e,
for the rest, her water lines were almost those of a racing yacht, so
that I concluded she would be exceedingly nimble under her canvas.
Altogether we were immensely pleased with, and not a little impressed by
Cunningham's effort; but I could not help reminding the others that it
was one thing to draught a smart little vessel on paper, and quite
another to build her with such resources as we had at our disposal.
Chips, however, who of course knew--or should have known--more about
such matters than any of the rest of us, while not exactly pooh-poohing
my reminder, was confident that--as he expressed it--we were men enough
to bring the scheme to fruition; and with that assertion I was obliged,
by no means unwillingly, to rest satisfied.

Meanwhile, however, a great deal still remained to be done before we
could start work upon the new schooner; for although we had by this time
salved everything from the wreck--and it was astonishing how much and
what a wide variety of things we found in her--she still remained to be
broken up; and we agreed that that should be our next job.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

TWO IMPORTANT EVENTS OCCUR.

It may be thought that there is little or nothing of interest to be
found in the operation of breaking up the wreck of a ship, but I, who
have assisted in such an operation, can testify most strongly to the
contrary; for when the work is undertaken as we undertook to break up
the wreck of the _Martha Brown_--that is to say, carefully, taking her
apart plank by plank and beam by beam, exactly reversing, in fact, the
several processes by which she was put together--there is plenty of both
interest and instruction to be found in observing the numberless
ingenious devices which have been resorted to by the shipwright to join
together the several members of the hull in such a manner as to ensure
the maximum of strength, so that, when once joined together, no strain
short of that involving the absolute destruction of the material should
be capable of pulling them apart again. We who had been aboard the
schooner during the time of her passage across the reef, and had
experienced in our own persons the terrific violence of the shocks to
which she had then been subjected, were amazed that she had not been
shattered like an _egg_ shell; but when, later on, we came to dismember
her, we were still more amazed to find how little damage, comparatively
speaking, she had sustained while passing through that