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On the 10th of August, with such cheers as the island never heard before or since, the single-master was launched from the skids and named the St. Peter. Cannon balls and cartridges were thrown in bottom as ballast. Luckily, eight hundred pounds of meal had been reserved for the return voyage, and Steller had salted down steaks of whale meat and sea-cow.
Often as not, the long-planked single-master fell to pieces in a gale, when the Russians went to the bottom of the sea, or stranded among the Aleutian Islands westward of Alaska, when the castaways took up comfortable quarters among the Indians, who knew no other code of existence than the rights of the strong; and the Russians with their firearms seemed strong, indeed, to the Aleuts.
All June, the noise of the planking went on till the mast raised its yard-arms, and an eight-oared single-master, such as the old Vikings of the North Sea used, was well under way. The difficulties of such shipbuilding can hardly be realized.
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