Nature's Evil

In 1730 the young Crown Prince Frederick, the elder son of the Prussian king, decided to escape the boredom of court life by fleeing with his lover, an army lieutenant, Hans Hermann von Katte. Bound for England, they were captured in Küstrin (today western Poland) and imprisoned for desertion. By order of the king, von Katte was beheaded in front of the prince; Frederick spent two months in the dungeon before begging forgiveness from his father. The king ordered his son to audit the local administration and learn ‘agriculture from the ground up’. This was how the future Frederick the Great first developed an interest in draining marshland. One of his first projects was the draining of the Oder’s banks: the main canal was designed by Leonhard Euler, a Swiss mathematician whom Frederick had lured away from St Petersburg. In those decades leading up to the Seven Years’ War, the monarchs of Europe competed for the services of astronomers, statisticians and chemists. But there were few places where the testing of theory by practice had such a dramatic character as in hydraulic work. Only when war broke out was Frederick able to tear himself away from his enthusiasm for bogs. He saw the Dutch art of drainage as a victory of mind over matter, the embodiment of the Enlightenment: the Dutch engineers implemented on the ground what French writers preached on the page. ‘Whoever improves the soil, cultivates land lying waste and drains swamps is making conquests from barbarism,’ wrote Frederick to Voltaire. He settled 300,000 migrants from the east and west of Prussia on the reclaimed land that they had drained. Militant rationalism, which was hard to implement anywhere else, reigned supreme on land won back from water. 4 A regular grid of ditches divided the fields. New systems of crop rotation were introduced there. English sheep and Danish cattle grazed on the reclaimed meadows. The elimination of malaria in Europe and North America was a direct consequence of the draining of the marshland.

Frederick thoroughly documented the work carried out on the Prussian marshland. Soldiers built wooden causeways that allowed people to move about on the marshland; this was the risky part of the work. Dug to connect to the nearest river, a network of ditches and canals drained the land. When the quagmire had partly dried, soldiers removed the top layer of light-coloured peat. Black peat lay underneath; this was sliced, dried and taken to the town market. Schooners brought back sand; mixed with the white peat, it raised the level of the ground. Wheat or buckwheat could be sown into this mixture. In other cases, the half-drained bog was simply set on fire and crops were sown in the ashes. Gradually, villages – ‘bog colonies’, as they were officially called – grew up in these places. In fact, more than a few of the beautiful cities in the world have been built on reclaimed marshland: Venice, Cambridge, St Petersburg, Princeton, Shanghai, New Orleans …

For a long period when people lived off the fruits of the earth, marshland remained a no man’s land which belonged to the sovereign. When he decided to build a university or a capital city, situating it in the marshes was a questionable but politically sound decision. The building of St Petersburg was one of the most significant of these decisions. Despite the abundance of marshland, Russians did not manage the extraction of peat for very long. Scotsmen and Dutchmen drained the land on which St Petersburg stands; they were experts in peat, but there was no demand for it because of the unlimited availability of firewood. In 1759, Mikhail Lomonosov, the founder of Russian natural sciences, made a study of peat. Although he had been brought up in the marshes of the Arkhangelsk region, he wrote about peat as if it was an alien speciality: ‘peat is extracted from bogs with nets … and is used by the Dutch instead of firewood … It has given rise to an amusing proverb about merchants and manufacturers: whoever trades in peat sells his land, his fatherland.’ 5