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They seldom took the general cut through Maiden and Laurel Streets to Second, but kept down the river bank by Beach Street, to see the ship-yards and hear the pounding of rivets and the merry adzes ringing, and see youngsters and old women gathering chips, while the sails on the broad river came up on wind and tide as if to shatter the pier-heads ere they bounded off.
The canoes of these inland sailors are truly primitive craft: they are hollowed out of the trunks of single trees by means of iron adzes; and if the tree has a bend, so has the canoe. I liked the frank and manly bearing of these men, and, instead of sitting in the wagon, preferred a seat in one of the canoes. I found they regarded their rude vessels as the Arab does his camel.
Infantry, bearing, besides their usual arms, implements for demolishing barricades axes, adzes and hatchets each soldier one upon his knapsack, followed. At two o'clock, at the Hôtel des Affaires Étrangères, at the corner of the Rue des Capucines and the Boulevard, an immense mass of men ebbed and flowed like tides of the sea, and a tempest of shouts, groans and choruses to national songs arose.
Then the carpenters landed, who had great axes in their hands, and planes and adzes hung at their sides. They took counsel together, and sought for a good spot to place a castle on.
They gave me two pigs, about 500 or 600 cocoa-nuts, and upwards of a ton of yams, though I told them I had only two small hatchets, five or six adzes, a few gimlets, and empty bottles to give in exchange.
Their weapons and tools were polished stone; their hammers and hatchets and adzes, their lance heads and their arrow tips, were of the hardest igneous rock chipped and ground with patient labour. The people who come first have the best chance of staying, if only they are willing to learn; hardy plants will soon take the place of tender plants if left alone.
The natives had daggers, knives, axes, adzes, hammers, and spears of stone, bone, shark teeth, and fire-hardened wood, but metals were unknown to them, and this long, glittering blade, that cut a javelin stem as the javelin would crack a rib, was a daily wonder.
Fifty to a hundred men with adequate equipment could have gotten the thing up in a summer. It was only by forcing himself to think in terms of spadeful after spadeful of earth, cartload after cartload creaking behind straining beasts, timber after timber cut with axes and dressed with adzes, stone after stone and brick after brick, that he could appreciate it.
The tools with which these canoes and their other implements and utensils were made consisted of axes and adzes made of a hard black stone, or of a green talc, which latter stone is not only hard but tough. They had chisels made of small fragments of jasper, and of human bones. These also served the purpose of augers for boring holes.
Meantime, Francis Cooke and I left our adzes and wedges where we were hewing plank, and so soon as I have taken bite and sup I'll forth to look for them with my snaphance." "We've heard of locking the stable door when the steed was stolen," murmured Priscilla to Mary, and the captain, whose ear was quick as a hare's, half turned toward her with a glint of laughter in his eyes.
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