The First Days of Man, as Narrated Quite Simply for Young Readers

by Frederic Arnold Kummer

The island people built their houses and temples of stone. With wood they at first made only roofs and doors, but it was not long before they began to use it for building other things, such as boats. They found no big trees of soft wood on the rocky hillsides, out of which they could make large canoes. So they hewed planks out of the smaller trees, and built the first wooden ships made by man. They could not be called ships, at first, for they were only small boats, but as time went on they built them larger and larger until they would carry forty or fifty men.

Modor was the first man to build one of these boats and he was a skilful carpenter. He hewed a long heavy keel for his boat out of a tree trunk, and at each end he set up a stout post, one for the stem, the other for the stern. Wooden braces, or knees, as they are called, fastened by pegs, held the posts to the keel. Modor's tools were heavy stone axes, wedges of stone to split planks with, saws, made of jagged, toothed pieces of flint, with wooden handles bound to them, sharp flint knives for making wooden pegs, and drills, for boring holes for the pegs. With such rough tools it was not easy for Modor and his companions to build a boat, but they were strong and patient, and worked very hard.

After the stem and stern posts had been fastened in place, ribs were pegged to the keel to form the frame of the boat. These curved ribs they made in two ways. One was to hew them from the crooked limbs of trees. The other was to take straight pieces of wood and soak them for many days in water, until the wood became soft and pliable, and then bend them to shape, and tie them that way with leather cords while they dried.

When the ribs had been fastened to the keel with wooden pegs, long strips of wood were bent around the tops of the ribs, from the stem post to the stern post, and fastened to each rib with a peg. This made the framework of the boat, and now it had to be covered with planks.

Modor and his helpers took the split boards they had made and bent them over the framework, with a peg at each rib to hold them, and in this way covered the whole framework of the boat. Of course a boat built in this rough way would not be water-tight; there were many joints and seams between the rough planking through which water would leak. But Modor had found, oozing from the pine trees, a black, sticky sort of gum or pitch, and this, with soft fibres from the bark of trees, he used to calk his boat and make it tight. The way he did this was to heat the pitch in a large shell, dip the fibres in it, and then drive them into the cracks with a stone wedge. In this way, after many trials, Modor at last got his boat so that it would not leak.

He built a deck of wood over the forward part of the boat, and across the middle part he put five board seats. These seats were for the paddlers to sit on, but the paddles were so long, in order to reach the water, that they were like oars, and it was hard to handle them against the ocean waves. So Modor drove pegs into the edges or gunwales of the boat to hold the oars in place, and men thus began to row boats, instead of paddling them, as they had their canoes and rafts.

As we have seen, the tribe had almost forgotten how to weave, because they no longer had the tough marsh grasses to make cord from. But Modor twisted the fibres from the bark of certain trees into strong cords, and took them to some of the old women, who knew how to weave, and they wove him a sail from them. Then he put a mast in the middle of his boat, with a pole or yard across it, and hung the sail from this yard, with strong cords tied to its lower corners to hold it down.

In this boat Modor and his companions made many voyages along the coast, fishing, and hunting. On one of these trips he found a marsh covered with reeds and rushes, but he did not gather them, for the tribe had no use for them now. On another voyage Modor's boat was carried by the wind across the water to a low shore. It was the same shore from which Tul-Ab and his companions had fled hundreds of years before. When Modor's boat came in sight of the beach, he saw many men running along the sand, waving their spears and shouting. Several canoes crowded with fighting men came out from the shore. Then Modor lowered the sail of his boat, and the rowers bent to their oars, and soon left the canoes and the shore far behind.

When Modor got back to the village he told the old men what he had seen, and that night around the camp fires they told again the story of Tul-Ab, and sang a song about him, and his coming to the island.

The next day the chief of the tribe, whose name was Gudr, told the watchers on the cliffs to be very careful, and to keep their eyes always on the sea, for he feared that the people from across the water might come to attack them. But for a long time none came.