That night I lay in my hammock in position to see the starlit ocean through one of the ventilators, and thought over my situation. I could not now complain of lack of food, for there was a supply sufficient to last me two months at least, and there was reason to suppose that it would not be at all difficult to replenish the store. In my porous earthen jar, slung at the head of my hammock in the cool air-current, and by its slow evaporation cooling the liquid contents, was pure, cool, sweet water to drink, and outside was a running brook from which to fill it as often as required. I could safely hope to support myself here as long as might be necessary. But as I had no desire to remain indefinitely a prisoner on this island, I began to turn my thoughts persistently upon the problem of building a boat to get away in. If in the mean time a vessel of some sort should heave in sight I was prepared to take advantage of the chance; and if none came I would still have my work started and no time unnecessarily lost.
Before I went to sleep that night I had planned a method of building a boat which I thought would be within the possibility of accomplishment, and had determined to begin work on the morrow.
CHAPTER V.
BOAT-BUILDING.
WHEN I roused the next morning the first thought that came to me was about the building of the boat. It would be necessary to have a shed to work under, large enough to contain a boat, both for shelter from the rain and for shade from the pitiless tropical sun. The building of such a shed was therefore the first task. As a suitable shipyard I selected the side of the stream on the sands of the sea-beach, and far enough above tide to be safe from a possible storm. Here I put up eight posts in the sand. To get these posts (for they had to be hunted for among the fallen wood), to carry them one or two at a time for a distance ranging from half a mile to a mile and a half, and to set them up in holes dug at the proper distances apart, was a whole day’s work, and left me only time to overhaul my dry-salting before bed-time. I went over each piece of meat, rubbing it again with salt, and turning it the other side up, and finished by putting the weights on again as before. This salting and turning every day would be necessary for about two weeks, and then the meat would be ready for the smoke-house, which I would endeavor in the meantime to get ready to receive it.
The next day I spent getting poles for rafters, and lashing them together to form the roof of my workshop. Then a rain storm set in and lasted three days, during which I was practically confined to the house, and busied myself indoors with making an easy chair out of a dry stick of cedar that split readily into straight pieces. It was a pleasure to work in this soft, straight-grained, fragrant wood, and I made a good, strong, comfortable arm-chair, dowelling and cording the parts together, and framing a sort of base for it so that it would stand firm on the sand floor. I could now sit and read with comfort, or look at the gray, rainy sea as it stretched its misty plane away before my door. It was at this time that I began to keep an irregular sort of journal, entering my thoughts and doings from time to time as the enforced semi-idleness of rainy weather prompted me. Besides pencils and pens there was paper enough in my stock, wet and stained and wrinkled though it had been, to last me indefinitely.
As soon as the rain was over I took the first day to construct my provision and smoke-house, in order that I might store the meat in it. A doorway was cut from my living-room into this store-room, and I purposed fitting a tight door into it before smoking my pork. I busied myself after that on my work-shed until it was finished. This roof I covered with palm-leaves,—not leaves of the cocoanut-palm, but of the great, spreading fan-palm, a single one of which was often three or four feet in diameter. I had used these leaves in making my storehouse roof, and had secured a giant specimen in a horizontal position over my front door as a sort of porch, and to keep the sun out of the house when the door was open.
The work-shed when finished was about twenty-four feet long by ten feet wide, with a shed or single-pitch roof, at the upper side about eight feet, and at the lower side—which was toward the sea—about five feet from the ground. Underneath was the clean sand of the beach. I was now ready to begin the actual work of boat-building, and my first need was a supply of clay,—so great a quantity, in fact, as would take me several days of hard work to raft down the stream to the boat-shed.
You will see as I proceed what part this material was to play. After a great deal of labor, wading up and down the creek, digging, loading, rafting, and unloading, I at last accumulated a sufficient amount for my purpose in a great heap close to the boat-shed. I next proceeded to smooth the sand beneath the shed, and to compact it into a smooth, hard floor as follows: I took of perfectly dry clay several bushels in fragments, and crushed these to a fine dust; this dust I sprinkled evenly all over the sand floor to the depth of an inch or more, sprinkling and wetting the dust and the sand liberally with a bough dipped in the sea water. As the mixture grew dry I trampled it with my naked feet until it was smooth and firm, sprinkling a little dry sand on the surface and trampling it in. The result was a dustless, dry floor, hard enough to support my weight readily, and smooth enough for my purpose.
On this floor, with a stretched cord rubbed with charcoal, I marked, as carpenters do with a chalk line, a straight line twenty-one feet long or thereabouts; this was to be the length of the boat, and its centre line from stem to stern. Using the cord as a measure, I laid off at each side of this centre line, the horizontal outline of my proposed boat. The greatest breadth of beam I made about six feet, and tapered both the stem and the stern alike, after the manner of a whaleboat. At each end of the centre line I drove a stake upright, and notched the top to carry a guide line stretched from one to the other directly over the centre line. Then, with tempered clay, I marked the outline of the boat by building up a little wall about three inches in breadth and as many in height all around from stem to stern on both sides. The space inside this wall I filled with sand, sprinkled and compacted until it was level with the top of the wall. Then I added to the wall another course of clay and filled in again; and so kept on adding and filling and sloping in the wall, until I had a mound of clay-coated sand, shaped like a boat turned upside down.
This labor, simple as it sounds in statement, took me over a week, and before it was done I was interrupted by the necessity for setting my smoke-house in order for curing the hams and bacon. I built for the smoking a slow fire of bark, which required attention only once or twice each day. The clay form under the boat-shed I left to get dry and hard. It was my design, as I have no doubt you have already guessed, to use this clay form as a core or groundwork, upon which to shape my boat.