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Other intellectual centers there were: SOLIDARITY, published by John Edelman; LIBERTY, by the Individualist Anarchist, Benjamin R. Tucker; the REBEL, by Harry Kelly; DER STURMVOGEL, a German Anarchist publication, edited by Claus Timmermann; DER ARME TEUFEL, whose presiding genius was the inimitable Robert Reitzel.
He came across Russians who, if unscrupulous, were also unprejudiced, and who could aid him in his bold reform of the ancient society. He there became acquainted with Swiss, English, and German adventurers with Lefort, with Gordon, and with Timmermann, who initiated him into European civilization.
Who could make them? Timmermann was able to tell him. Some thirty years before, a number of Dutch ship-carpenters had been brought from Holland and had built some vessels on the Volga River for the czar Alexis. These had been burned by a brigand, and Brandt, the builder, had returned to Moscow, where he still worked as a joiner.
"Can you do that?" asked the eager boy. "Yes, sire," said Brandt, "but I will need many things." "Oh, that does not matter at all," said Peter. "We can have anything." No time was lost. Brandt, with one of his old comrades and Timmermann, went to work at once in the woods bordering the lake, Peter working with them when he could get away from Moscow, where he was frequently needed. It took time.
These differences of opinion in regard to tactics led in 1891 to a breach with John Most. Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and other comrades joined the group AUTONOMY, in which Joseph Peukert, Otto Rinke, and Claus Timmermann played an active part. The bitter controversies which followed this secession terminated only with the death of Most, in 1906.
At length a Dutch merchant, Franz Timmermann by name, was brought him, who measured with the instrument the distance to a neighboring house. Peter was delighted, and eagerly asked to be taught how to use the instrument himself. "It is not so easy," replied Timmermann; "you must first learn arithmetic and geometry." Here was a new incentive.
It is, however, of the boy's activity in naval affairs that we must now speak. Timmermann had become one of his constant companions, and was always teaching him something new. One day in 1688, when Peter was sixteen years old, he was wandering about one of the country estates of the throne, near the village of Ismailovo.
In one corner, bottom upward, lay a boat, very different in build from the flat-bottomed, square-sterned boats which were in use on the Russian rivers. "What is that?" he asked. "It is an English boat," said Timmermann. "But what is it good for? Is it better than our boats?" demanded Peter. "Yes.
An English boat stranded on the shore of Yaousa caused him to send for Franz Timmermann, who taught him to manage a sailing-boat, even with a contrary wind. He who formerly, like a true boyar of Moscow, had such a horror of the water that he could not make up his mind to cross a bridge, became a determined sailor: he guided his boat first on the Yaousa, then on the lake of Pereiaslavl.
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