Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from With the World's Great Travellers, Vol. 7
The approach from the sea reminds the traveller of his first sight of Holland. The city slowly rises out of the water, and stops when its basement windows are level with the waves. Peter ignored all the unfavorable conditions and protests. The word was given and great armies of Babel-tongued Tartars, Cossacks, Finns, and Siberian ex iles were swiftly driven to the spot and ordered to dig the foundations of a city. Like the Israelites in Egypt they were compelled to make bricks without straw, dig the swamp with or without spades, build huts whether they had sufficient materials or not. Thousands of these wretches perished in the first year, but thirty thousand houses were set up. Then artisans and workmen were driven by brute force to settle in the embryo capital. Merchants and nobles who owned five hundred souls, otherwise serfs, were made to build their homes in the new Peter-town, and - stay there even through the winters. No more stone houses were allowed to be built in Russia, because all the masons were coralled in the rising city. No vessels were allowed to enter the wharves unless each brought a cargo of stone as a free-will offering. Thus grew the capital whose foundations are the bones of martyrs to the cruelest despot ism since the days of the Pharaohs. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
