Ashamed of his ignorance, he vigorously commenced studying German, and, notwithstanding all the seductions of the court, succeeded in acquiring such a mastery of the language as to be able both to speak and write it correctly.  Peter’s father, Alexis, had been anxious to open the fields of commerce to his subjects.  He had, at great expense, engaged the services of ship builders and navigators from Holland.  A frigate and a yacht had been constructed, with which the Volga had been navigated to its mouth at Astrachan.  It was his intention to open a trade with Persia through the Caspian Sea.  But, in a revolt at Astrachan, the vessels were seized and destroyed, and the captain killed.  Thus terminated this enterprise.  The master builder, however, remained in Russia, where he lived a long time in obscurity.

One day, Peter, at one of his summer palaces of Ismaelhof, saw upon the shore of the lake the remains of a pleasure boat of peculiar construction.  He had never before seen any boat but such as was propelled by oars.  The peculiarity of the structure of this arrested his attention, and being informed that it was constructed for sails as well as oars, he ordered it to be repaired, that he might make trial of it.  It so chanced that the shipwright, Brandt, from Holland, who had built the boat, was found, and the tzar, to his great delight, enjoyed, for the first time in his life, the pleasures of a sail.  He immediately gave directions for the boat to be transported to the great lake near the convent of the Trinity, and here he ordered two frigates and three yachts to be built.  For months he amused himself piloting his little fleet over the waves of the lake.  Like many a plebeian boy, the tzar had now acquired a passion for the sea, and he longed to get a sight of the ocean.

With this object in view, in 1694 he set out on a journey of nearly a thousand miles to Archangel, on the shores of the White Sea.  Taking his shipwrights with him, he had a small vessel constructed, in which he embarked for the exploration of the Frozen Ocean, a body of water which no sovereign had seen before him.  A Dutch man-of-war, which chanced to be in the harbor at Archangel, and all the merchant fleet there accompanied the tzar on this expedition.  The sovereign himself had already acquired much of the art of working a ship, and on this trip devoted all his energies to improvement in the science and practical skill of navigation.

While the tzar was thus turning his attention to the subject of a navy, he at the same time was adopting measures of extraordinary vigor for the reorganization of the army.  Hitherto the army had been composed of bands of vassals, poorly armed and without discipline, led by their lords, who were often entirely without experience in the arts of war.  Peter commenced, at his country residence, with a company of fifty picked men, who were put through the most thorough drill by General Gordon, a Scotchman of much military