A Royal Rescue
Despite failing health, Peter the Great of Russia leapt into Kronstadt Bay to save some young sailors from a watery grave.
1724
King George I 1714-1727
By Ivan Ayvazovsky (1817–1900), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.
‘The Wrath of the Sea’ by Ivan Ayvazovsky (1817–1900), painted in 1886. Peter the Great’s greatest passion was ships and their building, and he was seldom happier than when on the water. As a young man, he had spent time working incognito among shipwrights in the Netherlands, and during his fact-finding and diplomatic trip to England in 1698 he went down to the docks again, to watch the shipwrights build the yacht ‘Royal Transport’, a gift to him from King William III: see The Grand Embassy. The sea was an environment that brought out the best in him, as the accompanying story shows.
Introduction
By the autumn of 1724, kidney disease was exaggerating Emperor Peter the Great’s contradictions. Fleeting bursts of ill-temper had settled into peevish melancholy; he had fallen out with his mentor Alexander Menshikov; he had quitted his palace to live in a wooden cottage; and exhausting days of duty merged into exhausting nights of wine. But in a crisis, the old Peter was still there.
LATE in November, at twilight of a cold rainy day, he [Peter] sailed his yacht into the Bay of Kronstadt near Petersburg. A storm was brewing, and he saw a boat full of boys aground on a sandbar. With all his old energy Peter dashed to their rescue.
The storm broke in a fury of icy wind and rain. The boys on the stranded boat, a frail little pleasure craft they had taken out for a day’s sail, were frantic. They were on their knees praying, apparently unable to do anything to save themselves.
Peter, approaching as close as he could, jumped into the shallow water and by a superhuman effort, pulled the boat clear. It was leaking badly, and the boys were too terrified to bail it out or to try to wade ashore.
Buffeted by the storm, Peter and his men worked all night removing the boys from the boat, carrying them ashore and reviving them around great bonfires. Twenty lads owed their lives to Peter’s efforts.*
When it was all over, he went to bed with a violent attack of abdominal pain and a high fever. After a week or so he recovered enough to go home to his beloved Petersburg. He never left it again.
From ‘Peter the Great’ (1945) by Nina Brown Baker (1888-1957).
* In 1913, a strikingly similar incident occurred when a small boat, carrying spectators eager for a closer look at a British warship, capsized in the harbour at Kronstadt near St Petersburg. “Instantly some twenty of our bluejackets (officers and men) dived amongst them,” Herbert Bury tells us, “and in the shortest possible time had them safe in their righted boat again. This made a great impression in Russia, and, though news travels slowly in that vast country, this story went everywhere, continually evoking the comment, ‘Then — it’s true, all that we’ve been told about them — and their officers dived in to save the lives of poor peasant folk!’” For another story of heroism, see The Wreck of the ‘Dutton’.
