And while the carpenter, the boatswain, Sails, and I had been strenuously at work upon the construction of the catamaran, Cunningham had been quite as industriously employed upon his design for the proposed schooner, working alone, day after day, in our cave dwelling round at North Bay, evolving his half-breadth and body plans, his midship section, buttock lines, water lines, diagonals, and all the rest of it; ruling in, rubbing out again, calculating, altering, modifying, and patiently labouring to get his several drawings to agree accurately with each other, and resolutely refusing to be satisfied until he had got everything exactly to his liking: and at length he was able to display to us, not altogether without pride, the completed draught of as pretty a little ship as I think I ever set eyes upon. He had taken, as the foundation of his design, the shape of the Zenobia’s gig, in which we had made our memorable Atlantic voyage, and out of which we had been taken by poor old Skipper Brown, that fine little craft having produced a profound impression upon him, in consequence of the splendid qualities as a sea boat which she had exhibited. But the new craft was of course to be much bigger than the gig, for she was not only to be completely decked from stem to stern, but was to be sufficiently roomy in her interior to enable us to perform a voyage of over a thousand miles with a very fair measure of comfort. Her principal dimensions, therefore, were forty feet on the water line by ten feet beam; and, in order to provide a reasonable amount of headroom below, as also to make her weatherly, she was considerably deeper in proportion than the gig, and much sharper in the floor, this providing her with plenty of power for her size, by means of which she would be enabled to make good way even in a heavy head sea. Her bow was an almost exact reproduction of that of the gig, rather long and overhanging, with plenty of “flare” to lift her over a head sea, and she was provided with an even longer counter, which gave her after-body a remarkably smooth and easy delivery; while, for the rest, her water lines were almost those of a racing yacht, so that I concluded she would be exceedingly nimble under her canvas. Altogether we were immensely pleased with, and not a little impressed by Cunningham’s effort; but I could not help reminding the others that it was one thing to draught a smart little vessel on paper, and quite another to build her with such resources as we had at our disposal. Chips, however, who of course knew—or should have known—more about such matters than any of the rest of us, while not exactly pooh-poohing my reminder, was confident that—as he expressed it—we were men enough to bring the scheme to fruition; and with that assertion I was obliged, by no means unwillingly, to rest satisfied.
Meanwhile, however, a great deal still remained to be done before we could start work upon the new schooner; for although we had by this time salved everything from the wreck—and it was astonishing how much and what a wide variety of things we found in her—she still remained to be broken up; and we agreed that that should be our next job.
Chapter Thirteen.
Two important Events occur.
It may be thought that there is little or nothing of interest to be found in the operation of breaking up the wreck of a ship, but I, who have assisted in such an operation, can testify most strongly to the contrary; for when the work is undertaken as we undertook to break up the wreck of the Martha Brown—that is to say, carefully, taking her apart plank by plank and beam by beam, exactly reversing, in fact, the several processes by which she was put together—there is plenty of both interest and instruction to be found in observing the numberless ingenious devices which have been resorted to by the shipwright to join together the several members of the hull in such a manner as to ensure the maximum of strength, so that, when once joined together, no strain short of that involving the absolute destruction of the material should be capable of pulling them apart again. We who had been aboard the schooner during the time of her passage across the reef, and had experienced in our own persons the terrific violence of the shocks to which she had then been subjected, were amazed that she had not been shattered like an egg shell; but when, later on, we came to dismember her, we were still more amazed to find how little damage, comparatively speaking, she had sustained while passing through that fearful ordeal on the reef, and what extraordinary exertions were needed to wrench her several parts asunder. But a detailed description of the varied schemes to which we were obliged to resort in order to effect our purpose would be of no interest to the general reader; I will therefore content myself with the bare statement that it cost us six weeks of the hardest labour I ever performed in my life to reduce the Martha Brown to her component parts, and to stack the materials upon the beach in readiness for use in the construction of the new schooner.
In fairness to ourselves, however, it must be said that during part of that time there were only four of us engaged upon the work, Cunningham being busy upon calculations of stability, the relative positions of the centre of gravity and the metacentre of the new schooner, and I know not what beside, in connection with the determination of the amount of ballast that would be needed, the position of the masts, and the area and proportions of the several sails—for now that the engineer was fairly mounted upon his new hobby there was no possibility of dragging him out of the saddle. He had several novel theories which he was anxious to test, and he was resolutely determined that the new schooner should be as nearly perfect as his skill could make her; he therefore simply scoffed at us when we pointed out that time was flying, indignantly demanded to be told what mattered a few days more or less in comparison with the importance of the matters with which he was dealing, and returned to his figures with renewed zest.
But all things come to an end sooner or later, and the day at length arrived when Cunningham completed his final calculation, drew his last line, and carefully rolled up his completed drawings, to await the moment when they would be called for upon the beginning of the important task of laying the keel of the new schooner.
Now, if I have succeeded in portraying anything like a true picture of our life upon the island, the reader will have gathered the impression that, after the first day following the wreck, we were constantly in a condition of breathless activity, due to the fact that there were so many matters, each of apparently paramount importance, all clamouring for our instant attention, and that, at the beginning at least, we strove to attend to all these several matters at the same time, doing first a little to this, and then a little to that or the other, according to what we believed at the moment to be most pressing. And this state of affairs prevailed with us until we had salved everything possible from the wreck, and until we had built our catamaran; after which we felt that we might with advantage adopt some sort of system in the arrangement of our work.