The first thing I did was to chop away the bulwarks amidships, where the spare spars were lashed. Then I made a line fast to half a dozen of the spars and launched them overboard. Then I went overboard myself and lashed them together, and laid planks over them. A good part of the spars that had gone overboard where we first struck were still alongside, but they were so mixed up with the rigging that I didn’t try to use them.
“Now you want to cut a spare top-mast into three lengths and add them to your raft,” said Mr. Crusoe.
I never supposed that he knew what a top-mast was, but it seems he did, and the spare top-mast was just what the raft needed to make it float high enough out of the water. However, I afterwards found out that he got the idea of using a spare top-mast out of his grandfather’s book of travels.
The raft was now big enough, and we were all ready to load it.
“Now we want to take nothing ashore with us this first trip except things that we can’t get along without,” said I.
“We must take,” said Mr. Crusoe, just as if he was reciting a lesson out of a book, “three seamen’s chests broken open and filled with bread, rice, Dutch cheeses, dried goat’s flesh, and a little corn, besides some bottles of rum, the carpenter’s chest, two shot-guns, two pistols, two rusty swords, three barrels of gunpowder, and a bag of shot. I’ll help you look for them. That was my grandfather’s first load.”
“And it isn’t going to be our first load,” I answered. “Where’s our goat’s flesh? and what do we want of three barrels of gunpowder?”
Mr. Crusoe came and looked straight in my face with his wonderful bright eyes, and said, “Mike, we’ll take exactly what I said. You can take anything else you want to take, but you’ll never go ashore if you show a want of respect to my sainted grandfather.”
Well, I didn’t want to hurt Mr. Crusoe’s feelings, so I said I would do what he wanted. I couldn’t find any dried goat’s flesh, but Mr. Crusoe found a ham, and said that it was goat’s flesh, and I didn’t contradict him. We couldn’t find any barrels of gunpowder either, though we found one small keg of it.
The raft was big enough to carry a great deal more than Mr. Crusoe put on it, so, after he was satisfied, I got together two barrels of flour, a barrel of sugar, a bag of coffee, two breech-loading rifles, a lot of cartridges, Mr. Crusoe’s trunk, the captain’s chest, and the medicine-chest. Then I found two long oars and a big coil of rope, not much larger than signal halyards, and put them aboard the raft and shoved off.