unching my boat came often into my head; but I put a
stop to my own inquiries into it, by this foolish answer: Let me first
make it; I warrant I will 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. I felled a cedar tree, and 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, where it lessened, and then parted into branches. It
was not without infinite labour that I felled this tree; I was twenty
days hacking and hewing at the bottom, and fourteen more getting the
branches and limbs, and the vast spreading head of it, cut off: 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 there remained nothing but to get it into the
water; which, had I accomplished, 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 inexpressible 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
begun, and it cost me a prodigious deal of pains; (but who grudge pains
that have their deliverance in view?) 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