The Samson was built in Holland. It was a gift to Peter the Great from the tsar’s close companion Prince Alexander Danivolovich Menishikoff. It was a relatively small vessel, bristling with guns. There were forty of them. But forty was considered too many guns for the size of vessel. The English master builder Richard Brown overhauled the Samson and reduced the guns to a more manageable thirty-two. Deane’s assessment of Brown’s handiwork was that he had turned the Samson into ‘an excellent frigate’. Prior to Hango Head the Samson had been employed to look for the Swedish fleet, avoid a confrontation and alert the Russians of their enemy’s whereabouts. After Hango Head the Samson hunted privateers, capturing three enemy vessels. The Samson was sent on missions to England and Holland. The Samson was fitted with, and then stripped of, the contentious boarding equipment John Deane would help transport across Russia by sledge. Prior to Deane, the Samson had been commanded by another Englishman, Benjamin Edwards, and two Norwegians, Isaac Brandt and Peter Bredale. Under the new administration John Deane would stay with the Samson until promotion, death, demotion or disgrace separated him from her.
When Peter the Great assumed command of the fleet, John Deane got the opportunity to test the guns of his new vessel when a salute was fired in honour of the tsar. Once the tsar’s fleet had been reorganised it was ready to find the Swedes and force a confrontation if the conditions favoured the Russians. But John Deane’s orders were to wait upon Sir John Norris and find out if he had any intentions of committing his cruisers to the ensuing conflict. If the answer was ‘yes’ then Deane and fellow Englishman William Baker would accompany the English cruisers, Deane in the Samson and Baker in the Arundel. Sir John Norris declined to commit his ships so the tsar ordered Deane and Baker to search for the Swedish fleet and report back the Swedes’ strength and numbers.
The ocean echoed with the sound of gunfire. Sir John Norris had honoured the tsar with a twenty-one-gun salute. The tsar reciprocated in kind. Danish warships fired their own friendly salvos.
In early August the Russian fleet set sail for the Danish island of Bornholm. Norris’s squadron, a number of merchant vessels and a Dutch man-of-war accompanied them. John Deane located the Swedish fleet. They had sailed to the naval port of Karlskrona. Deane returned to the Russians and reported the news.
A proposed plan to invade Sweden came to nothing. The campaigning season juddered to a halt as winter approached. John Deane’s last mission of 1716 was to patrol the Baltic in the Samson alongside Captain Baker in the Arundel. Deane and Baker’s orders were to ‘keep different courses in the Baltic,’ in order to find and harry enemy store ships that were believed to be in the vicinity.
7
Apraxin
As 1716 drew to a close, a few of the tsar’s ships were lost to the elements; a four-gun privateer was captured and there was a controversy involving a Dutch officer. Captain Vandergun had sold items aboard Deane’s previous vessel, the Egudal. The items were not his to sell, an act tantamount to theft. His peers informed on him. Vandergun was arrested. He was subject to court martial and was sentenced to three years’ confinement. On closer investigation it transpired that Vandergun had had no money to feed his men and had only sold the items to buy food for that purpose. Deane was convinced that those that had told tales about Vandergun’s justifiable indiscretion had been motivated by covetousness, craving the Dutchman’s command.
The fleet wintered at Revel. A storm destroyed part of Revel and broke two ships to pieces, the Fortune and the Antonio. The tsar was in St Petersburg. In his absence there were few promotions. No important decisions were allowed to be made in his absence so nothing much was accomplished until he returned.
On 12 April 1717, the day the ice broke, John Deane set sail with new orders. He was to briefly visit his homeland. Deane transported apprentices bound for five years’ service to Rostock, England and then Holland. By July, he had returned, and John Deane and the Samson were placed in a squadron under the command of General Admiral Fedor Matveevich Apraxin.
The general admiral was one of the few Russians John Deane had a kind word to say about. Deane’s physical description of him was a man ‘well made’ and ‘inclined to feed’, a polite or mischievous euphemism for fat. Apraxin had long white hair that he tied in a ribbon. He was in his mid-fifties. He was a childless widower. He was neat and dressed, in Deane’s opinion, in a manner that ‘surpasses all the noblemen of his years in Russia’. Apraxin was an even-tempered individual. He liked men to behave according to their rank and station, and expected to be treated with the deference due his own rank. He didn’t suffer fools. He was a man of his word. He did not extend patronage easily but when he did he was fiercely protective of his charges. Where Apraxin was concerned, Deane abandoned his stance of denigrating Russians with little or no naval experience. Deane respected the on-the-job knowledge Apraxin had accrued. Deane’s assessment of Apraxin’s relationship with the tsar was that the Admiral was more ‘esteemed than loved’ by Peter the Great, ‘and therefore rarely consulted, unless on arduous and important affairs’. On this point Deane was in error. Apraxin was a close friend and intimate confidant of the tsar. There was also a shadow side to the admiral. He could be a rough and brutal man when he believed necessity demanded it. In the aftermath of an early revolt, Apraxin had hanged rebels on the roads leading in and out of Voronezh. In 1718 the tsar’s son Alexi Petrovich would rebel against his father. Apraxin would be present at his interrogation and torture. Alexi Petrovich would be brutally flogged and die later that day. But Apraxin showed the conciliatory and paternal part of his nature to many of Peter the Great’s foreign mercenaries and it was the better part of Apraxin that John Deane encountered at close quarters. Deane would recall an incident between Captain Commodore Sievers and the English Jacobite exile Rear Admiral Thomas Gordon. Sievers and Gordon were celebrating the anniversary of the Battle of Hango Head. Both men were roaring drunk. Gordon insulted Sievers, claiming he had taken the best sailors for himself prior to Hango Head. When news reached the tsar of the dispute, Apraxin defended the Dutchman to his ruler and criticised Gordon. The tsar refused to take sides and forced the two enemies to have a conciliatory drink together. Despite Apraxin’s intervention tensions continued to fester and engendered factions within the fleet. Gordon recruited a strong ally in Rear Admiral Thomas Saunders, a man that would cause John Deane particular grief in years to come. But Apraxin’s example was not lost on Deane, who would have reason to thank the admiral when his own Russian adventure turned to ash.
The fleet anchored near Ostergarn. John Deane and Clays Eckoff, the Danish captain of the Portsmouth, were ordered to sail southward toward Slite Hamn where they were to observe enemy fortifications and report back on the enemy’s strength.
The Russian fleet entered Ostergarn. They encountered a small amount of enemy resistance from mounted guns that the Swedes quickly spiked before retreating and lighting warning beacons. The Russian fleet anchored and put soldiers ashore.