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.