Peter the Great (108 page)

But the following morning what Peter had hoped for finally happened. The wind died, the sea was becalmed, and on the glassy surface lay a division of the Swedish fleet commanded by Admiral Ehrenskjold. The Russians moved quickly to seize the advantage. At dawn, twenty Russian galleys left the protective waters of the coast and rowed outside to seaward of the motionless Swedish vessels. Realizing what was happening, Ehrenskjold's ships lowered small boats, which under oars tried to tow their ships away. But the power of a few oarsmen in small boats could not match the coordinated strokes of the oarsmen in the Russian galleys. That night, Apraxin's main force, over sixty galleys, slipped between the Swedes and the coast, moving out to sea between the squadrons of Wattrang and Ehrenskjold. For refuge, Ehrenskjold withdrew up a narrow fjord and formed his ships into a line, head to stern, from one side of the fjord to the other. The following day, with the Swedish squadron isolated, Apraxin was ready to attack. First, he sent an officer on board the Swedish flagship to offer Ehrenskjold honorable terms if he would surrender. The offer was refused, and the battle began.

It was a strange and extraordinary contest between warships of two different kinds, one ancient and one modem. The Swedes had superiority in heavy cannon and skilled seamen, but the Russians had an overwhelming advantage in numbers of ships and men. Their smaller, more maneuverable galleys, decks loaded with infantry, simply charged the Swedish ships en masse, taking what losses they had to from Swedish cannon fire, closing in and boarding the immobile Swedish vessels. Indeed, Apraxin launched his ships less like an admiral than a general sending in waves of infantry or cavalry. At two p.m. on August 6, he sent in the first wave of thirty-five galleys. The Swedes held their fire until the galleys were close, then raked their decks with cannon fire, the galleys to fall back. A second attack by eighty galleys was also repulsed. Then, Apraxin's combined fleet attacked, ninety-five galleys in all, concentrating on the left side of the head-to-stern line. Russian boarding parties swept over the Swedish vessels; one Swedish vessel capsized from the sheer weight of the men struggling on its deck. Once the Swedish line was broken, the Russians rowed through the gap, swarming along the remainder of the line, attacking from both sides at once and seizing ship after ship of the immobile Swedish line. The battle
raged for three hours with heav
y casualties on both sides. In the end, the Swedes were overwhelmed, 361 were killed and more than 900 became prisoners. Ehrenskjold himself was captured, along with his flagship, the frigate
Elephant,
and nine smaller Swedish ships.

There is a disagreement as to Peter's whereabouts during the battle. Some have said that he commanded the first division of Apraxin's galleys; others, that he watched the action from the shore. Hango was not a classic naval action, but it was Russia's first victory at sea, and Peter always considered it a personal vindication of his years of effort to build a navy, and a victory equal in importance to Poltava.

Elated, he meant to celebrate in the grandest style. Sending the bulk of the galley fleet westward to occuply the now unprotected Aland Islands, Peter returned
with his Swedish prizes to Kron
stadt. He remained for several days while Catherine was in childbirth, delivering their daughter Margarita. Then, on September 20, he staged his triumph, leading the captured frigate and six other Swedish ships up into the Neva River while cannon boomed a 150-gun salute. The ships anchored near the Peter and Paul Fortress, and both Russian and Swedish crews came ashore for the victory procession. The parade was led by the Preobrazhensky Guards and included 200 Swedish officers and seamen, the flag of the captured Admiral and Admiral Ehrenskjold himself, wearing a new suit laced in silver which was a present from the Tsar. Peter appeared in the green uniform of a Russian rear admiral laced with gold. A new triumphal arch had been erected for the occasion, adorned with a Russian eagle seizing an elephant (an allusion to the captured Swedish frigate) and the inscription, "The Russian Eagle catches no flies." From the arch, victors and vanquished marched to the fortress, where they were greeted by Romodanovsky, seated on a throne in his role as Mock-Tsar and surrounded by the Senate. Romodanvosky summoned the tall Rear Admiral before him and accepted from Peter's hands a written account of the battle at sea. The account was read aloud, after which the Mock-Tsar and senators questioned Peter on several points. After brief deliberation, they unanimously proclaimed that in consideration of his faithful service, the Rear Admiral was promoted to Vice Admiral, and the crowd broke into cheers of "Health to the Vice Admiral!" Peter's speech in thanks called his comrades' attention to the changes wrought in only two decades: "Friends and Companions: Is there any one among you who, twenty years ago, would have dared to conceive our covering the Baltic with ships built with our own hands or living in this town built on soil conquered from our enemies?"

When the ceremony ended, Peter boarded his own sloop and hoisted the flag of vice admiral with his own hands. That night, Menshikov's palace was the scene of a huge banquet for Russians
and
Swedes alike. Peter, rising and turning to his Russian followers, praised Admiral Ehrenskjold. "Here you see
a
brave
and
faithful servant of his master who has made himself worthy of the highest reward at his hands and who shall always have my favor as long as he is with me, although he has killed many
a
brave Russian. I forgive you," he said directly to Ehrenskjold,
"
and
you may depend on my good will."

Ehrenskjold thanked the Tsar and replied, "However honorably I may have acted with regard to my master, I did only my duty. I sought death, but did not meet it, and it is no small comfort to me
in
my misfortune to be a prisoner of Your Majesty and to be used so favorably and with so much distinction by so grat a naval officer and now worthy a vice admiral." Later, talking to the foreign envoys present, Ehrenskjold declared that the Russians had indeed fought skillfully, and that nothing but his own experience could have convinced him that the Tsar could make good soldiers and sailors out of his Russian subjects.

The victory at Hango cleared not only the Gulf of Finland but the eastern side of the Gulf of Bothnia of Swedish ships. Admiral Wattrang now quit the upper Baltic entirely, being unwilling to risk his big ships against the Russian flotillas to continue their westward advance. In September, a fleet of sixty galleys landed 16,000 men in the Aland Islands. Soon afterward, the larger Russian ships returned to Kronstadt, but Apraxin's galleys kept working their way up into the Gulf of Bothnia. On September 20, he reached Wasa, and from there he sent nine galleys across the gulf to attack the coast of Sweden, burning the Swedish town of Umean. As some galleys were lost and the winter ice was coming, Apraxin put his fleet in winter quarters, at Abo on the Finnish coast and across the Gulf of Finland at Reval.

The success of the Finnish campaigns spurred Peter to increase his shipbuilding program. Later, near the end of the Tsar's reign, the Baltic fleet consisted of thirty-four ships-of-the-line (many of them sixty- and eighty-gun vessels), fifteen frigates and 800 galleys and smaller ships, manned by a total of 28,000 Russian seamen. This was a gigantic achievement; to complain that Peter's fleet was still smaller than Great Britain's is to overlook the fact that Peter began without a single ship; with no tradition, shipwrights, officers, navigators or seamen. Before the end of Peter's life, some Russian ships were equal to the best in the British navy and, said an observer, "were more handsomely furnished." The only weakness that Peter could never overcome was his countrymen's lack of interest in the sea. Foreign officers— Greeks, Venetians, Danes and Dutchmen—continued to command the ships; the Russian aristocracy still hated the sea and resented the imposition of naval service almost more than any other. In his love of blue waves and salt air, Peter remained unique among Russians.

45

THE KALABALIK

Bitterly
frustrated by his failure to prevent the peace made on the Pruth, Charles XII had worked doggedly to undo it. To some extent, the three subsequent short "wars" a year or two apart between Russia and the Ottoman Empire had been his work, although Peter's unwillingness to hand over Azov and to withdraw his troops from Poland had also been responsible. A promising opportunity had come with the third of these wars, declared by the Turks in October 1712. Then, a huge Ottoman army had assembled at Adrianople under the personal command of the Sultan. As part of a joint war plan, Ahmed III had agreed to send Charles XII north into Poland with a strong Turkish escort so that the King could rendezvous with a new Swedish expeditionary force under Stenbock's command. But when Stenbock landed in Germany, he moved west, not south, and he was eventually captured in the fortress of Tonning. Charles remained a king without an army, and the Sultan, reflecting on the uncertainties of invading Russia alone, had decided to make peace and return to his harem.

Thus, by the winter of 1713, Charles XII had been in Turkey for three and a half years. Moslem hospitality notwithstanding, most Turkish officials had grown weary of him. He was indeed a
"heavy weight on the Sublime Porte." The Sultan wanted to make a permanent peace with Russia, but Charles' constant intrigues had made this difficult. It was decided, one way or another, to send Charles home.

Out of this decision developed a plot. Devlet Gerey, the Tatar Khan, had originally been an admirer of Charles, but his feelings had changed when the King refused to join the Turkish army marching to the Pruth. Now the Khan made contact with Augustus of Poland and worked out a plan whereby the King of Sweden would be offered a strong escort of Tatar cavalry ostensibly to cross Poland and return to Swedish territory. Once under way, the escort would be progressively weakened as parts of the force were detached under various pretexts. Across the Polish frontier, the group would be confronted by a strong force of Poles, and the diminished escort, too weak to resist, would surrender and hand over the Swedish King. Thus, both sides would profit: The Turks would get rid of Charles, and Augustus would have him.

This time, however, fortune was with Charles. A body of his men, disguised as Tatars, intercepted the messengers and brought the correspondence between Augustus and the Khan to the King at Bender. Charles learned that both the Khan and the Seraskier of Bender were involved in the plot; as best he could determine, the Sultan was not. For years, Charles had been trying to get away from Turkey, but now he made up his mind not to go. He tried to contact Ahmed III to tell him of the plot, but he found that all communication between Bender and the south had been cut. None of the messages he sent, even by roundabout routes, arrived.

In fact, the Sultan was anxious to see the last of Charles, but had worked out a different solution. On January 18, 1713, he gave orders to abduct the King, by force if necessary, but without harming him, and take him to Salonika, where he would be put on board a French ship which would carry him back to Sweden. Ahmed did not believe that force would be required. He did not know of the Khan's plot, and of course he did not know that Charles was aware of it. From this tangle of plots, partial knowledge and misunderstandings arose the extraordinary episode known by its Turkish name as the Kalabalik (tumult).

The Swedish camp at Bender had greatly changed in three and a half years. Tents had been replaced by permanent barracks built in rows as in a military camp, with glass windows for the officers and leather-covered windows for the common soldiers. The King lived in a large, new, handsomely furnished brick house which, with a chancery building, officers' quarters and a stable, formed a semifortified square in the center of the compound. From the balconies of his upper windows, he had an excellent view of the whole Swedish encampment and the surrounding cluster of coffee houses and small shops in which merchants sold figs, brandy, bread and tobacco to the Swedes. The settlement, called New Bender, was a tiny Swedish island lost in a Turkish ocean. But it was not a hostile ocean. The Janissary regiment posted to guard the King watched over him with an admiring eye. Here was a hero of the king that Turkey desperately lacked. "If we had such a king to lead us, what could we not do?" they asked.

Despite these friendly feelings, when the Sultan's orders arrived in January 1713, the air around the Swedish camp began to fill with tension. Charles' officers watched from the balconies as thousands of Tatar horsemen rode in to join the Janissaries. To confront this force, Charles had fewer than a thousand Swedes and no allies; seeing the massing of the Turkish forces, the Poles and Cossacks nominally under Charles' command had quietly drifted away and placed themselves under Turkish protection. Undeterred, the King began preparations to resist; his men began collecting provisions to last six weeks. To stiffen Swedish morale, Charles one day rode alone and unmolested through the waiting ranks of the Tatar army standing thickly "like organ pipes so close together on all sides."

On January 29, Charles was warned that an attack would come the following day. He and his men spent the night trying to build a wall around the camp, but the frozen earth made digging impossible. Instead, they created a barricade of wooden carts, wagons, tables and benches, and shoveled piles of dung between the wagons. What happened the following day was one of the most bizarre martial episodes in European history. As the dramatic tale resounded through Europe, people shook their heads, but of course, at the time, none who heard the tale knew that Charles intended simply to make a token stand to foil the plot to carry him off and betray him in Poland. Unable to inform the Sultan of this plot, he hoped by his stand to force the Khan and the Seraskier to pull back, wait and ask for new instructions from their master, Ahmed III.