art of navigation. As a result of his enterprise, the principal parts
of a Russian ship have English or Dutch names, some words being
changed a little to adapt them to Russian pronunciation. The Dutch
navigators exerted great influence upon the nautical language of
Russia. To illustrate this Captain Lund said: "A Dutch pilot or
captain could come on my ship and his orders in his own language would
be understood by my crew. I mean simply the words of command, without
explanations. On the other hand, a Dutch crew could understand my
orders without suspecting they were Russian."

Sitting among the officers in the ward-room, I endeavored to accustom
my ear to the sound of the Russian language and learn to repeat the
most needed phrases. I soon acquired the alphabet, and could count up
to any extent; I could spell Russian words much as a schoolboy goes
through his 'first reader' exercise, but was unable to attain rapid
enunciation. I could never get over the impression that the Muscovite
type had been set up by a drunken printer who couldn't read. The R's
looked the wrong way, the L's stood bottom upward, H's became N's, and
C's were S's, and lower case and small caps were generally mixed up.
The perplexities of Russian youth must be greater than ours, as they
have thirty-six letters in their alphabet and every one of them must
be learned. A brief study of Slavonic verbs and nouns convinced me
they could never be acquired grammatically in the short time I
proposed remaining in Russia, and so I gave them up.

What a hindrance to a traveler and literal man of the world is this
confusion of tongues! There is no human being who can make himself
verbally understood everywhere on this little globe. In the Russian
empire alone there are more than a hundred spoken languages and
dialects. The emperor, with all his erudition, has many subjects with