all considering the particular
inconveniences which I lay under more than the Indians did, viz., want
of hands to move it, when it was made, into the water, a difficulty
much harder for me to surmount than all the consequences of want of
tools could be to them. For what was it to me, that when I had chosen
a vast tree in the woods, I might with much trouble cut it down, if,
after I might be able with my tools to hew and dub the outside into
the proper shape of a boat, and burn or cut out the inside to make it
hollow, so to make a boat of it; if, after all this, I must leave it
just there where I found it, and was not able to launch it into the
water?

One would have thought I could not have had the least reflection upon
my mind of my circumstance while I was making this boat, but I should
have immediately thought how I should get it into the sea; but my
thoughts were so intent upon my voyage over the sea in it that I never
once considered how I should get it off of the land; and it was
really, in its own nature, more easy for me to guide it over
forty-five miles of sea than about forty-five fathoms of land, where
it lay, to set it afloat in the water.

I went to work upon this boat the most like a fool that ever man did
who had any of his senses awake. I pleased myself with the design,
without determining whether I was ever able to undertake it. Not but
that the difficulty of launching my boat came often into my head; but
I put a stop to my own inquiries into it by this foolish answer which
I gave myself: "Let's first make it; I'll warrant I'll find some way
or other to get it along when 't is done."

This was a most preposterous method; but the eagerness of my fancy
prevailed, and to work I went. I felled a cedar-tree: I question much
whether Solomon ever had such a one for the building of the Temple at
Jerusalem. It was five feet ten inches diameter at the lower part next
the stump, and four feet eleven inches diameter at the end of
twenty-two feet, after which it lessened for a while, and then parted
into branches. It was not without infinite labor that I felled this
tree. I was twenty days hacking and hewing at it at the bottom; I was
fourteen more getting the branches and limbs, and the vast spreading
head of it cut off, which I hacked and hewed through with axe and
hatchet, and inexpressible labor. After this, it cost me a month to
shape it and dub it to a proportion, and to something like the bottom
of a boat