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The diary abruptly closes on the twenty-second of June.
The author was captured on the 28 th, and carried to
Siberia after the Poltawa defeat. But of his further fate
we possess no account. All we know is that he died after
his return, in 1725, on the 13th of April.1
Let us pass in review the military exploits of some
other officers. There is first Henry Wright, the son of
George Wright, who had fled in the Cromwellian troubles
and settled as a merchant in Narwa. Henry, or Henric as
he is called, was born in 1685. When nearly nineteen
he was made a prisoner by the Russians and sold as a
slave for five Rubel, but he succeeded in escaping during
the dark New Year’s night of 1703 to the Finnish army
near Viborg. Imprisoned a second time in 1708 near
Kalkonpö, his treatment was much more severe. Put in
irons, he had to go about St Petersburg and Nöteborg
begging for his bread. In the year following his chains
were removed, and he was attached to the Russian
General Bruce,2 who offered him his liberty and a large
reward if he would enter the Russian service and disclose
all about the fortifications of Viborg. Wright refused,
but made another attempt at flight, together with eight
other officers, on the 10th of May 1710. After having
killed their guard, they marched for a month through
dense forests and deserted wildernesses, starvation staring
them in the face. At last they reached Nyslott and
Sweden, and, nothing daunted, Wright took service again
under Generals Steenbock and Armfelt. In 1732 he
1 Krigs-Arkivet, Stockholm.
2 There were two General Bruces, both of Scotch extraction, in the
Russian army at that period. Old General Bruce invited his nephew,
Peter Henry Bruce of Detring Castle, born in 1692, to come to Russia.
This he did in 1711. He has left us a most interesting account of his
life and adventures, written in German, but translated into English in
1755, and retranslated into German in 1784.
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