We trace the ambition of Peter for commercial and maritime greatness also to a very humble beginning.  Whether it was a youthful sport, subsequently directed into a great enterprise, or the plodding intention to create a navy and open seaports under his own superintendence, it would be difficult to settle.  We may call this beginning a decree of Providence, an inspiration of genius, or a passion for sailing a boat; the end was the same, as it came about,—­the entrance of Russia into the family of European States.

It would seem that one day, by chance, Peter’s attention was directed to a little boat laid up on the banks of a canal which ran through his pleasure-grounds.  It had been built by a Dutch carpenter for the amusement of his father.  This boat had a keel,—­a new thing to him,—­and attracted his curiosity, Lefort explained to him that it was constructed to sail against the wind.  So the carpenter was summoned, with orders to rig the boat and sail it on the Moskva, the river which runs through Moscow.  Peter was delighted; and he soon learned to manage it himself.  Then a yacht was built, manned by two men, and it was the delight of Peter to take the helm himself.  Shortly five other vessels were built to navigate Lake Peipus; and the ambition of Peter was not satisfied until a still larger vessel was procured at Archangel, in which he sailed on a cruise upon the Frozen Ocean.  His taste for navigation became a passion; and once again he embarked on the Frozen Ocean in a ship, determined to go through all the gradations of a sailor’s life.  As he began as drummer in Lefort’s regiment, so he first served as a common drudge who swept the cabin in a Dutch vessel; then he rose to the rank of a servant who kept up the fire and lighted the pipe of the Dutch skipper; then he was advanced to the duty of unfurling and furling the sails,—­and so on, until he had mastered the details of a sailor’s life.

Why did he condescend to these mean details?  The ambition was planted in him to build a navy under his own superintendence.  Wherefore a navy, when he had no seaports?  But he meant to have seaports.  He especially needed a fleet on the Volga to keep the Turks and Tartars in awe, and another in the Gulf of Finland to protect his territories from the Swedes.  We shall see how subsequently, and in due time, he conquered the Baltic from the Swedes and the Euxine from the Turks.  He did not seem to have an ambition for indefinite territorial aggrandizement, but simply to extend his empire to these seas for the purpose of having a free egress and ingress to it by water.  He could not Europeanize his empire without seaports, for unless Russia had these, she would remain a barbarous country, a vast Wallachia or Moldavia.  The expediency and the necessity of these ports were most obvious.  But how was he to get them?  Only by war, aggressive war.  He would seize what he wanted, since he could attain his end in no other way.