to achieve this, in addition to currency reforms and a stable legal system, was through trade and commerce. These improvements would also incidentally provide increased government revenues. His attempts to open a dialogue with the Chinese government to enable Russian caravans to enter China and for Russian consulates to be established in some Chinese towns were rudely rebuffed. His envoy, Captain Lev Ismailov, offered elaborate gifts but overplayed his hand when he asked to establish a Russian church in Beijing as a component of a trade deal. The official response was condescending and arrogant: “Our Emperor does not trade and has no bazaars. You value your merchants very highly. We scorn commerce. Only poor people and servants occupy themselves in that way with us, and there is no profit at all to us from your trade. We have enough of Russian goods even if your people did not bring them.” In the later years of Peter’s reign, in spite of his efforts, trade in the eastern empire was declining, and the Chinese government refused him access to the Amur River, on the border of Russia and China, that would have provided access to the Pacific.