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Updated: May 1, 2025
They are first framed with logs, fastened by wooden tree-nails, and the timber placed within the frame. There are, perhaps, from forty to a hundred people on this raft to guide it down the stream, and the houses you see are built on it for the accommodation of these people. I have seen as many as fifteen houses upon a raft, which will sometimes contain the cargoes of thirty or forty large ships."
One of the best of their bows was made of a single piece of fir, four feet eight inches in length, flat on the inner side and rounded on the outer, being five inches in girth about the middle, where, however, it is strengthened on the concave side, when strung, by a piece of bone ten inches long, firmly secured by tree-nails of the same material.
Though their saw was too small to cut out the planks of the proposed vessel, they might obtain them by splitting up trees with wedges, and then smoothing them down with the axe. Though they had no nails, the planks might be secured to the ribs with tree-nails or wooden pegs. "Ya, ya!" exclaimed the brave skipper for the hundredth time; "where there's a will there's a way.
Arcadia House, while it certainly stood in need of the repairer's hand, was by no means uninhabitable, a fact which spoke well for the honesty of its old-time builders. Its oak beams, fastened together with tree-nails instead of iron spikes, were still sound, and its brick walls, unusually massive in construction, were without a crack.
For not to speak of his readiness in ordinary duties: repairing stove boats, sprung spars, reforming the shape of clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull's eyes in the deck, or new tree-nails in the side planks, and other miscellaneous matters more directly pertaining to his special business; he was moreover unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both useful and capricious.
The surrounding piles were also attached to the horizontal logs by various ingenious contrivances, such as a fork, a natural bend, an artificial check, or a mortised hole; and some of the beams were pinned together by tree-nails, the perforations of which were unmistakable.
On removing the cat-head, after the ship arrived at Boston, it was found that there were two holes under it which had been bored for the purpose of driving tree-nails, and which, accidentally, had not been plugged up when the cat-head was placed over them. This was sufficient to account for the leak, and for our not having been able to discover and stop it.
They are sharp at both ends, and wide in the middle, their planks being fastened with tree-nails, and their bottoms payed over with pitch; and as the natives use no compasses, or other maritime instruments, they always creep along the coast.
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