My next task, after making the common tools that I needed and various castings that were useful to me, was to erect a turning lathe,—one for wood, which was quite simple, and one for iron, which was a work of some magnitude,—and a whole year elapsed before I had it perfected to my taste. The castings were rough, but solid and useful, and the other parts were, with care and attention, at last made mathematically true, and this, with a drilling machine and some iron rollers to roll out my metal when coming from the furnace, completed my iron foundry, as I was now pleased to call it.
Having all these things about me it was a small matter to cast several small cannon, of some four or six pound calibre, and bore them out on my turning-lathe and table. These I mounted on wooden trucks, and placed one on East Signal Point, one on Eastern Cape, one on South Cape, which I transported there by water in the canoe Fairy, one on Penguin Point, and one on West Signal Point. It was fun for me to make these things, and therefore, to protect myself still more, I made a number, of smaller calibre even, which I placed pointing out through embrasures in a wall with which I had encircled the Hermitage, and surrounded with a strong picket fence, made of cast-iron, which I found no difficulty in casting in sections of nearly ten feet in length. At all the stations at the extremities of the island I hid a little amount of ammunition, near the cannon erected, and also a flint and steel and a limestock or slow-match, so that at any time, if needful, I could load one of these cannon at once and discharge it. The touchholes I covered nicely with a piece of goatskin, so as to protect the guns from the weather, and fitted all the muzzles with a wooden plug, so that the interior would be kept clear and dry.
PLACING THE CANNON.—Page 190.
In the wall that now surrounded my Hermitage I built a strong iron gate, that I could see through and yet too strong to be broken down by any savage hands. The iron fence or comb which ran round the summit of this wall, and of which I have spoken, crossed also above the gateway, and made my house impregnable to anything except artillery. My doorway facing this, in the Hermitage itself, had long been replaced by a nice hard-wood one, with iron hinges, with several loopholes left, through which I could poke a gun-barrel or discharge an arrow.
I had six cannon mounted on my wall, two in front, two on each side, and one in rear, which was, however, naturally protected by a thick and almost impenetrable grove of trees and undergrowth. These guns were mounted in a peculiar manner upon carriages that allowed the muzzles to be depressed at least thirty degrees, and I kept in store, to load them with, quantities of iron ball castings, from the size of an English walnut to a common musket bullet, which at close quarters would do fearful execution. I approached these guns, from the interior, by means of step ladders, made of wood, leading up to each from the enclosure, and an oval hole, like an inverted letter U, was left in the iron fencing to allow the muzzle to protrude over the wall. This opening, however, was small, and not large enough to admit even the head of a man, much less his body. The erection of the whole wall, which was some nine feet high, cost me infinite labor and patience.