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Updated: June 24, 2025
Each factory was capable of accommodating about one hundred merchants, with their servants. Their importations consisted of flax, corn, biscuit, flour, malt, ale, cloth, wine, spirituous liquors, copper, silver, &c.; and they exported ship-timber, masts, furs, butter, salmon, dried cod, fish-oil, &c.
The busy hum of machinery made music with her neglected waterfalls. All her streams, like the famous Pactolus, flowed with gold. From her discouraged and embarrassed commerce arose a greater blessing, apparently indestructible. Walls of brick and granite could not easily be overturned by the Southern lever, and left to decay, as the ship-timber had done.
A single fragment of ship-timber, black with time and weeds, and crusty with barnacles, heaved to and fro in the edge of the surf, and two fishermen's children, a boy and girl, tilted upon it as it moved, clung with the semblance of terror to each other, and played at shipwreck. The rocks were dark with moisture, steaming in the sun.
It is not, however, as cabinet wood that the Jarra is so highly valuable. It has been found to be some of the best ship-timber in the world. It is so extremely durable, that when it is cut in a healthy state, it is never found to rot, even though it be buried in the ground for years. For seventeen years it has been constantly used in the colony for a variety of purposes.
In addition to the quaint low house of clapboards and old ship-timber, with its sloping roof and little toy windows, so unlike his own at Yardley, and smoked ceilings, there was a scrap heap piled up and scattered over the yard which in itself was a veritable treasure-house. Here were rusty chains and wooden figure-heads of broken-nosed, blind maidens and tailless dolphins.
One would have thought that he had planned the siege himself. He took his stick from where it leaned against a decaying piece of ship-timber and went clicking away. The explanation of his housekeeping arrangements was not long in flying about the town, and Mrs. Captain Topliff made an early call to say that she had always suspected it from the first, from the family likeness.
"From one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet," was replied, "and on the north-west coast of America one called the 'Douglas's pine' is the loftiest tree known; it is said to measure over three hundred feet. 'From the pines are obtained the best masts and much of the most valuable ship-timber, and in the building and finishing of houses they are of almost indispensable utility.
It is owing in still greater measure to the value of Oak-wood for ship-timber, especially as those full-grown trees which have sprung up by the road-sides, and the noble pasture Oaks, contain the greatest number of those joints which are in special demand for ship-building.
The age at which the oak should be felled for ship-timber, &c., depends on many circumstances, and is fixed by different authorities at from eighty to a hundred and fifty years. Oaks are said to be more liable than other trees to be struck by lightning. Oak-coppices or "little woods" are cut over at from twelve to thirty years old. The bark is valuable as well as the wood.
Lynch marks the appearance of high land, giving it the name of Princess Augusta Sophia hill, and points it out as a commanding situation for a settlement. He speaks in favourable terms of the facility with which ship-timber of any dimensions or shape may be procured and loaded. Respecting the size or population of the town no information is given.
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