Free Island of the Lost by Joan Druett

wind.”

SEVEN
The Cabin
    T he day after the outing, Wednesday, January 20, the weather turned foul, but the men didn’t allow this to bring their work to a standstill. They had a good store of meat, and so could concentrate on the cabin—and right now, the building of the fireplace and chimney was the project at hand. It was crucial that they get it right. Not only would the fire provide vital heat in the winter to come but it had to be safely contained. If the cabin burned down, it would spell the end for them all, so Raynal planned a long way ahead, and the men worked with care.
    Because of the danger of the peat beneath the fireplace alighting, they dug out a deep hearth between the two fireplace posts, and filled the cavity with stones. Then they painstakingly chose flat, large rocks for the sides and rear, laying them carefully on top of each other and bracing them with wooden pegs pushed into the ground on the outer side. The next problem was that there was no clay to make an adobe-style mortar to stick the stones together. What they needed, Raynal decided, was cement.
    After thinking about it, he went down to the beach and collected a great quantity of seashells. “These,” he stated matter-of-factly, “we calcined during the night.” In the process called “calcining,” calcium carbonate—the hard substance of the shells, in this case—is converted into calcium oxide (lime). It requires intense heat, and is normally done in a kiln. A roaring fire was made, the shells piled on top of the red-hot embers, and the whole covered over and then left to roast.
    It was successful, because when the makeshift oven was opened in the morning, Raynal found that he was now “provided with a supply of lime.” Normally, to make cement, this lime would be mixed with clay. As there was no clay available, Raynal turned to a process the ancient Roman engineers would have recognized, by mixing the calcium oxide with sand. It was a slow process, and a painful one—by the time Raynal had made enough mortar to cement the fireplace stones together, the lime had burned right through his fingertips.
    â€œThis lime, mixed with the fine gravel we found under the rocks of the beach, made a capital mortar for our mason’s work. But when the latter was finished,” he ruefully wrote, “though I had used a palette of wood as a substitute for a trowel, I found the tips of my fingers, and nearly all of my right hand, burned to the quick.” He was gratified by Musgrave’s approval, but the most effusive compliments “could not make me forget the intense pain I suffered. However,” he added, “constant application of fresh water, and a few dressings with seal-oil, soon cured my wounds.”
    Getting the materials together for the chimney pot took still more ingenuity. The hull of the
Grafton
had been sheathed with a thin layer of copper below the waterline, a customary precautionbecause unprotected wood is vulnerable to teredo, the wood-boring shipworm that can reduce hard timber to something as fragile as lace in a matter of weeks. Luckily, the moon was full, and so Alick and George took advantage of the very low tides to wade into the surf and strip sheets of this copper from the sides of the wreck, using a pry bar Raynal had made out of a flat metal rod—a “tringle,” which had been salvaged from the foremast shrouds—by splitting it a little way at one end, and then curving up the split ends to make a claw.
    Considering that they were standing waist deep in cold salt water, and were forced to duck under the surface at regular intervals to detach the lower edges of the copper plates, the two men were surprisingly efficient. “Though they could not work above two hours at a time, in three tides George and Alick had stripped off enough copper to enable us to finish our chimney pot,” wrote Raynal. At the same time, the two seamen carefully