But he was soon relieved from these disturbing thoughts, by discovering that the two boats in the offing were Indian proas, and, perceiving that they stood towards the shore, he directed every appearance that could give them any suspicion to be removed, and concealed his people in the adjacent thickets, prepared to secure the Indians when they should land; but, after the proas had stood in within a quarter of a mile of the land, they suddenly stopt short, and remaining there motionless for near two hours, they then made sail again, and stood to the southward.—­To return to the projected enlargement of the bark.

If we examine how they were prepared for going through with this undertaking, on which their safely depended, we shall find, that, independent of other matters which were of as much importance, the lengthening of the bark alone was attended with great difficulty.  Indeed, in a proper place, where all the necessary materials and tools were to be had, the embarrassment would have been much less; but some of these tools were to be made, and many of the materials were wanting; and it required no small degree of invention to supply all these deficiences.  And when the hull of the bark should be completed, this was but one article; and there were many others of equal weight, which were to be well considered:  These were the rigging it, the victualling it, and, lastly, the navigating it, for the space of six or seven hundred leagues, through unknown seas, where no one of the company had ever passed before.  In some of these particulars such obstacles occurred, that, without the intervention of very extraordinary and unexpected accidents, the possibility of the whole enterprise would have fallen to the ground, and their utmost industry and efforts must have been fruitless.  Of all these circumstances I shall make a short recital.

It fortunately happened that the carpenters, both of the Gloucester and of the Tryal, with their chests of tools, were on shore when the ship drove out to sea; the smith, too, was on shore, and had with him his forge and some tools, but unhappily his bellows had not been brought from on board, so that he was incapable of working, and without his assistance they could not hope to proceed with their design; their first attention, therefore, was to make him a pair of bellows, but in this they were for some time puzzled, by their want of leather; however, as they had hides in sufficient plenty, and they had found a hogshead of lime, which the Indians or Spaniards had prepared for their own use, they tanned some hides with this lime; and though we may suppose the workmanship to be but indifferent, yet the leather they thus made served tolerably well, and the bellows (to which a gun-barrel served for a pipe) had no other inconvenience than that of being somewhat strong-scented from the imperfection of the tanner’s work.