While the meeting between King William III and Tsar Peter at Utrecht was one that proved highly advantageous for Russia, it was to be no less important to England, providing the latter with a privileged position in Russia for its seaborne merchant traders. This, in itself, might seem of limited significance, given that British traders were already spreading their tentacles across all the world’s oceans, but for the fact that without the goods that Russia could produce and sell, those traders and the navy that supported them would have but few ships with which to carry out trade, and no navy to defend those ships when sailing the high seas. For Russia would become the key source of naval stores, the basic raw materials used for the building, supplying, maintaining and repairing of ships, with the meeting at Utrecht coming at a particularly auspicious moment. It was a point in time when Britain was undergoing a period of naval expansion that was to be maintained and continued right into the nineteenth century and on into the age of steam, iron and steel. To sustain that growth, during the age of sail, Britain’s ship builders and owners, be they merchant traders or the Admiralty, needed a steady and virtually limitless supply of basic raw materials out of which the wooden ships of that period were constructed and maintained. The Russian Empire, through the vastness of its territory, suitable climatic conditions and a ready supply of cheap labour, was in a position to fully meet that demand with materials of quality and at a cost much lower than might be found elsewhere. It was the privileged position that British merchants were given in Russia, first explored by the two monarchs at their meeting in Utrecht, that secured for Britain the future sure supply of those essential items known as naval stores, and which in turn secured British trading dominance as the world’s leading maritime power.