About the middle of the afternoon we got on board, and after sculling the boat out over the bar set sail for Home Creek, where we arrived safely about five o’clock. While supper was being made ready I built a safe coop for the old hen, with sticks driven into the ground, and put her with her nest into it, giving her corn and a gourd of water, and left her to hatch her brood if she chose. We were all very tired that night and went early to bed.
The next day Mr. Millward and I went to work to contrive some sort of device for spinning the cocoa-husk fibre into rope-yarn. The old fanning-mill came very handily into play in this job. The fan was geared to run at a high rate of speed, and by disconnecting the sieves and shakers and taking off the fan blades, this final piece of shafting could be made to revolve at a rattling gait by a comparatively slow motion of the crank, and with very little expenditure of force. We turned the old machine up on one end and mounted it on stilts to bring the final or fan shaft into convenient position. Then on the end of the fan shaft we mounted the spinning device, whittled out of hard wood and pieces of cane. This consisted primarily of a spool about a foot in length mounted in a framework so that its axis would be at right angles to the fan shaft. The revolution of the fan shaft would now cause the spool to revolve with an end-over-end movement; so that a piece of cord, if one end were tied or wound upon the spool, would be twisted. The next thing was to contrive some method for causing the spool to rotate automatically on its own axis at a slower rate, so as to wind up the cord as fast as it was twisted by the other motion of the spool at a high rate of speed.
This movement cost us an almost indescribable amount of the closest and hardest thought. To complete the machine up to this point took only two days. Then we stuck fast for a whole week debating the matter and trying contrivances which would not work, and which, when they came to trial it seemed as though we should have known would not work, so complete and humiliating was their failure. Finally we changed the whole structure by mounting the spool loosely on the end of the fan shaft itself with its axis coincident with the axis of the shaft, fitting the spool to run by friction on the shaft, while the frame which led the yarn to the spool was rigidly fixed on the same shaft. Now the rapid motion of the frame would do the twisting and the cord would wind only as fast as it was freely fed, the spool slipping at a commensurate rate on the shaft. This worked all right with a piece of cord already made; but whether it would make the yarn out of unformed fibre was a matter to be determined by trial. This trial we could not make until we had built a feeding-table on which to pile the mass of fibre, fitted with a tube of cane to guide the forming yarn to the twister-frame. When this was done the machine proved satisfactory and did the work it was designed to do rapidly and well. It required two to work it,—one to turn the crank and thus furnish the power, and the other to feed up and manipulate the fibre so that it would be smoothly and properly interwoven with the twisting end of the forming filament.
The construction of this rude machine took us ten days of hard study and work. But when it was done we had taken a long step in advance. When we learned it would work we celebrated the occasion by twisting a spoolful of yarn, about a hundred yards,—I turning the crank, with the sweat of honest toil dripping from me, while Mr. Millward fed in the fibre. This yarn, which was quite firmly spun, we doubled, and allowed it to twist together upon itself making a stout cord nearly fifty yards in length and of the size of signal halyard stuff. It was strong and firm, and as we judged would easily stand a strain of fifty pounds without breaking. That it was not absolutely smooth and even, was a matter of comparatively small consequence, the vital thing being strength and compactness.
To say that we were both delighted with the result of our labors, is only faintly to express the real condition of mind with which we hailed it.
Alice Millward had come down to see the trial of the machine, and was a witness of the making of the first piece of cord, and we all joined together in the rejoicing.
Now began a period of steady, hard work, manufacturing rope. We first rigged up the machine under the shed, so that we might have protection from the sun and the rain, and then set to work, regularly each day, excepting of course on the sabbath day, during which we always rested and held divine service at least once. We divided the working day as follows: from breakfast until nine o’clock we spent gathering husks enough for the whole day’s work, bringing them to the shed and pounding up and separating sufficient of the fibre for a run of half an hour. Promptly at nine o’clock I took the crank and began a steady half-hour’s grind; then to give my muscles a change we would go again at pounding and separating fibre for half an hour; then came another half-hour at the crank, and so on until the blessed hour of noon arrived, when we would take dinner and rest until one o’clock; then hard at it again, rain or shine, until five o’clock.
Mr. Millward could sit at his feeding work and was thus able to endure it; but it was doubtless very hard for him, though he never uttered a complaint and seemed to thrive on it. My work at the crank was very hard indeed, and at first when night came every bone and muscle in my whole body would ache with the strain. As the days went by, however, the work grew easier and easier day by day, until I felt it no longer as a strain upon me.
At five o’clock we set to work getting up the necessary fuel and doing the chores about the house, and such little things as Alice wanted attended to. Exactly at six o’clock Alice, who carried the watch, would come out and call us in for supper, to which two tired men were sure to do justice, especially to the hot coffee which we now had at each meal in plenty. After supper we generally sat on the porch talking over various matters of interest. Mr. Millward, who when a younger man had spent ten years as a missionary in India and South Africa, related many interesting reminiscences of his life in those strange countries: of desperate fights with savages in resisting forays; of hunts for game and encounters with wild beasts; of the rude forms of worship and superstitions of the African tribes, and the complex religion of the Hindoos. His memory was wonderfully accurate and stored with countless incidents, curious, strange, and interesting.