I felled a cedar-tree, and I question
much whether Solomon ever had such a one for the building of the Temple
of 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 labour 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 cut off, which I
hacked and hewed through with axe and hatchet, and inexpressible labour;
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, that it might swim upright as
it ought to do. It cost me near three months more to clear the inside,
and work it out so as to make an exact boat of it; this I did, indeed,
without fire, by mere mallet and chisel, and by the dint of hard labour,
till I had brought it to be a very handsome periagua, and big enough to
have carried six-and-twenty men, and consequently big enough to have
carried me and all my cargo.

When I had gone through this work I was extremely delighted with it. The
boat was really much bigger than ever I saw a canoe or periagua, that was
made of one tree, in my life. Many a weary stroke it had cost, you may
be sure; and had I gotten it into the water, I make no question, but I
should have begun the maddest voyage, and the most unlikely to be
performed, that ever was undertaken.

But all my devices to get it into the water failed me; though they cost
me infinite labour too. It lay about one hundred yards from the water,
and not more; but the first inconvenience was, it was up hill towards the
creek. Well, to take away this discouragement, I resolved to dig into
the surface of the earth, and so make a declivity: this I began, and it
cost me a prodigious deal of pains (but who grudge pains who have their
deliverance in view?); but when this was worked through, and this
difficulty managed, it was still much the same, for I could no more stir
the canoe than I could the other boat. Then I measured the distance of
ground, and resolved to cut a dock or canal, to bring the water up to the
canoe, seeing I could not bring the canoe down to the water. Well, I
began this work; and when I began to enter upon it, and calculate how
deep it was to be dug, how broad, how the stuff was to be t