hat on the morning of the
third day they rather shamefacedly announced their readiness to turn-to
again, and accompanied us to South-west Bay. But what put the finishing
touch to the matter was Cunningham's audacious proposal to ballast the
schooner entirely with gold, and sail in her direct home to England.
This idea very strongly appealed to their somewhat crude imaginations,
especially when the engineer took a sheet of paper and proved to them by
figures that if we could obtain gold enough to carry out this plan, the
value of it, equally divided among the five of us, would enable each to
bank upward of half a million; which, if judiciously invested, would
provide us with an income of somewhere about two thousand pounds
sterling per month! Such figures as these naturally appealed to men
whose incomes hitherto had amounted to about five pounds per month, and
they were immediately all on fire to build the Schooner, if only to see
how much gold she could be induced to carry as ballast.

Had there been a shipwright in our party he would probably have been
intensely amused at the lightheartedness and assured confidence with
which we approached the task of building a schooner, small, certainly,
but complete in every respect, out of the timbers and planking of the
dismembered _Martha Brown_. I do not believe that anyone excepting
myself had the slightest suspicion of the difficulties that we were so
cheerfully facing; but by the time that we had got the keel blocks laid,
and were preparing to shape and put together the keel, it began to dawn
upon us that we had undertaken a distinctly formidable task, and one in
which we might very easily fail should we once permit ourselves to
become discouraged. Indeed, the getting out of the keel was in itself a
work of such difficulty that Chips more than once threw down his tools
and pronounced the task impossible, demanding the revision and
simplification of the design.

But Cunningham was deeply in love with the design which he had worked
out with so much care--and so indeed was I; therefore we resolutely
resisted Parsons' demands, and insisted that all that was needed was
patience and the resolution to take the necessary pains, and in the end
we got our own way and the work proceeded. But it proceeded with what,
to me, was painful slowness, there being days occasionally on which the
embryo ship presented precisely the same appearance when we knocked off
work in the evening that