On Down the Dnieper

Come the first of May, when the ice broke on the Dnieper, the group pulled out on the next portion of its trip. It was only 250 miles but required them to maneuver falls. For this portion, Potemkin had built a flotilla of seven galleys (or maybe 11, depending on the book); accompanying boats totaled 80. Meals were served on one of the galleys to all but Catherine and her little in-group, who ate in their own quarters. Each galley was well furnished and even had a library and its own musicians. As had been the case with the coaches, Catherine's galley had a cabin for six persons. She, Mamanov, and her maid took up three spots and the other three were occupied by a rotating shift of others from the group. They were entertained by an entire orchestra directed by Sarti, the premier maestro of the time. Who rowed the galleys? One biographer noticed that not one person who wrote about the trip showed any curiosity about the hands at the oars.

Always, despite the distractions, Catherine took time for writing and administration. Couriers, who negotiated on horseback the immense distances between St. Petersburg and Moscow and the traveling group, delivered fat packs of diplomatic documents and correspondence from her family. At least three times, the flotilla stopped and gentry landowners and even some serfs from the surrounding area would come to talk with Catherine. She would ask them questions and listen to their grievances.

They would tell her about such things as crop failures and things that had broken.

It was hard for Catherine to know what to do about the enslaved serfs. She had been put on the throne by the powerful nobles, and in return, as is the case with political support everywhere, they expected her to ease their responsibilities and tighten their hold on the serfs who did all the work, making their relatively easy lives possible. She had dreamed about freeing them because she sensed how burdened their lives were, but she had also had to put down some frightening serf uprisings, one of which had directly threatened Moscow. She had even enserfed thousands who had formerly been free. Her youthful idealism, she felt, had had to give way to the world's hard realities.