mucronata_.--H.S.
the differences between woods, which until that time we had thought
little about, but was now become a matter of importance, with our
fortress in view. We needed a hard, strong wood, yet not too hard to
be worked with our clumsy tools, and we spent a day or two in testing
the varieties of trees that grew on our island. The cocoa-nut palm was
by far the most plentiful, and the bread-fruit tree came next: but we
did not think of cutting down either of these to make posts of, because
they were food trees, and, being ignorant how often they bore fruit, we
did not venture at the first to diminish the source of our provision by
so much as one. Besides, we found, when we tried to cut a cocoa-nut
tree which had been cast down in the storm, that the wood was exceeding
hard, and so heavy that it sank in water. After this testing, I say,
we discovered a tree on the hill-side whose wood was neither too hard
nor too soft, and as it existed in great numbers, and bore no fruit,
none that was edible, at least, we determined on this as the material
for our house. I never knew the name of it, but it seemed to be a kind
of pine.
I had now, as I say, clean lost count of the days, and had no means of
keeping a journal, even if I had had the patience. You must therefore
think of us as getting up every day with the sun, and going to bed
every night when it became dark. I say, going to bed, though indeed we
had little that deserved the name, our couch consisting of nothing but
the bare ground and such leaves and grasses as we found serviceable.
It was a mercy that the climate was so even, and the nights were not at
all cold, or I do believe we should have perished, our clothing being
so light. Indeed it was not long before we began to look with concern
upon our garments, which were much rotted already by the drenchings
they had had, and were becoming rent and frayed from hard usage. We
had no means either of repairing them, or of making others, and we
could only think that in course of time we should have to go naked,
like the savages. However, this did not trouble us at the moment,
since we had so much to do and to think about, what with getting our
food, and preparing our house, and fending off the dogs, which were
very troublesome, keeping at a distance, indeed, by day, but prowling
around our hut at night, and scratching at the walls so that they often
disturbed our sleep. Between sunrise and sunset we worked very
diligently, and resting one day in seven--or it might be five, or six
sometimes, since we kept no strict count; but I did not think God would
be angry with us if we were not very exact in this, since we did as
well as we could.
We set to work getting material for our big house, as we called it,
immediately after our little house, or hut, was finished. At first we
were greatly disheartened, for though we chose small trees of which to
make our logs, both for easiness of felling and of moving when they
were felled, we found that our clumsy axes were very poor tools. Not
only did the flints need sharpening every few minutes, like a mower's
scythe, but being attached to the handles only with creepers, and not
very skilfully, they continually worked loose, and we had to desist in
order to bind them again, which mightily exasperated us. At the end of
the first day, seeing what little progress we had made, we were ready
to despair. "It will take us a hundred years, master," says Billy,
"and the corner posts will be rotted before we get the roof on. I
don't believe in none of your Robinson Crusoes; and we'd better have
been drownded; and I warrant you Hoggett and Chick and great fat
Wabberley are just enjoying themselves somewhere, and I'm sick of my
life."
[Sidenote: Billy Scoffs at Romance]
I have forgot to say that when we were eating our meals, or resting, I
had told Billy the surprising story of Robinson Crusoe, of whom he had
never heard, encouraging both him and myself with the tale of how that
good mariner, after tribulations like to our own, came at length
happily to his own land again. But I own I thought our case was much
worse than Crusoe's, for he had clothes, and corn food, and good
liquors, and firearms, and good tools, though few; and, indeed,
everything he needed save company, and that came to him at last;
whereas we had absolutely nothing except the fruits of the island and
what things we could make for ourselves. Yet in reckoning up our
situation and his, I felt very thankful that I had a companion, for the
worst of evils are tolerable if we have some one to share them, and I
wonder that Crusoe did not go stark mad, being alone for so many years
till his man Friday came. Billy often scoffed when I told him what I
remembered of Crusoe's story, and said he wasn't near so badly off as
we were, and if he--that is, Billy--only had what Crusoe had, he would
do as much as he, or more, especially if he had a forge and
blacksmith's tools. And in particular, when I told him of Crusoe's
horror when he saw a footprint in the sand, he burst into a laugh, and
asked why there was only one footprint, and made me go down to our
little bit of sandy beach there and then, and showed me the prints he
made with his own feet, and asked me triumphantly whether the man whose
mark Crusoe saw was a one-legged man, or what.
Another thing I must mention, before I forget it, was that the first
time we went down to the shore we saw that the second boat, which,
being broken, the mariners had left, had been washed away. We were
very much vexed at this, and wished we had had the forethought to drag
it higher up, where the waves could not reach it. I do not think we
could have mended it enough to make it seaworthy, but we might have
tried; and it would at least have provided us with planks which we
should have found useful. However, it was gone, and there was no use
repining.
But to come back to our house. We were, I say, in despair at the small
result of our first day's hard labour, especially as we saw no way of
improving our tools, and had no other means of felling the trees. It
came into my mind that if we only had fire, we might have burned them
down, and we tried again for a good while to make fire with the stick
and the chunks of wood. But we had no more success than before, and
Billy cried out that he wished he could get some of the fire that set
the mountain water a-boiling, but he supposed he would be burned alive
if he tried to get any. I smiled at his simplicity, and to ease his
thoughts a little, I asked him to accompany me up the mountain, it
being my turn to take our nightly look-out over the sea. It chanced
that as we strayed over the mountain-side we lighted upon one of the
splinters of the boulder which Billy had broken before, and the gleam
of metal in it catching my eye, I said to Billy that it was desperately
plaguy to be where metal abounded, and not be able to use it.
[Sidenote: Making Fire]
"Why, master," says he, "who knows as how we can't use it? We ain't
tried. Why didn't we think of it afore?" And straightway he picks up
the splinter, and I found a flint, and he struck them together, and
fairly danced with delight when he made a spark, though he stopped
dancing and howled next moment, having hurt his bare feet on the sharp
rock.
I felt as great a delight as Billy, it being plain that we now had the
first means of making fire, and if only we could discover anything to
serve as tinder we might soon have a fire as large as we pleased. We
went back to our hut by the wood very quickly, being eager to try
before it was dark; but though we collected plenty of dry grass and
struck spark after spark out of the flint, we could not kindle a flame,
and, to our great disappointment, ate cold supper again. The next day
also we were no more successful, though we neglected our work while we
tried again and again, and should have been very sorry for the loss of
time but that time mattered very little to us. However, in the
afternoon, when we went into the wood to get cocoa-nuts, I sat myself
down on the trunk of a great tree which had been thrown down by a
storm, I suppose--not our storm, but earlier, for the leaves were all
withered. I sat myself down, I say, but went lower than I intended,
the trunk, that appeared solid, giving way under me, so that I toppled
over backwards in a cloud of dust. When we looked at the tree, we saw
that the inside of it was completely rotted away, with the dry rot, as
we say, and we both cried out at the same moment that this might be our
tinder. We immediately broke off a strip of the bark, and collected
some of the dust upon it, and then striking a spark, we caught it on
the tinder, which was, however, so dry that it flared up and burnt out
in an instant, without kindling the bark. We remedied this very soon
by mingling some dry grass, rubbed small, with the wood dust, and this
burning more slowly, it caused the bark to smoulder, from which we blew
up a flame, and in a few minutes had a very pretty fire of sticks.
Billy leapt around it in an ecstasy, and I could not help but liken him
to a fire-worshipper, whose religion I understood better now than
before, after all the trouble we had had.
"Now we can bake some bread," said I.
"And roast some pork," says Billy.
"We had better make bread first," said I.
"My mouth is watering for the crackling," says Billy.
"Bread will be the sooner done," I said.
"But the taste of pork stays in the mouth longer," says Billy.
It nearly came to a quarrel between us, as to which should be cooked
first, meat or bread; but when we were in the heat of the argument we
perceived that our fire was going out, and that brought us to our
senses. We piled more sticks on it, and broken cocoa-nut shells, and
Billy, yielding to my desire for bread, went out into the wood and soon
returned with two or three fine large fruits, weighing, I should think,
about three pounds apiece. We had seen the native way of cooking this
fruit, paring off the rough rind and baking the inner part, between the
rind and the core, in an oven; but having no oven, though we promised
ourselves to build one soon, we laid the fruits as they were on a red
part of the fire, turning them about as you do chestnuts, and after a
while we took them up and, having broken away the rind, ate the bread
hot, and I do think I had never in my life before made such a hearty
meal as I now did, though, to be sure, the bread had a slight flavour
of burnt wood. However, we ate a good supper, and went to bed much
happier than at any time since we first came to the island.
[Sidenote: Bread]
We made our breakfast in the same way when we awoke, but finding that
it took some time to get a fire, we considered whether we could not
keep it constantly alive, yet without needing to replenish it too
frequently with fuel, which would have been a trouble, as well as a
hindrance to our work. After some thought, we devised a kind of
covered-in grate, which we built four-square of stones and pieces of
rock, filling up the spaces between them, where they did not fit, with
the clayey earth I have before mentioned, which we moistened with
water, fetched from the lake in half a cocoa-nut shell, and then worked
with our hands into a kind of mortar. We made a cover to this grate
with small boughs plaited with grass and smeared all over with earth,
and at the bottom of the grate we left two small holes by which air
might enter, not a great current, but enough to keep the fire
smouldering without burning much fuel. This device answered our
expectations very well. We found that by casting into the embers a
quantity of dry brushwood, and blowing upon them, we could obtain a
brisk fire in a very little time, and when we had no more need of it
for the present, we laid on a heap of grass and twigs, not too dry, and
shut down the lid, and so found that we could keep our fire alive for a
whole day with no more tending. We discovered, moreover, that by
making a second enclosure about our grate, and covering this in also,
we had a very convenient oven, in which we could lay in the morning the
bread-fruit we needed for our dinner, and at midday find it very well
cooked, neither too much nor too little. I must not forget to say that
our neighbours the dogs watched these proceedings very curiously, and
the first time we left the grate they went to it, to investigate with
their noses; but the stones being very hot, their noses were burnt, and
they ran yelping away, and came to it no more except the first time we
roasted some pig's flesh, and then, being in a perfect frenzy at the
savoury smell, they scratched down the walls of our oven and ran away
with our meat, hot as it was, so that we had none for dinner. At this
Billy flew into a fine rage, I assure you, and we had to consider of
some way of preserving our meat from these greedy maws, of which more
in its place.
[Sidenote: Wood-cutting]
Having now fire at our command, we set about putting it to the use for
which we had so greatly desired it, namely, the felling of trees for
our big house. We kindled fires against the trunks of four trees of a
fair size which we selected for our corner posts, at first setting the
fire all round, until we saw both that the wind, which was fairly
strong that morning, blew the flames all one way, and also that it
would be more convenient to burn the tree on the opposite side from the
direction in which we wished it to fall; then we put out the fires
except on the windward side. We found it no easy matter to keep the
flames at a just height, so that they did not burn more of the trunks
than we desired. Every now and again we chipped away the charred wood
with our axes, and so the fire ate deeper and deeper into the trees,
and we cut deeper and deeper also, until by the close of this day the
trees stood, as it were, but by a thread. We wished we had ropes,
wherewith we might pull the trees to the ground, but having none we
threw ourselves with great violence against the trunks, and so cast
them all down but one, which we left for a little more burning on the
morrow, and went to our hut very well satisfied with our day's work.
We were sitting at our supper when of a sudden Billy gave a jump and
cried out, "What if any savages have seen our smoke!" Our fires had
given a good deal of smoke, especially the damper woods with which we
fed them; but I said that even the nearest island was too far off for
our smoke to be easily seen from it, and as for any savages who might
be cruising in canoes, they would suppose it came from the mountain. I
could not doubt that our island was an object of terror to the peoples
of the neighbouring islands, and I said we ought to be thankful to God
that it was so, since it was better to be lonely than to be made
slaves, or eaten by cannibals. This comforted Billy, though he said
that we had better use the driest woods we could find for our fires, so
that the smoke would be less.
CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
OF THE BUILDING OF OUR HUT, TO WHICH WE BRING MORE ENTHUSIASM THAN SKILL
I have not said anything about the plan of our big hut, but it must not
be supposed that we began to work without any design. We often talked
about it, and so made a general plan, though we forgot many things and
did not foresee others. What this plan was will be made clear as I go
on: if I set it down here all in one place it would be like writing the
same thing twice over, which would be tedious.
Having felled the four fairly large trees we designed for our
corner-posts, the next thing was to bring them down from the wood to
the level plateau where we intended to build. We lopped off some of
the branches and burnt off the rest, but then found that the trunks
were too heavy for us to drag, even though it was downhill. Thus we
were put to it to make rollers, which was not such a tedious matter as
felling the trees, for there were many young trees of a shape and size
fit for this use when we had taken off their branches. But when we
came to place the rollers under the first of our trunks we could not at
first by any means do it, the tree being so heavy that the two of us
together could not raise it an inch from the ground. How to get over
this difficulty puzzled us for some time; indeed, we might never have
thought of a way but for what I may call an accident. We had gone down
to the shore for our morning swim, and as we walked over the beach we
spied a crab scuttling away under a small rock. Billy had felt a
grudge against crabs ever since one had robbed him of his club: so he
cries out, "We'll have this old crab for dinner, master," and with that
he takes his axe and prises up the rock, and then gives the crab a
great knock, which did it not the least harm, it being large with a
thick shell. However, he was not to be baffled, so, setting down the
rock again, he bids me watch it, and runs off to the wood, returning
presently with a long bit of creeper, in which he had made a loop or
noose at one end. This noose he slips over one of the claws of the
crab, and drew it tight, and then set off at a run, dragging the crab
after him.
[Sidenote: A Crab]
We ate the crab for dinner, and liked it very well, but the more
important matter was that seeing Billy prise up the rock gave me a
notion of the right manner of moving our trees.
"We must carry two rocks up to the wood," I said, "and cut two stout
poles, and then I will show you how the trees can be moved."
"'Tis desperate hard work, master," says Billy with a prodigious sigh.
"We don't get on very fast. I wish we could find a cave where we could
live like that old Robinson Crusoe, without any building at all."
"But he built all the same," said I.
"But not without tools," says Billy.
However, he agreed to my proposal, and we carried a rock between us,
with a great deal of sweating, up to where the fallen trees lay, and
then Billy says, "Ain't we fools!" and showed me that we could save a
deal of labour by fastening strands of creeper to the second rock, and
dragging it up instead of carrying it in our arms. This being done we
cut two stout poles, which took us a long time, and then, putting the
rocks one on either side of the first trunk, we took a pole each, and,
resting them on the rocks, put the one end under the tree and pressed
heavily on the other, and so contrived to lift the weight which our
unaided strength was quite unequal to. I do not mean that we had never
seen levers before, but we might never have thought of them unless
Billy had prised up the rock after that crab. The use of levers was
indeed a mystery to him, I mean the explanation of them, he saying that
we were no stronger than before, and there was certainly no strength in
two dead poles, and when I reminded him of the pulleys and the windlass
on board ship, which also helped to raise things, he said that poles
were not pulleys, nor a windlass neither, and he didn't see what that
had to do with it. However, there was the trunk lifted, and while I
held it so with my pole, Billy slipped a roller under it, and working
thus from the end towards the middle, we brought the roller along by
degrees, and then found that we could slip the second roller under the
other end without the help of the poles.
Then, with much pushing and hauling, we set the trunk a-moving on the
rollers down the slope. It was still hard work enough, for where the
earth was soft, the rollers sank into it under the heavy weight of the
tree, and when we came to a part that was hard and pretty smooth, the
trunk set to a-rolling so fast that it almost ran away with us, and
Billy, who was in front, was very nearly sent headlong down, which
would have been very terrible if he had fallen plump into our grate.
We brought the other three trunks down to our plateau in the same way,
and thus had the four stout posts which we intended for the corners of
our house, though there was a great deal to be done to them before they
could be erected. They were about the same thickness, being sixteen or
eighteen inches across, but not the same length, and we had first to
make them equal, which took us a long time; I think we were ten days at
the work. When we had finished it, the trunks were about fourteen feet
long, that being the height we had determined on for our house,
allowing for some portion of the posts to be driven into the earth. We
did not peel the bark off the trees, but left it on, thinking it would
do no harm.
[Sidenote: Choosing a Site]
We marked out the lines of our house, on the level plateau near the
lake, which was almost the only even spot on the island, and allowed us
a space of about twenty feet square, which I thought was large enough,
thinking besides of the great labour we should be put to if we tried to
make too big a house. But when it came to erecting our corner-posts we
were in a great quandary. The ground was pretty soft, and deeper than
at other parts of the island, which I guessed was due to the heavy
rains washing earth down from the hill above. With spades or shovels
we might have dug holes to a considerable depth, and then slipped the
trunks in, and having thus disposed of a part of the dead weight of
them, we might have raised them to an erect position with levers, or by
pushing them up with our hands as men raise a long ladder. But with no
tools save our blunt axes we saw that such excavation would demand
unconscionable toil, and besides, after we should have accomplished it,
we should be hard put to it to make the earth around the timber
sufficiently firm and compact; so we had to consider another way, which
gave us a great deal of trouble. Indeed, it baffled us for several
days, in which, however, we were not idle, but occupied ourselves in
other concerns.
[Sidenote: A Flagstaff]
One of these was the erecting of a signal-post. Although, when we
talked matters over--as we often did, both in the daytime and
especially at night before we fell asleep--when we talked things over,
I say, we always concluded that there was little or no chance of being
rescued, and made our plans as if we were to remain on this island for
the rest of our lives; yet we thought it right to take our measures for
attracting any friendly ship that might heave in sight. We must not,
of course, attempt to raise any permanent signal, for such a thing
would beyond question be discovered by the savages of some neighbouring
island when going about in their canoes, and the last thing we could
wish was to bring savages into our peaceful domain. On the other hand,
unless we had some means of signalling, a ship might easily pass us by
before we could communicate with it, for the island was so small that
no vessel would heave to on the mere chance of finding water, since its
most important river, if it had one, could not be more than a mere
brook in size. Being thus decided that we ought to have some kind of
signal ready, in such a case, we determined that nothing could be
better than a flagstaff, even if we should never have a flag.
As for the spot where to erect it, we had no difficulty in choosing
that; no better could be found than the wooded hill above the lava bed,
whither we climbed every morning and evening to take our lookout. At
the top of this hill, and somewhat apart from the rest of the trees,
there stood a tree very straight and tall, overtopping the others, so
that it formed a very clear mark. Since our flagstaff was not to be
permanently in sight, it seemed best that we should have one that we
could take to pieces, and put together when it was necessary to hoist
it, and I had already seen, at the edge of the lake, what I thought
would serve our purpose to a marvel. This was a cluster of trees, or
rather shrubs, like what is called bamboo, the stalks being tough and
hollow, with joints or knuckles here and there. We cut down three or
four of these stalks, choosing them all of different diameters, and
having burnt out the pith inside them, for some distance from the top,
we contrived to make a kind of telescope tube by fitting them together,
it reaching a length of near thirty feet.
This being made, we cut, in the top of the trunk of the tall, straight
tree before mentioned, a groove large enough to form a socket for the
bottom end of our flagstaff, and when we had fitted it to our
satisfaction, we ventured just before sunset to raise the staff, and it
made a sort of topmast to the tree, standing some twelve feet above the
summit.
"This is prime," says Billy. "Now all we want is an ancient or a
pendant to fix to the top of it, and there you are."
"We have nothing but our shirts," said I, "and those we cannot spare."
"But we don't need to raise our flag until we see a ship over yonder,"
says Billy, "and if we do see one I can strip off my shirt in no time."