had not been obliged to touch the schooner at all, but
had drawn for our material entirely upon the loose wreckage of bulwarks
and so on that we had found strewn about the beach on the day after the
wreck, together with four stout saplings which we cut down to serve as
beams, and which we found to be exceedingly tough and in many respects
to resemble elm.

And while the carpenter, the boatswain, Sails, and I had been
strenuously at work upon the construction of the catamaran, Cunningham
had been quite as industriously employed upon his design for the
proposed schooner, working alone, day after day, in our cave dwelling
round at North Bay, evolving his half-breadth and body plans, his
midship section, buttock lines, water lines, diagonals, and all the rest
of it; ruling in, rubbing out again, calculating, altering, modifying,
and patiently labouring to get his several drawings to agree accurately
with each other, and resolutely refusing to be satisfied until he had
got everything exactly to his liking: and at length he was able to
display to us, not altogether without pride, the completed draught of as
pretty a little ship as I think I ever set eyes upon. He had taken, as
the foundation of his design, the shape of the _Zenobia's_ gig, in which
we had made our memorable Atlantic voyage, and out of which we had been
taken by poor old Skipper Brown, that fine little craft having produced
a profound impression upon him, in consequence of the splendid qualities
as a sea boat which she had exhibited. But the new craft was of course
to be much bigger than the gig, for she was not only to be completely
decked from stem to stern, but was to be sufficiently roomy in her
interior to enable us to perform a voyage of over a thousand miles with
a very fair measure of comfort. Her principal dimensions, therefore,
were forty feet on the water line by ten feet beam; and, in order to
provide a reasonable amount of headroom below, as also to make her
weatherly, she was considerably deeper in proportion than the gig, and
much sharper in the floor, this providing her with plenty of power for
her size, by means of which she would be enabled to make good way even
in a heavy head sea. Her bow was an almost exact reproduction of that
of the gig, rather long and overhanging, with plenty of "flare" to lift
her over a head sea, and she was provided with an even longer counter,
which gave her after-body a remarkably smooth and easy delivery; whil