The difficulties in the way of founding a city in such a spot were such as might well have appalled any ordinary mind. The site had but a few years before belonged to the Swedes, who maintained a small fort on the edge of Ladoga, the lake which the Neva drains. They were constantly making attacks; Charles XII. remarked that Peter was founding cities only that he might capture them. Petersburg might well have anticipated the fate of Port Arthur. The wretched conditions in which operations had to be carried on brought about an appalling mortality among the workmen employed in building the new town, however much exaggerated may have been the foreign reports that two hundred thousand died. The mechanical appliances available were so extraordinarily poor that earth had to be carried by each workman as best he could; there was no one about who could construct a wheelbarrow! Brigands made communications with Russia unsafe and sometimes did as they pleased in the city itself, while sentries on duty or citizens going about their business were occasionally carried off by the wolves. Provisions had to be fetched from an enormous distance, the cost of living was extremely high. Though the woods were all around, fuel was so scarce that even the nobles (who most unwillingly had been compelled to live here for part of the year) were not allowed to have hot baths excepting once a week. To add to all this no one except Peter could see the slightest need for any other capital than Moscow, still less the point of building a city on this forbidding and man-forsaken spot. But to the Tsar the rising town was a Paradise, so well loved that he had soon decided to make it not merely the chief seaport of his Empire, but the capital as well. The objection which the sagas tell us the eleventh century Russians showed to outland men having dominion was fully shared by eighteenth century Russians, and the huge number of them employed about St. Petersburg helped still more to increase the general loathing for the new capital. Hardly a nation of Europe failed to supply Peter with friends and fellow-workers. He honoured them above his own subjects. Nor did it matter in the least in what circumstances he happened to encounter them. One day as he was inspecting the operations he chanced to notice working with the other convicts a scion of the fightingest family of Scotland, who, born in Sweden, combined with the surname of Douglas the designation of Gustaf Otto. Captured at Pultowa he entered the Russian service; having slain a general in wrath, he entered a Russian jail. But to Peter his failings did not appear at all seriously to cry to heaven for vengeance. He could well make allowance for the spirit of a Douglas when provoked, so restored him to all his honours. In 1719 the now Russified Swede-Scot seized the ancient capital of Finland, and bore in triumph from the cathedral of Abo the bones of Henry the English saint (p. 188).[139]