At any rate, after four days of incredible difficulties the passage was made, and the boat landed at Reval, a Russian port on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland. They had sailed in one way and another about five hundred miles. Those who had known of his departure from Sweden had no thought but that he and all with him had perished in the attempt. He was, as he stated to Jefferson, in wretched health, and the exposure alone might have killed him. That he went on is highly characteristic of him, and exhibits his entire indifference to personal hardships. The passage presents a fine evidence of his audacity. When he determined to do a thing, he never allowed anything to stop him. Having paid the boatmen for the loss of their boat, and remunerated them handsomely for their labors, he dismissed them to return at their leisure, and proceeded to the Russian court, where he arrived on the fourth day of May. His great reputation, his adventurous passage, his strange and attractive personality, and the fact that he stood high in the good graces and enjoyed the favor of the empress, rendered him an object of universal interest and attraction. On the 6th of May he was presented to the empress, who immediately conferred upon him the rank he coveted, of rear admiral. Catherine treated him with such distinction that he states in his journal that "I was overcome by her courtesies (_je me laissai seduire_), and put myself into her hands without making any stipulation for my personal advantage. I demanded but one favor, that I should never be condemned unheard." Poor fellow! It was the one right--not favor, but rights went by favor then in Russia--which was not accorded him. He little knew what the future that looked so promising had in store for him, but for the present everything was most delightful. He remained, recuperating and preparing for his command, for two weeks, during which period he was magnificently entertained by the highest nobility of Russia and the distinguished foreigners in attendance at the court. Among his papers the cards of many of them are still preserved. There was one exception to his welcome. The English officers in the service of Catherine, and they were many in number and high in quality, affected to describe him as a pirate and a smuggler, and are said to have threatened to resign in a body rather than serve under his command. While I have no doubt as to their feelings, I think it improbable that the threat was ever seriously meant, or that it reached the ears of the empress, for two reasons: first, it was apparently never contemplated that Jones should command the Cronstadt fleet, in which those Englishmen who were highest in rank and reputation were stationed--he had been designated for the Black Sea fleet, and specifically called into service to war against the Turks; and second, it is extremely unlikely that they should have carried such a threat to the throne, for Catherine was not one whom it was