Palm Tree Island Part 5

Being set on building a substantial house, or rather fortress, as I said, we saw that with our rude tools it would take us a very long time, and so we first took in hand to make a small hut which would shelter us while the other was a-building. This we determined to place at the edge of the wood above the lake, and we found much material in the trees which had been uprooted in the storm, and in young straight saplings which we could either pull up, the soil being thin, or cut down with our stone axes. These axes of ours soon became blunt, but we found a means to sharpen them by whetting on the hard rocks by the sh.o.r.e, and it became our constant practice to begin each day with bathing in the sea, and then sharpening our axes, which sharpened our appet.i.tes also, I do a.s.sure you. Having got a sufficiency of these slender poles for our walls, we stuck them in holes which we made with our axes, and held them together with tendrils of the creeping plants that grew very plentifully in the woods. We thus made walls about ten feet high, about a s.p.a.ce twelve feet square, and it was not until the walls were up that we began to consider of how to put a roof to them, having no ladders nor any means of mounting to such a height. This made us see how needful it was to take thought beforehand, though we never succeeded in foreseeing all the difficulties that we should meet with, and I suppose no one ever did. All we could do about this roof of ours was to carry up small rocks from the sh.o.r.e, and pile these one on another until we made a stand high enough for us to lay saplings from wall to wall. Since it was clear that this roof would protect us but little, the rain being able to come through the interstices, we put up stands of rocks inside the hut, and supported on these we made s.h.i.+ft to weave gra.s.ses and creepers among the poles, finding it very hard work, and very long too, we having to take the stands down and build them up again as we moved from place to place in the hut. As for the walls, we filled up the interstices in them with earth from the hill-side above us, which we found to be of a clayey sort, and soon hardened in the sun, though after a little it began to crack and crumble. We carried this earth in our hands, a very troublesome and slow manner of doing it, but we had no vessels, nor did we at that time think of making any.

This hut took us above a week in building, at least I think so, for after the first day or two we neglected to take any account of the pa.s.sage of time. It was a poor sort of thing when finished, and could not have stood against a hurricane; but the weather was very fair, and besides, the place we had chosen was not near so much exposed as our first habitation, on higher ground. We hoped it would serve us until we should have made our proposed fortress, and the building of it was exceeding useful to us, for it took up, with the getting and eating of our food, every minute of the daytime, and by keeping our thoughts busy, as well as our hands, hindered us from dwelling on our loneliness.

I had almost forgot to mention two or three things: first, that every morning and evening one or other of us went up the mountain-side, to a spot whence we had sight of the sea all around, to spy whether a sail was visible. The second thing is, that Billy went out one day, and brought back a little sucking-pig, which he had killed with his axe.

We cut off its hinder legs, and carried them to the hot spring, and found that they cooked very well; and though the meat had a slight savour of brimstone, it was vastly more agreeable than the salt junk we were used to have aboard s.h.i.+p. Indeed, Billy said that it only wanted pease-pudding to make a meal fit for a king, and he ran all the way to the wood and back again to fetch a bread-fruit, to see if that, when boiled, would supply the place of pease; but the fruit only boiled to a pap, and when Billy tasted it, he declared that it spoiled the flavour of the pork, so we ate the meat by itself.

[Sidenote: Failure]

This failure made Billy determine again to try his hand at making fire, which we had no time for when building our little hut. He picked up a straight twig, that seemed to promise well for his purpose, and sharpening his flint axe, he peeled the twig and cut it so as to make a stick about a foot long, one end of which he brought to a point. But, finding the wood too soft for the use to which he designed it, he went prowling about to discover a tree hard enough, testing them with his axe, and after a long search, lighted upon a tree that was very hard, and whose sap was of a blood-red colour.[1] Having cut a stick of this, he sharpened one end to a point, and then took two chunks of wood, one of a soft kind, the other of the new-discovered tree, which we called redwood, and in each of these chunks he made a little hollow, one in the soft wood for the sharp end of the stick, the other for the blunt. Then, fitting the stick into these hollows, he gave me all three pieces of wood to hold, and while I held them tightly clamped together, he began to twirl the stick between his hands as fast as he could, as he had seen the savages do, though often they used a bowstring. He continued this for a good while, until his hands, hard as they were, grew sore and his face was running with sweat; but whether that the wood was damp, or that Billy was not dexterous enough, I know not, only that there was never a sign of smouldering, though the wood was hot when we felt it. Billy insisted that I should take a turn, which I did, and twirled the stick even faster, I believe, than he did, though not so long; but it was all no good, and at last we threw the wood from us, concluding that if we were to obtain fire, it must be in some other way. I do not mean that we never tried the native way again: we were not so easily discouraged; we tried more than once in the intervals of doing other things, and I think that with perseverance we might have succeeded at last, only it was not necessary, as will be seen hereafter.

[Sidenote: Building Materials]

This failure, though it annoyed us at the time, was of use to us, inasmuch as it set us on noticing

[1] This appears to have been what botanists call _Rhizophora 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 gra.s.ses 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 G.o.d 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 sh.o.r.e 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s, 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-wors.h.i.+pper, 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 sh.e.l.ls, 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 s.p.a.ces 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 sh.e.l.l, and then worked with our hands into a kind of mortar. We made a cover to this grate with small boughs plaited with gra.s.s 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 quant.i.ty 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 gra.s.s 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 a.s.sure 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 G.o.d 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 sh.o.r.e 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 sh.e.l.l. 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 windla.s.s on board s.h.i.+p, which also helped to raise things, he said that poles were not pulleys, nor a windla.s.s 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 s.p.a.ce 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 was.h.i.+ng 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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.