To break up a ship is, under ordinary circumstances, no very difficult matter, but as they expected that they would be dependent almost entirely upon the wreck for the timber necessary to the construction of their little ship, they had to go carefully to work; and as it was all manual labour, and they were very weak-handed, they found the task one of no ordinary difficulty. At length, however, after nearly another month’s arduous toil, they had cut her down to the water’s-edge, and there they were obliged to leave her.
Hitherto they had not allowed themselves time to very closely investigate the nature of the cargo which they had so laboriously conveyed to the shore, their chief anxiety being to secure from the wreck every scrap likely to be of the slightest use to them, before the change of, the season and the break-up of the weather should render this impossible. Now, however, they had leisure to give their booty a thorough overhaul; and this was the next task to which they devoted themselves. As, however, they were now no longer pressed for time, and one man could easily do most of what was required to be done in that way, it was arranged that Doctor Henderson should examine the cargo as far as he could, and prepare a detailed list of the various goods and articles of which it was composed; whilst Gaunt and Nicholls should proceed in the raft on a trip of exploration round the bay, for the purpose of discovering an outlet in the reef which the former believed to exist, and, if such an outlet could be found, to proceed through it and make a short trial trip to sea for the purpose of testing the sailing qualities of the raft.
On the morning following the completion of their work of dismemberment, therefore, these two tasks were taken in hand. Such cases and packages as it was thought the doctor would have a difficulty in breaking open unaided were attacked by the three men, and their contents laid bare; and then Gaunt and Nicholls got on board the raft—which was berthed at a short distance from the beach and made thoroughly secure by being moored with the ship’s smallest kedge—and, hoisting her huge lateen sail, cast off from the mooring-buoy, and proceeded to execute a few trial evolutions preparatory to the exploration of the reef. The mode of working the raft under sail was, as has already been intimated, the same in principle with that in vogue among the Ladrone Islanders; that is to say, the vessel was sailed indifferently, with either end foremost, the sail being always kept on the same side of the mast. In order to accomplish this two broad-bladed steering-oars were necessary—one for each end of the craft—and a long tripping-line, with its ends bent on to either end of the yard, hanging down in a bight on deck, so that by its means the end of the yard which was to form the tack might be hauled down on deck. It will be understood that when plying to windward a craft so rigged is never thrown in stays, but when it is necessary to go on the opposite tack her stern is thrown up to windward by means of the steering-oar, which is then laid in; the end of the yard which is down on deck and made fast is released, and the opposite end of the yard is hauled down and secured; the sheet is transferred from one end of the vessel to the other; the steering-oar at that end is laid out; and the vessel, gathering way, moves off in the required direction. It is probably the most simple mode of working a craft known to navigating mankind, and it obviates all possibility of missing stays; a difficulty which mainly induced Gaunt to adopt it on board his raft. This was the first occasion upon which it had had a fair trial, and it was found to answer admirably; the raft proving to be not only so stiff as to be absolutely uncapsizable, but also remarkably fast considering her shape, a speed of six knots being got out of her unloaded and with a good fresh breeze blowing.
As soon as the somewhat novel mode of working her had been satisfactorily tested, the exploration of the reef was begun in earnest. They cruised along its inner edge to the southward in the first instance, and discovered several places where it would probably have been possible for them to pass out to sea; but in every case the channels, if indeed they were worthy of the name, were so narrow and tortuous that Gaunt had no fancy for attempting them unless as a last resource. They next tried the northern side of the bay; and here they were more successful, for just where the reef seemed to join the land there was a channel of about one hundred feet in width, nearly straight, and trending in a north-westerly direction, with so much water in it that the sea only broke in one or two places throughout its entire length. This channel was all that they could desire; for as the prevailing wind seemed to be about south-west, they were enabled to pass in and out of the bay with the sheet slightly eased off.
Standing through this channel, which was only about a quarter of a mile long, they soon found themselves in the open sea, with a considerable amount of swell, over which the raft rode with a buoyancy which was most satisfactory to her designer. If Gaunt had any doubt whatever about the strength of any portion of his novel construction it was in the transverse bracing which connected the bottoms of his two pontoons, and he was therefore rather anxious for the first ten minutes or quarter of an hour after he found himself fairly in the open sea. But the bracing was found amply sufficient to give the required rigidity, and this fact once demonstrated he kept away before the wind, and coasted along the northern shore of his island, keeping at a sufficient distance from the tremendously lofty cliffs to prevent his being becalmed. With the wind over her quarter the raft travelled remarkably fast, and within an hour of the time when she passed out through the channel she was abreast of the entrance to the river—which, by the way, was so effectually masked that Gaunt actually ran past it, and arrived off a point which they had seen from their original landing-place before he became aware of the fact. Retracing his way, the engineer, after a careful search, found the opening and passed into the river. Their course for the first two miles was dead to windward; but the raft sailed remarkably near the wind, and held her own even better than her designer had believed to be possible—the long, flat sides of the two pontoons seeming to act the parts of leeboards, and so preventing her from making any perceptible leeway. They reached the lake, sailed round the islet, landed there, and procured a liberal supply of fruits of various descriptions, which seemed to grow more luxuriantly and of a finer flavour there than on the mainland, and then embarking once more made the best of their way back to the bay, where they anchored the raft and proceeded on shore in a small boat, which had been built as a sort of tender to the larger craft.
They found Henderson still busy with his examination of the cargo, and Gaunt in particular was highly delighted with its multifarious character. There were many articles which he foresaw would be of the utmost use to them in the construction of their little ship, but perhaps the find which delighted him most was a large circular saw. When his eye fell upon this his vivid imagination at once pictured it as in operation in a mill erected upon a spot which he had already recognised as most suitable for the purpose; and he saw, too, that now they need no longer be dependent upon the old ship-timber, full of bolt and trenail holes, for the timber and planking of their craft, as they would be enabled with the assistance of the saw to provide themselves with all the planking, and, indeed, timber of every description which would be necessary in their work, from the magnificent teak and other trees which grew in such abundance on the island.