the remaining years of his life; and January of
1725 found the palaces of all the Russias hushed, for the Hercules who
had scrunched all opposition like a giant lay dying, ashamed to consult
a physician, vanquished of his own vices, calling on Heaven for pity
with screams of pain that drove physicians and attendants from the room.

Perhaps remorse for those seven thousand wretches executed at one fell
swoop after the revolt; perhaps memories of those twenty kneeling
supplicants whose heads he had struck off with his own hand, drinking a
bumper of quass to each stroke; perhaps reproaches {7} of the highway
robbers whom he used to torture to slow death, two hundred at a time,
by suspending them from hooks in their sides; perhaps the first wife,
whom he repudiated, the first son whom he had done to death either by
poison or convulsions of fright, came to haunt the darkness of his
deathbed.

Catherine, the peasant girl, elevated to be empress of all the Russias,
could avail nothing. Physicians and scientists and navigators, Dane
and English and Dutch, whom he had brought to Russia from all parts of
Europe, were powerless. Vows to Heaven, in all the long hours he lay
convulsed battling with Death, were useless. The sins of a lifetime
could not be undone by the repentance of an hour. Then, as if the
dauntless Spirit of the man must rise finally triumphant over Flesh,
the dying Hercules roused himself to one last supreme effort.

Radisson, Marquette, La Salle, Verendrye, were reaching across America
to win the undiscovered regions of the Western Sea for France. New
Spain was pushing her ships northward from Mexico; and now, the dying
Peter of Russia with his own hand wrote instructions for an expedition
to search the boundaries between Asia and America. In a word, he set
in motion that forward march of the Russians across the Orient, which
was to go on unchecked for two hundred years till arrested by the
Japanese. The Czar's instructions were always laconic. They were
written five weeks before his death. "(1) At {8} Kamchatka . . . two
boats are to be built. (2) With these you are to sail northward along
the coast. . . . (3) You are to enquire where the American coast
begins. . . . Write it down . . . obtain reliable information . . .
then, having charted the coast, return." [3]

From the time that Peter the Great began to break down the Oriental
isolation of Russia from the rest of Europe, it was his policy to