THE RUSSIAN FLEET

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ten or twelve days’ continuance at sea, when manyare sea sick, or otherwise in ill state of health, andthe rest thunderstruck with the terror of an ap-proaching engagement, under various disadvantagesin an element disagreeable to far the major partand the distraction heightened by the everlastinganimosities and emulation subsisting betwixt landand sea officers and their people. The officers froma sense of their people’s inexperience will be fearfulof opening their ports or loosening their guns, lestby ill steerage, or other mismanagement, the searun in at their portholes, or the guns break looseand endanger their sinking, especially amongst theRussians, whose known property is ever to recoilfrom danger, even when immediate presence of mindis requisite to repel an otherwise unavoidable ruin.And the people construing the officers’ caution in theworst sense, will quite lose the spirit they have, andwhen they come to engage do but little execution,neither firing so quick, nor sure as they might,through confusion and despair of success. Andeven in calm moderate weather, when the peopleare in condition to behave something better, yetthe enemy has great advantage through the bad-ness of their powder ; and commanders acquaintedwith the hazard they run, above all things dread theblowing up of their ships, through the fear, ignorance,and confusion of the undisciplined multitude. TheRussian ships of war have never 1 been in any actionworth taking notice of, and always four to one, whenaught of that kind offered. What method the Tsarwill take to instruct his people time alone can

1 As before remarked in the notes, the battle at Hango Headwas not a sea-fight, and was not fought between the Russian andSwedish navies, but between the Russian galley fleet and the Swedishskdrgardsfleet {Peter der Grosse, by Professor Alexander Bruckner,of Dorpat University, Berlin, 1879, p. 421).