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It seemed like a very long while before the houses were ready so that
we who were well could go on shore to live. I must tell you what our
home is like. In Scrooby, when one builds a house, he has the trees
sawed into timbers and boards at a mill; but in this new land we had no
mills. When a man in England wants to make a chimney, he buys bricks
and mortar; but here, as father said, we had plenty of clay and lime,
yet could not put them to proper use until tools were brought across
the sea with which to work such material into needed form.
There was plenty of granite and other rock out of which to make cellars
and walls; but no one could cut it, and even though it was already
shaped, we had no horses with which to haul it. Think for a moment what
it must mean not to have cows, sheep, oxen, horses or chickens, and we
had none of these for three or four years.
My father built the house we are now living in, almost alone, having
but little help from the other men when he had to raise the heavy
timbers. First, after clearing away the snow, he dug a hole in the
frozen ground, two or three feet deep, making it of the same shape as
he had planned the house. Then, having cut down trees for timbers, he
stood them upright all around the inside of this hole, leaving here a
place for a door, and there another for a window, until the sides and
ends of the building were made.
On the inside he filled the hole again with the earth he had taken out
at the beginning, pounding it down solid to form a floor, and at the
same time to help make the logs more secure in an upright position.
Where the floor of earth does not hold the timbers firmly enough, what
are called puncheons are fastened to the outside just beneath the roof.
Puncheons are logs that have been split and trimmed with axes until
they are something like planks, and you will see very many in our
village of Plymouth. Hard work it is indeed to make these puncheon
planks; but they were needed to fasten crosswise on the sides and ends
of our house, in order to hold the logs more firmly in place.
Across the top of the house, slanting them so much that the water would
run off, father placed a layer of logs to make the roof.
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Three puncheons were put across the inside of the roof, being fastened
with pegs of wood, for the few nails we have among us are of too much
value to be used in house building.
That the roof might prevent the water from running into the house,
father stripped bark from hemlock trees, and placed it over the logs
two or three layers deep, fastening the whole down with poles cut from
young trees.