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Romances and Narratives: A new voyage round the world
Romances and Narratives A new voyage round the world Author:Daniel Defoe Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: rains continued in the mountains they might have lain there till they had been obliged to eat one another, and so there had been an end of our new discovery. ... more »But the weather cleared up among the hills the next day, which heartened them up again ; and as the flood rose so soon, so the current being furiously rapid, the waters ran off again as easily as they came on, and in two days the water was all gone again. But our little float was shipwrecked, as I have said, and the carpenters finding how dangerous such great unwieldy rafts would be, resolved to set to it and build one large float with sides to it like a punt or ferry-boat. They worked so hard at this, ten of the men always working with them to help, that in five days they had her finished. The only thing they wanted was pitch and tar to make her upper work keep out the water; and they made a shift to fetch a juice out of some of the wood they had cut, by help of fire, that answered the end tolerably well. But that which made this disappointment less afflicting was, that our other men, hunting about the small streams where this water had come down so furiously, found that there was more gold, and the more for the late flood. This made them run straggling up the streams ; and, as the captain said, he thought once they would run quite back to the mountains again. But that was his ignorance too, for after awhile, and the nearer they came to the rising of the hills, the quantity abated ; for where the streams were so furious the water washed it all away and carried it down with it, so that by the end of five days the men found but little, and began to come back again. But then they discovered that though there was less in the higher part of the rivers, there was more farther down, and they found it so well worth while that ...« less