catamaran struck me as being a particularly simple and ingenious
affair, some of its many merits consisting in the facts that it needed
no moulds for its construction, that it could be built of any fragments
of wreckage that were too short and too much splintered and damaged to
be of use in the construction of the schooner, and that it needed no
very elaborate working or shaping. It consisted essentially of two
oblong tanks or boxes, each thirty feet long by two feet wide by two
feet six inches deep. These boxes were not unlike a Thames fishing punt
in shape, although they were, proportionately, much narrower and deeper.
The bottom of each was perfectly flat transversely, and also
longitudinally, except at the ends, where it curved up gradually in a
semi-parabola until it met the gunwale. These two boxes, or punts,
having been decked over and made perfectly watertight, were then joined
together--with a space of eight feet between them--by stout beams, over
the after part of which was laid the schooner's wheel grating, to serve
the purpose of a deck; a broad-bladed steering paddle was fitted
securely into a grommet attached to the aftermost beam; the punts were
simply rigged with an enormous lateen sail made out of the schooner's
tattered foresail, and there we had a nondescript kind of craft, thirty
feet long by twelve feet beam, drawing only about eight inches of water
when light and on an even keel, buoyant, unsinkable, and uncapsizable,
which, when we came to try her, developed a speed under sail that was
positively astounding, and went to windward like a racing cutter.

She was wet, of course, particularly when driven hard to windward, but
in such a climate as we now enjoyed, to be drenched with salt water was
a pleasure rather than otherwise, and, regarded as a drawback, was not
worth a moment's consideration. It took us a month almost to a day to
build and rig her complete; and after our first trial of her we almost
invariably used her to go to and fro between the two bays, although the
trip by water was about seven miles in length, as compared with the
short cut of two miles overland. Yet we did it either way in a little
over half an hour, while the sail home in the evening, after a hard
day's work, was much the more exhilarating mode of travelling of the
two. And what, perhaps, gratified us as much as anything in connection
with the construction of this exceedingly useful craft was that in
building her we