The Galley ‘Dvina’ (The galley – A unique in the Russian fleet 25- banked (50-Oared) three-masted vessel ) This is specially designed with a rosewood double plank on the hull. Truly a masterpiece! Meticulously crafted figurehead and head rails in quality material, size scale and color all according to the historical ship. Stern windows and taffrail decoration are sculptured with excessive attention to detail and all with first class craftmanship. Accurately reflect the beauty of the original Dvina– nowhere you can find this such beautiful ship model! This auction is for an exquisite scale model of the Russian Ship Dvina, with details including bound masts, yards with stun’s’l booms and foot ropes, carved full sails running and standing rigging with carved scale blocks, dolphin-striker, safety nets, carved fiddle-end prow with coat-of-arms, anchor with chains and hawse pipes, catheads, bitts, stove pipe, sail winch, belaying rails and pins, companionway, helm and tiller, ship’s bell and other details. The planked hull with open gun ports with metal guns, pressed stern and quarter gallery decoration boarding companionway and finished in black. Dimension: 42″ (L) x 27″ 
Peter returned to St. Petersburg on March 22, 1713, but
spent only one month in his beloved city. During April, he learned from
Shafirov in Turkey that, despite damaging Tatar raids in the Ukraine, the
Ottoman Turks had no intention of making serious war in the south. The Tsar
therefore was able to devote all his attention to readying the fleet and army
to conquer the north shore of the upper Baltic.
Once the surrender of Stenbock, penned up in the fortress of
Tonning, seemed inevitable, Peter turned to the opposite end of the Baltic,
resolving to drive the Swedes out of Finland. He did not intend to keep the
province, but any territory he took in Finland beyond Karelia would be useful
for bargaining when peace negotiations began. It could, for example, be used to
balance those Swedish territories such as Ingria and Karelia which Peter did
intend to keep. There was another advantage to a Finnish campaign: He would be
on his own, without wrangling allies to hinder his operations. After the
agonizing delays in Pomerania over the delivery of artillery and the necessity
of pleading with other monarchs to live up to their promises, it would be a
relief to conduct a campaign exactly how and where he wished.
In fact, Peter had not waited until that spring to decide on
this campaign. Already in the previous November, he had written from Carlsbad
ordering Apraxin to intensify the preparation of troops and fleet for an
advance into Finland. “This province,” Peter wrote, “is the
mother of Sweden as you yourself are aware. Not only meat, but even wood is
brought from it, and if God let us get as far as Abo [a town on the east coast
of the Gulf of Bothnia, then the capital of Finland] next summer, the Swedish
neck will be easier to bend.”
The Finnish campaign that summer and the next was swift,
efficient and relatively bloodless. For this brillant success, the new Russian
Baltic fleet was almost wholly responsible.
During Peter’s reign, there was a radical shift in warship
design and naval tactics. In the 1690’s, the term “ship-of- the-line”
first appeared when the confused melee of individual ship-to-ship duels was
replaced by the “line” tactic-two rows of warships sailing on
parallel courses and pounding each other with heavy artillery. The
“line” imposed standards of design; a capital ship had to be powerful
enough to lie in the line of battle, as compared to the smaller, faster
frigates and sloops used for reconnaissance and commerce raiding. The
qualifications were strict: stout construction, fifty or more heavy cannon and
a crew trained in expert seamanship and accurate gunnery. In all these
respects, Englishmen excelled.
The average ship-of-the-line carried from sixty eighty heavy
cannon placed in rows of two or three gundecks and divided, port and starboard,
so that even a full broadside meant that only half the guns aboard a ship could
fire at an enemy. Some men-of-war were even bigger, goliaths of ninety or one
hundred guns, whose crews, including marine sharpshooters posted in the rigging
to pick off officers and gunners on the enemy decks, reached more than 800 men.
Apart from damage inflicted in battle, the effectiveness of
warships was limited by the damage caused by time and the elements. Leaking
hulls, loose masts, tattered rigging and parted lines were commonplace in ships
at sea. For serious repairs, ships had to come into port, and the bases to
support them were an essential element of seapower.
In winter-especially in the Baltic, where ice made naval
operations impossible-fleets went into hibernation. The ships were brought
alongside a quay, where sails, rigging, topmasts, spars, cannon and cannonballs
were carried off and laid in rows or stacked in pyramids. At the Baltic naval
bases-Karlskrona, Copenhagen, Kronstadt and Reval- the great hulls were lined
up side by side like sleeping elephants, frozen into the ice for winter. In the
spring, one by one, the hulls were careened-that is, rolled on one side so that
rotten or damaged bottom planks could be replaced, barnacles scraped, seams
recalked and tarred. This done, the ships went back to the quay, and the procedure
of the previous autumn was reversed: Cannon, spars, rigging all came back on
board and the hull became once more a warship.
Relative to England’s Royal Navy with its 100 ships of the
line, the Baltic powers had smaller fleets, intended mainly for use against
each other within the confines of that enclosed sea. Denmark was almost an
island kingdom whose capital, Copenhagen, was wholly exposed to the sea. The
Swedish empire when Charles XII came to the throne was also a maritime entity,
its integrity resting on secure communications and freedom to move troops and
provisions between Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Livonia and North Germany. From
her new, strategically placed naval base built at Karlskrona in 1658 to curb
the Danes and protect her sea communications with her German provinces, Sweden
was able to control all the middle and upper Baltic. Even after Poltava had
humbled the previously invincible Swedish army, the Swedish navy remained
formidable. In 1710, the year after Poltava, Sweden had forty-one ships-of-the-line,
Denmark had forty-one, Russia had none. The senior Swedish admiral,
Wachtmeister, was primarily occupied against the Danes, but powerful Swedish
squadrons still cruised in the Gulf of Finland and off the Livonian coast.
Against the Russians, the Swedish fleet was able to do
little. It could ensure the arrival of supplies and reinforcements, but once an
army was committed to action on land, a fleet was not much help. At the time
the Russians were besieging Riga, the entire Swedish fleet assembled off the
mouth of the Dvina, but could contribute nothing to the town’s defense, and
eventually Riga capitulated. In the later phase of the Great Northern War,
however, seapower became increasingly important. The only way to force an
obdurate Sweden to make peace, Peter realized, was to reach across the Baltic
Sea to threaten the Swedish homeland. One invasion avenue was directly across
from Denmark to Sweden, a massive landing to be supported and covered by the
Danish fleet; this projected assault occupied the Tsar during the summer and
autumn of 1716. The other approach lay along the coast of Finland, then across
the Gulf of Bothnia into the Aland Islands and thence toward Stockholm. It was
this approach which Peter tried first, in the summers of 1713 and 1714.
Peter would have preferred to make this effort at the head
of a powerful Russian sea-going battle fleet of fifty ships-of- the-line. But
to lay the great keel beams in place, then add the ribs and planking, to cast
the cannon, set the rigging, recruit and train the crews to sail and fight them
so that they would do more damage to the enemy than to themselves, was a
gigantic task. Despite the hiring of foreign shipwrights, admirals, officers
and seamen, the project moved slowly. The herculean effort expended at
Voronezh, Azov and Tagonrog was now fruitless; the construction of a new fleet
on the Baltic had to begin from scratch.
Gradually, through 1710 and 1711, the big ships accumulated,
but Peter still possessed too few to challenge the Swedish navy in a classic
sea battle for control of the upper Baltic. Besides, once he had spent the
immense effort in time and money necessary to build and equip the ships, he
wanted to preserve them. Accordingly, he had given an order absolutely
forbidding his admirals to risk the ships-of-the-line and frigates in battle
unless the odds were overwhelmingly favorable. Thus, for the most part, the new
big ships of Peter’s Baltic fleet remained in the harbor.
Although Peter continued to build ships-of-the-line at home
and to order them from Dutch and English shipyards, the brilliant success of
the Tsar’s naval campaigns in 1713 and 1714 in the Gulf of Finland was due to
his employment of a class of ship never seen before in the Baltic, the galley.
Galleys were hybrid ships. Usually around eighty to a hundred feet long, a
typical galley possessed a single mast and a single sail, but also numerous
benches for oarsmen. Thus equipped, it combined the qualities of sailing ships
and rowed vessels and could move in wind or calm. For centuries, galleys had
been used in the enclosed waters of the Mediterranean, where the wind was
freakish and unreliable. Even in the eighteenth century, on these sun- baked
bays and gulfs, the naval tradition of the Persian emperors and Roman republic
survived. A few small cannon had been added, but the galleys were too small and
unstable to carry the heavy naval guns of larger ships. Accordingly,
eighteenth-century galleys fought using the tactics developed in the days of
Xerxes and Pompey: They rowed toward their enemy and grappled with him,
deciding the issue with a hand-to-hand infantry battle conducted on crowded,
violent, slippery decks.
In Peter’s time, the Ottoman navy was made up mostly of
galleys. Officered by Greeks, manned by slaves, they were behemoths, the
biggest carrying as many as 2,000 men divided between two decks of oarsmen and
ten companies of soldiers. To fight the Turks in the confined waters of the
Aegean and the Adriatic, the Venetians also built galleys, and it was to Venice
that Peter sent numerous young Russians to learn the art of galley building.
France kept some forty galleys in the Mediterranean, rowed by convicts sent to
the galleys for life in lieu of execution. Surrounded by stormy seas, Britain
had no use for galleys.
Peter had always been interested in galleys. They could be
built quickly and inexpensively, of pine rather than hardwood. They could be
manned by inexperienced seamen, soldiers who could double as naval infantrymen
to board and attack an enemy. The largest would carry 300 men and five guns,
the smallest 150 men and three guns. Peter had constructed galleys first at
Voronezh, then at Tagonrog, and those built on Lake Peipus were used in the cannon
had been added, but the galleys were too small and unstable to carry the heavy
naval guns of larger ships. Accordingly, eighteenth-century galleys fought
using the tactics developed in the days of Xerxes and Pompey: They rowed toward
their enemy and grappled with him, deciding the issue with a hand-to-hand
infantry battle conducted on crowded, violent, slippery decks.
In Peter’s time, the Ottoman navy was made up mostly of
galleys. Officered by Greeks, manned by slaves, they were behemoths, the
biggest carrying as many as 2,000 men divided between two decks of oarsmen and
ten companies of soldiers. To fight the Turks in the confined waters of the Aegean
and the Adriatic, the Venetians also built galleys, and it was to Venice that
Peter sent numerous young Russians to learn the art of galley building. France
kept some forty galleys in the Mediterranean, rowed by convicts sent to the
galleys for life in lieu of execution. Surrounded by stormy seas, Britain had
no use for galleys.
Peter had always been interested in galleys. They could be
built quickly and inexpensively, of pine rather than hardwood. They could be
manned by inexperienced seamen, soldiers who could double as naval infantrymen
to board and attack an enemy. The largest would carry 300 men and five guns,
the smallest 150 men and three guns. Peter had constructed galleys first at
Voronezh, then at Tagonrog, and those built on Lake Peipus were used in the campaigns
of 1702, 1703 and 1704 to drive a Swedish flotilla from the lake. Galleys would
be perfect to circumvent the Swedish advantage in big men-of-war in the Baltic.
Given the nature of the Finnish coast, studded with myriad rocky islands and
fjords fringed with red granite and fir trees, Peter could neutralize the
Swedish fleet simply by conceding to it the open water while his more
maneuverable shallow-draft galleys moved in the inshore coastal waters that the
larger Swedish ships would not dare enter. Cruising along the coast, the
Russian galleys could carry supplies and troops, almost invulnerable to the
larger Swedish ships outside. And if the Swedes came in to meet them, the big
ships might easily founder on the rocks, or if the wind dropped and left them
becalmed, the Swedes would lie helpless before the Russian galleys rowing to
attack.
For Sweden, Russia’s surprising appearance as a Baltic naval
power and Peter’s heavy reliance on galleys created a painful dilemma.
Traditionally, Swedish admirals were accustomed to maintain a regular fleet of
modem, heavy ships-of-the-line ready to confront their traditional adversaries,
the Danes. When Peter’s galleys began splashing down from the construction
ways, Sweden faced an entirely different kind of naval warfare. Already
financially exhausted, Sweden lacked the means simultaneously to maintain its
fleet against the Danes and to build a huge galley fleet to combat Russia. Thus
it was that Swedish admirals and captains could only watch helplessly from
their larger ships outside as Peter’s oar-driven, shallow- draft galley
flotillas moved inshore along the coastline, swiftly and efficiently conquering
the coast of Finland.
The overall commander in these successful naval campaigns
was General Admiral Fedor Apraxin, who usually also took personal command of
the galley fleet. Vice Admiral Cornelius Cruys, the Dutch officer who had
helped Peter build his fleet and train his seamen, customarily flew his flag on
one of the ships-of-the-line, while the Tsar himself, always insisting on
calling himself “Rear Admiral Peter Alexeevich” when afloat, switched
back and forth between commanding squadrons of larger ships and flotillas of
galleys. Apraxin impressed his foreign officers with his manner and skill. One
of his English captains described him as a man “of moderate height,
well-made, inclining to feed, careful about his hair which is very long and now
grey; and generally wears it tied up in a ribbon. A widower of long date,
without issue, yet you observe an incomparable economy, order and decency in
his house, gardens, domestics and dress. All unanimously vote in behalf of his
excellent temper; but he loves to have men comport themselves according to
their rank.” Apraxin’s relations with Peter, ashore and afloat, were
conducted with a delicate blend of dignity and circumspection. At court, having
given his word, and convinced of the merit of his case, Apraxin continued
“even if opposed by the Sovereign’s absolute will to
maintain the justice of his demand until the Tsar, in a passion, by his menaces
enforces silence.” But at sea Apraxin would not give way to Peter. The
General Admiral had never been abroad and had not himself been trained in
seamanship and naval tactics until he was well along in years. Nevertheless he
refused to submit. even when the Tsar, as junior flag officer, differing in
opinion, will endeavor to invalidate the General Admiral’s opinion by alleging
his inexperience as never having seen foreign navies. Count Apraxin will
instantly overrule the same invidious charge, to the utmost provocation of the
Tsar; though afterwards he will submit with the following statement:
“Whilst I as Admiral argue with Your Majesty in quality of flag officer, I
can never give way; but if you assume the [rank of] Tsar I know my duty.”
