but easy: and pleased
myself extremely with my thoughts of making it, and with my having much
more convenience for it than any of the Negroes or Indians; but not at
all considering the particular inconveniences which I lay under more
than the Indians did, viz. want of hands to move it into the water, when
it was made; 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 great
trouble cut it down, if after I might be able with my tools to hew and
dub the outside into a 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 this 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 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 me first make it, I'll warrant I'll find some way or
other to get it along, when it is done.

This was a most preposterous method; but the eagerness of my fancy
prevailed, and to work I went, and felled a cedar-tree: I question much
whether Solomon ever had such an one for the building 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 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 of it,
cut off, which I hacked and hewed thro