Peter the Great

The English island,” Peter said, “is the best and most beautiful in the world

He looked in on a watchmaker to buy a pocket watch and stayed to learn to dismantle, repair and reassemble the intricate mechanism. Impressed by the carpentry in English coffins, he ordered one shipped to Moscow to serve as a model. He bought a stuffed crocodile and a stuffed swordfish

His Majesty has often declared to his lords, when he has been a little merry, that he thinks it a much happier life to be an admiral in England than a tsar in Russia.

He visited the Greenwich Naval Hospital, designed by Christopher Wren and called “one of the most sublime sights English architecture affords.”

They say that he intends to civilize his subjects in the manner of other nations. But from his acts here, one cannot find any other intention than to make them sailors.

In Russia, he once said to Perry that “if he had not come to England he had certainly been a bungler.”

More important, the Embassy had recruited 640 Dutchmen, among them Rear Admiral Cruys and other naval officers (eventually, Cruys persuaded 200 Dutch naval officers to come to Russia), seamen, engineers, technicians, shipwrights, physicians and other specialists. To carry them and the equipment purchased back to Russia, ten ships had been chartered.

In 1691, at Pereslavl, he had ordered the cannon of his ships on the lake fired in salute when he heard of the English and Dutch victory over the French fleet at La Hogue

And the English heartily returned William’s dislike. They commented on his unsociability, his silence and his surliness toward his English subjects, as well as on his distaste for their habits, their traditions, their parties and politics, and for London.

He came ashore behind a banner carrying the ancient creed of the House of Orange, “Je maintiendrai” (“I shall maintain”), to which William had added the words: “the liberties of England and the Protestant religion.”