Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [94]
"That's blasphemy," Langman said quickly.
"What's blasphemous about it?" Swede asked.
"Let him call it anything he likes," Captain Dean said. "In good weather we've always observed the Sabbath on my ships in a fitting manner, provided the weather made it possible for us to do so.
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"But if a storm happened to hit us on Sunday, we did anything necessary for the welfare of the ship.
"You've insisted for days that our lives may depend on this boat because the full-moon tide may force us off.
"Very well, Mr. Langman. I think I can speak for God. I think I can say you'll be forgiven for working on Sunday, just as God would forgive you for eating a seal on Friday, if you were a Catholicand if we were so fortunate as to kill a seal.
"So you'll take your turn hauling plank, Mr. Langman, and so will Mellen and White, just as if it were Saturday, which it is."
"That's more blasphemy, and it's still Sunday," Langman insisted.
Swede looked at him as if he wanted to kill him, and I wish he had.
A smooth piece of ledge, sprinkled with boulders, lay just above the seaweed fringe. This ledge sloped easily toward the seaweed fringe and ended between two rock fingers.
That rock was our shipyard, our launching stage, our naval storehouse.
Our only tools were our pocket knives, Chips's hammer, the caulking mallet and the cutlass.
Our only shipbuilding materials were the remnants of the Nottingham. With Chips's hammer we had strained our muscles to draw nails and spikes from the few wet planks we had recovered, but we had failed so lamentably that our chief reliance for putting the boat together were the nails and spikes salvaged from Chips's workbag.
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While those of us able to walk dragged timbers, planks, canvas and cordage to the launching stage, the captain and Swede undertook to make the cutlass into a sawa task that would never, I thought, be accomplished except by the direct intervention of Mercury, Minerva and another half-dozen Greek divinities like those who were forever getting Ulysses out of his difficulties.
Neither Mercury nor Minerva, however, had a helping hand in the transformation of the cutlass. Chips thought of the way it could be done, but was too weak to do anything except advise us in our labors.
He had come down with the same sort of sickness that had finished Cooky Sipper. Being a heavy man, the blisters and ulcers on his feet and legs were worse than ours, and he couldn't stand upright. So he stayed in the tent, while Captain Dean and Swede worked beside him on the cutlass. His voice was weak and choked with phlegm, as Cooky's had been, and he found difficulty in making himself heard above the everlasting slashing and crashing of the breakers.
The captain and Swede brought sharp-edged rocks into the tent. While Swede held the blade of the cutlass at an angle against the sharp edge of a rock as a man holds the blade of a razor at an angle against his cheek, the captain would smash at the blade with a similar rock. Thus a V-shaped nick would be broken out of the cutlass blade.
They started with a nick at the hilt end, a nick at the point and a nick halfway between each of the three nicks. Then they subdivided each space between the nicks until the blade became a series of jagged saw teeth.
Then Swede took one of those chisel-like rocks and
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Chips took another, and they rubbed and rubbed at each nick until both sides had beveled edges and the teeth were sharp.
When they started I didn't believe they could do it. Since Boon Island, I believe the right sort of man can do anything.
Even less than I believed a saw could be made from the cutlass did I believe that a seaworthy boat would emerge from the materials at hand, but we did build it, even though we had less with which to work than strolling players would need to build a stage in a barn.
In spite of all our handicaps, we had something to hearten us, for