de his way
up the shore of this river for a considerable distance, but it grew but
little narrower, and he could see no chance of getting across. He could
not swim and he had no wine-jars now with which to buoy himself up, and
if he had been able to swim he would probably have been eaten up by
alligators soon after he left the shore. But a man in his situation
would not be likely to give up readily; he had done so much that he was
ready to do more if he could only find out what to do.

Now a piece of good fortune happened to him, although to an ordinary
traveller it might have been considered a matter of no importance
whatever. On the edge of the shore, where it had floated down from some
region higher up the river, Bartholemy perceived an old board, in which
there were some long and heavy rusty nails. Greatly encouraged by this
discovery the indefatigable traveller set about a work which resembled
that of the old woman who wanted a needle, and who began to rub a
crow-bar on a stone in order to reduce it to the proper size. Bartholemy
carefully knocked all the nails out of the board, and then finding a
large flat stone, he rubbed down one of them until he had formed it
into the shape of a rude knife blade, which he made as sharp as he
could. Then with these tools he undertook the construction of a raft,
working away like a beaver, and using the sharpened nails instead of his
teeth. He cut down a number of small trees, and when he had enough of
these slender trunks he bound them together with reeds and osiers, which
he found on the river bank. So, after infinite labor and trial he
constructed a raft which would bear him on the surface of the water.
When he had launched this he got upon it, gathering up his legs so as to
keep out of reach of the alligators, and with a long pole pushed himself
off from shore. Sometimes paddling and sometimes pushing his pole
against the bottom, he at last got across the river and took up his
journey upon dry land.

But our pirate had not progressed very far upon the other side of the
river before he met with a new difficulty of a very formidable
character. This was a great forest of mangrove trees, which grow in
muddy and watery places and which have many roots, some coming down from
the branches, and some extending themselves in a hopeless tangle in the
water and mud. It would have been impossible for even a stork to walk
through this forest, but as there was no way of getting around it