Everyone conversant with Russian history knows that Peter the Great went to England, and afterward to Holland, to study ship building.  He introduced naval construction from those countries, and brought from Holland the men to manage his first ships and teach his subjects the art of navigation.  As a result of his enterprise, the principal parts of a Russian ship have English or Dutch names, some words being changed a little to adapt them to Russian pronunciation.  The Dutch navigators exerted great influence upon the nautical language of Russia.  To illustrate this Captain Lund said:  “A Dutch pilot or captain could come on my ship and his orders in his own language would be understood by my crew.  I mean simply the words of command, without explanations.  On the other hand, a Dutch crew could understand my orders without suspecting they were Russian.”

Sitting among the officers in the ward-room, I endeavored to accustom my ear to the sound of the Russian language and learn to repeat the most needed phrases.  I soon acquired the alphabet, and could count up to any extent; I could spell Russian words much as a schoolboy goes through his ‘first reader’ exercise, but was unable to attain rapid enunciation.  I could never get over the impression that the Muscovite type had been set up by a drunken printer who couldn’t read.  The R’s looked the wrong way, the L’s stood bottom upward, H’s became N’s, and C’s were S’s, and lower case and small caps were generally mixed up.  The perplexities of Russian youth must be greater than ours, as they have thirty-six letters in their alphabet and every one of them must be learned.  A brief study of Slavonic verbs and nouns convinced me they could never be acquired grammatically in the short time I proposed remaining in Russia, and so I gave them up.

What a hindrance to a traveler and literal man of the world is this confusion of tongues!  There is no human being who can make himself verbally understood everywhere on this little globe.  In the Russian empire alone there are more than a hundred spoken languages and dialects.  The emperor, with all his erudition, has many subjects with whom he is unable to converse.  What a misfortune to mankind that the Tower of Babel was ever commenced!  The architect who planned it should receive the execration of all posterity.

The apartment I occupied was of goodly size, and contained a large writing desk.  My bed was parallel to the keel, and hung so that it could swing when the ship rolled.  Previous to my embarkation the room was the receptacle of a quantity of chronometers, sextants, charts, and other nautical apparatus.  There were seventeen chronometers in one box, and a few others lay around loose.  I never had as much time at my command before or since.  Twice a day an officer came to wind these chronometers and note their variation.  There were marine instruments enough in that room to supply a dozen sea-captains, but if the entire lot had been loan’d me, I never could have ascertained the ship’s position without asking somebody who knew it.