I cannot say that after this, for five years, any extraordinary thing happened to me, but I lived on in the same course, in the same posture and place, just as before; the chief things I was employed in, besides my yearly labour of planting my barley and rice, and curing my raisins, of both which I always kept up just enough to have sufficient stock of one year’s provision beforehand; I say, besides this yearly labour, and my daily pursuit of going out with my gun, I had one labour, to make me a canoe, which at last I finished:  so that by digging a canal to it of six feet wide, and four feet deep, I brought it into the creek, almost half a mile.  As for the first, which was so vastly big, as I made it without considering beforehand, as I ought to do, how I should be able to launch it, so, never being able to bring it into the water, or bring the water to it, I was obliged to let it lie where it was, as a memorandum to teach me to be wiser the next time:  indeed, the next time, though I could not get a tree proper for it, and was in a place where I could not get the water to it at any less distance than, as I have said, near half a mile, yet as I saw it was practicable at last, I never gave it over:  and though I was near two years about it, yet I never grudged my labour, in hopes of having a boat to go off to sea at last.

However, though my little periagua was finished, yet the size of it was not at all answerable to the design which I had in view when I made the first; I mean, of venturing over to the terra firma, where it was above forty miles broad; accordingly, the smallness of my boat assisted to put an end to that design, and now I thought no more of it.  As I had a boat, my next design was to make a cruise round the island; for as I had been on the other side in one place, crossing, as I have already described it, over the land, so the discoveries I made in that little journey made me very eager to see other parts of the coast; and now I had a boat, I thought of nothing but sailing round the island.

For this purpose, that I might do every thing with discretion and consideration, I fitted up a little mast in my boat, and made a sail to it out of some of the pieces of the ship’s sails which lay in store, and of which I had a great stock by me.  Having fitted my mast and sail, and tried the boat, I found she would sail very well:  then I made little lockers, or boxes, at each end of my boat, to put provisions, necessaries, ammunition, &c. into, to be kept dry, either from rain or the spray of the sea; and a little long hollow place I cut in the inside of the boat, where I could lay my gun, making a flap to hang down over it, to keep it dry.