Engraving "Peter I's Little Boat" after Ivan Zubov

This etching is a 19th-century impression reproducing Ivan Zubov's engraving of 1722, made after a drawing by I. P. Zarudny. The sheet shows the little boat of Peter I, a small sailing vessel known as the "grandfather of the Russian fleet".

Peter I recorded the boat's story himself: in May 1688, at Izmailovo near Moscow, among the belongings of his grandfather Nikita Ivanovich Romanov, he came across a foreign vessel, an English boat. The Dutch shipwright Karsten Brandt repaired it, fitted a mast and sail and launched it on the Yauza, where the young tsar learned to handle a boat.

In 1723 the boat took part in a parade of the Baltic Fleet in St Petersburg marking the second anniversary of the Peace of Nystad, and was then brought to Kronstadt, where the fleet greeted it with a salute. Today the vessel itself is kept in the Central Naval Museum in St Petersburg. The engraving is an etching on paper.