ild a smaller craft. A vote {58} was asked. The resolution was
called, written out, and signed by every survivor, but afterward, when
officers and men set themselves to the well-nigh impossible task of
untackling the ship without implements of iron, revolt appeared among the
workers. Again Waxel avoided mutiny. A meeting was called, another vote
taken, the recalcitrants shamed down. The crew lacked more than tools.
There was no ship's carpenter. Finally a Cossack, who was afterward
raised to the nobility for his work, consented to act as director of the
building, and on the 6th of May a vessel forty feet long, thirteen beam,
and six deep, was on the stocks. All June, the noise of the planking
went on till the mast raised its yard-arms, and an eight-oared
single-master, such as the old Vikings of the North Sea used, was well
under way.

The difficulties of such shipbuilding can hardly be realized. There was
no wood but the wood of the old ship, no rigging but the old hemp, no tar
but such as could be melted out of the old hemp in earth pits; and very
few axes. The upper part was calked with tallow of the sea-cow, the
under with tar from the old hull. The men also constructed a second
small boat or canoe.

On the 10th of August, with such cheers as the island never heard before
or since, the single-master was launched from the skids and named the
_St. Peter_. Cannon balls and cartridges were thrown in bottom as
ballast. Luckily, eight hundred pounds of {59} meal had been reserved
for the return voyage, and Steller had salted down steaks of whale meat
and sea-cow. On the evening of August 16, after solemn prayer and
devotions, with one last look to the lonely crosses on the hillside where
lay the dead, the castaways went on board. A sharp breeze was blowing
from the north. Hoisting sail, they glided out to sea. The old
jolly-boat bobbled behind in tow. Late at night, when the wind fell, the
eager mariners bent to the oar. By noon next day they had rounded the
southeast corner of the island. Two days afterward, rough weather set
the old jolly-boat bumping her nose so violently on the heels of the _St.
Peter_, that the cable had to be cut and the small boat set adrift. That
night the poor tallow-calked planks leaked so badly, pumps and buckets
were worked at fever heat, and all the ballast was thrown overboard.
Sometime during the 25th, there shone above the silver rim where sea and
sky met, the opal dom