Peter's education, directed by curiosity and whim, a blend of useful and useless, set the man and the monarch on his course. Much that he accomplished might never have happened had Peter been taught in the Kremlin and not at Preobrazhenskoe; formal education can stifle as well as inspire. But later Peter himself felt and lamented the lack of depth and polish in his own formal education.
His experience with a sextant is typical of his enthusiastic, self-guided education. In 1687, when Peter was fifteen, Prince Jacob Dolgoruky, about to leave on a diplomatic mission to France, mentioned to the Tsar that he had once owned a foreign instrument
"by which distance and space could be measured without moving from the spot." Unfortunately, the instrument had been stolen, but Peter asked the Prince to buy him one in France. On Dolgoruky's return in 1688, Peter's first question was whether he had brought the sextant. A box was produced and a parcel inside unwrapped; it was a sextant, elegantly made of metal and wood, but no one present knew how to use it. The search for an expert began; it led quickly to the German Suburb and soon produced a graying Dutch merchant named Franz Timmerman, who picked up the sextant and quickly calculated the distance to a neighboring house. A servant was sent to pace the distance and came back to report a figure similar to Timmerman's. Peter eagerly asked to be taught. Timmerman agreed, but he declared that his pupil would first need to learn arithmetic and geometry. Peter had once learned basic arithmetic, but the skill had fallen into disuse; he did not even remember how to subtract and divide. Now, spurred by his desire to use the sextant, he plunged into a variety of subjects: arithmetic, geometry and also ballistics. And the further he went, the more paths seemed to open before him. He became interested again in geography, studying on the great globe which had belonged to his father the outlines of Russia, Europe and the New World.
Timmerman was a makeshift tutor, he had spent twenty years in Russia and was out of touch with the latest technology of Western Europe. Yet to Peter he became a counselor and friend, and the Tsar kept the pipe-smoking Dutchman constantly at his side. Timmerman had seen the world, he could describe how things worked, he could answer at least some of the questions constantly posed by this tall, endlessly curious boy. Together, they wandered through the countryside around Moscow, visiting estates and monasteries or poking through small villages. One of these excursions in June 1688 led to a famous episode which was to have momentous consequences for Peter and for Russia. He was wandering with Timmerman through a royal estate near the village of Ismailovo. Among the buildings behind the main house was a storehouse which, Peter was told, was filled with junk and had been locked up for years. His curiosity aroused, Peter asked that the doors be opened and, despite the musty smell, he began to look around inside. In the dim light, a large object immediately caught his eye: an old boat, its timbers decaying, turned upside down in a corner of the storehouse. It was twenty feet long and six feet wide, about the size of a lifeboat on a modern ocean liner.
This was not the first boat Peter had ever seen. He knew the cumbersome, shallow-draft vessels which Russians used to transport goods along their wide rivers; he also knew the small craft used for pleasure boating at Preobrazhenskoe. But these Russian boats were essentially river craft: barge-like vessels with flat bottoms and square sterns, propelled by oars or ropes pulled by men or animals on the riverbank, or simply by the current itself. This boat before him was different. Its deep, rounded hull, heavy keel and pointed bow were not meant for rivers.
"What kind of boat is this?" Peter asked Timmerman.
"It is an English boat," the Dutchman replied.
"What is it used for? Is it better than our Russian boats?" asked Peter.
"If you had a new mast and sails on it, it would go not only with the wind, but against the wind," said Timmerman.
"Against the wind?" Peter was astonished. "Can it be possible?"
He wanted to try the boat at once. But Timmerman looked at the rotting timbers and insisted on major repairs; meanwhile, a mast and sails could be made. With Peter constantly pressing him to hurry, Timmerman found another elderly Dutchman, Karsten Brandt, who had arrived from Holland in 1660 to build a ship on the Caspian Sea for Tsar Alexis. Brandt, who lived as a carpenter in the German Suburb, came to Ismailovo and set to work. He replaced the timbers, calked and tarred the bottom, set a mast and rigged sails, halyards and sheets. The boat was taken on rollers down to the Yauza and launched. Before Peter's eyes, Brandt began to sail on the river, tacking to right and left, using the breeze to sail not only into the wind, but against the lazy current. Overwhelmed with excitement, Peter shouted to Brandt to come to shore and take him aboard. He jumped in, took the tiller and, under Brandt's instruction, began to beat into the wind. "And mighty pleasant was it to me," the Tsar wrote years later in the preface to his Maritime Regulations.*
*The true origin of this famous boat, which Peter called "The Grandfather of the Russian Navy," is unknown. Peter believed that it was English; one legend says that originally it was sent as a gift to Ivan the Terrible by Queen Elizabeth I. Others think it was built in Russia by Dutch carpenters during the reign of Tsar Alexis. What is important is that it was a small sailing ship of Western design.
Recognizing the significance in his own life, Peter was determined that the boat be preserved. In 1701, it was taken into the Kremlin and kept in a building near the Ivan Bell Tower. In 1722, when the long war with Sweden was finally over, Peter commanded that the boat be brought from Moscow to St. Petersburg. Weighing a ton and a half, it would have to be dragged partway over log corduroy roads, and Peter's orders for its care were specific: "Bring the boat to Schlusselburg. Be careful not to destroy it. For this reason, go only in daytime. Stop at night. When the road is bad, be especially careful." On May 30, 1723, Peter's fifty-first birthday, the celebrated boat sailed down the Neva and out into the Gulf of Finland to be met there by its "grandchildren," the men-of-war of the Russian Baltic Fleet. In August of that year, the boat was placed in a special building inside the Fortress of Peter and Paul, where it remained for over two centuries. Today, Peter's boat is the most prized exhibit of the Navy Museum of the U.S.S.R. in the former Stock Exchange building on the point of Leningrad's Vasilevsky Island.
Thereafter, Peter went sailing every day. He learned to work the sails and use the wind, but the Yauza was narrow, the breeze was often too light to provide maneuverability and the boat constantly went aground. The nearest really large body of water, nine miles across, was Lake Pleschev, near Pereslavl, eighty-five miles northeast of Moscow. Peter might be an irresponsible youth larking about in the fields, but he was also a tsar and he could not travel so far from his capital without some serious purpose. He quickly found one. There was a June festival at the great Troitsky Monastery, and Peter begged his mother's permission to go there and participate in the religious ceremony. Natalya agreed, and once the service was over, Peter, now beyond the reach of any restrictive authority, simply headed northwest through the forest to Pereslavl. By prearrangement, Timmerman and Brandt were with him.