On the way Herbert had discovered a tree, the branches of which the Indians of South America employ for making their bows.  It was the crejimba, of the palm family, which does not bear edible fruit.  Long straight branches were cut, the leaves stripped off; it was shaped, stronger in the middle, more slender at the extremities, and nothing remained to be done but to find a plant fit to make the bow-string.  This was the “hibiscus heterophyllus,” which furnishes fibers of such remarkable tenacity that they have been compared to the tendons of animals.  Pencroft thus obtained bows of tolerable strength, for which he only wanted arrows.  These were easily made with straight stiff branches, without knots, but the points with which they must be armed, that is to say, a substance to serve in lieu of iron, could not be met with so easily.  But Pencroft said, that having done his part of the work, chance would do the rest.

The settlers arrived on the ground which had been discovered the day before.  Being composed of the sort of clay which is used for making bricks and tiles, it was very useful for the work in question.  There was no great difficulty in it.  It was enough to scour the clay with sand, then to mold the bricks and bake them by the heat of a wood fire.

Generally bricks are formed in molds, but the engineer contented himself with making them by hand.  All that day and the day following were employed in this work.  The clay, soaked in water, was mixed by the feet and hands of the manipulators, and then divided into pieces of equal size.  A practiced workman can make, without a machine, about ten thousand bricks in twelve hours; but in their two days work the five brickmakers on Lincoln Island had not made more than three thousand, which were ranged near each other, until the time when their complete desiccation would permit them to be used in building the oven, that is to say, in three or four days.

It was on the 2nd of April that Harding had employed himself in fixing the orientation of the island, or, in other words, the precise spot where the sun rose.  The day before he had noted exactly the hour when the sun disappeared beneath the horizon, making allowance for the refraction.  This morning he noted, no less exactly, the hour at which it reappeared.  Between this setting and rising twelve hours, twenty-four minutes passed.  Then, six hours, twelve minutes after its rising, the sun on this day would exactly pass the meridian and the point of the sky which it occupied at this moment would be the north.  At the said hour, Cyrus marked this point, and putting in a line with the sun two trees which would serve him for marks, he thus obtained an invariable meridian for his ulterior operations.