While at Zaandam, Peter finished a sixty gun ship, upon which he had worked diligently from the laying of the keel. As the Russians then had no harbor in the Baltic, this ship was sent to Archangel, on the shores of the White Sea. Peter also engaged a large number of French refugees, and Swiss and German artists, to enter his service and sent them to Moscow. Whenever he found a mechanic whose work testified to superior skill, he would secure him at almost any price and send him to Moscow. To geography he devoted great attention, and even then devised the plan of uniting the Caspian and the Black Sea by a ship canal. Early in January, 1698, Peter, having passed nine months at Zaandam, left for the Hague. King William III. sent his yacht to the Hague, to convey the tzar to England, with a convoy of two ships of war. Peter left the Hague on the 18th of January, and arrived in London on the 21st. Though he attempted here no secrecy as to his rank, he requested to be treated only as a private gentleman. A large mansion was engaged for him, near the royal navy yard at Deptford, a small town upon the Thames, about four miles from London. The London Postman, one of the leading metropolitan journals of that day, thus announces this extraordinary visit: "The tzar of Muscovy, desiring to raise the glory of his nation, and avenge the Christians of all the injuries they have received from the Turks, has abrogated the wild manners of his predecessors, and having concluded, from the behavior of his engineers and officers, who were sent him by the Elector of Brandenburg, that the western nations of Europe understood the art of war better than others, he resolved to take a journey thither, and not wholly to rely upon the relations which his embassadors might give him; and, at the same time, to send a great number of his nobility into those parts through which he did not intend to travel, that he might have a complete idea of the affairs of Europe, and enrich his subjects with the arts of all other Christian nations; and as navigation is the most useful invention that ever was yet found out, he seems to have chosen it as his own part in the general inquiry he is about. His design is certainly very noble, and discovers the greatness of his genius. But the model he has proposed himself to imitate is a convincing proof of his extraordinary judgment; for what other prince, in the world, was a fitter pattern for the great Emperor of Muscovy, than William the Third, King of Great Britain?"[11] [Footnote 11: Postman, No. 417.]