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The midshipmen and doctor had been somewhat over sanguine in regard to the rapidity with which the proposed craft could be built. They had not taken into account the damage the tools would receive from unskilful hands. They were constantly striking bolts and nails with their adzes and hatchets, blunting the edges.
To this end good cutting instruments and powerful and lasting crushers are needful. Accordingly, the twelve cutting teeth of a horse are close-set and concentrated in the fore-part of its mouth, like so many adzes or chisels. The grinders or molars are large, and have an extremely complicated structure, being composed of a number of different substances of unequal hardness.
Ten or a dozen men then collect round it with small adzes, which, when sharpened with an iron bodkin, are capable of shaving off the substance of the skin on the fleshy side until it is quite thin; when sufficiently thin, a quantity of brain is smeared over it, and some thick milk.
There was a sort of hold literally built full of purchases; a small fireproof safe; huge blocks of salt; saws, axes, pickaxes, adzes, flails, tools innumerable, bales of wool and linen stuff, hams, and two hundred empty sacks strewn over all.
It is formed by the head of a small hatchet, or any other flat piece of iron, lashed on, at an angle of forty-five, to the end of a small piece of wood, eighteen inches long, as its handle. Of old they used stone and shell axes and adzes.
There are forty-five different kinds of axes; fourteen for the American market, twelve adzes, twenty-six bills and bill-hooks, and upwards of seventy hoes for different foreign countries Spain, Portugal, South America, the United States, and Australia, which will soon consume as much hardware as America did fifty years ago.
We saw there a great number of trees which bore mattocks, pickaxes, crows, weeding-hooks, scythes, sickles, spades, trowels, hatchets, hedging-bills, saws, adzes, bills, axes, shears, pincers, bolts, piercers, augers, and wimbles.
He had on board, as usual in such voyages, beads, looking-glasses, tinder-works, axes, hatchets, saws, adzes, planes, chisels, gouges, gimlets, files, spokeshaves, rasps, hammers, nails, knives, scissors, razors, needles, thread, crockery-ware, calico, trinkets, and other similar articles.
The loot consisted of all sorts of household articles and implements, including wooden pillows, bowls, and dishes, "tapa" cloth of quaint designs, stone adzes, beautiful feather ornaments, "bau-baus" or native bamboo pipes, wooden spears, and a great quantity of shell and dogs'-tooth necklaces.
They had a couple of adzes, three axes, and two augers, but only five of the party could be engaged on the building; indeed, it would have been dangerous to have entrusted some of them with such tools. Billy to a certainty would have cut off his toes, and neither Tom nor Desmond were accustomed to their use, although they knew what it was necessary to do.
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