Like several of the other men, the lone marine had not bothered to introduce himself. “Lieutenant King has ordered us to work now,” said Richard to him. “Could I trouble you to show us the sawpit?”
Lieutenant King’s residence, somewhat larger than the others, stood on a small knoll directly behind the blue-and-yellow landing flag; a Union flag on a second staff closer to the house lay with equal limpness down its mast. The gubernatorial mansion probably contained three small rooms and one attic; no doubt the shed at its rear was its kitchen. There seemed to be a communal oven and cooking area, a smithy, a few buildings which looked as if they stored supplies, each about ten feet by eight, if that. On another rise to the east were extensive cultivated gardens to which all the women, including Ann Innet, were hurrying. And between the two hillocks, among the pines, stood fourteen huts of wooden planks, each very well thatched with some kind of tough, strappy plant; the walls facing the ocean were blank, indicating that their doors looked inland.
The sawpit was close to the beach at the end of a cleared path free of stumps which ran back into the pines; the area around it had also been cleared to make room for dozens of twelve-foot logs, the smallest five feet in diameter. Though he badly wanted to stop to inspect these gargantuan trees he was supposed to reduce to beams and boards, Richard dared not; King’s orders were specific and the marine, who had grudgingly admitted that his name was Heritage, did not look the kind to be nice to felons.
Somehow he and his inexperienced little band had to produce enough sawn timber to fill Golden Grove’s holds, he presumed within the space of ten to fourteen days. Two small mast logs and what appeared to be a spar had already been prepared and lay to one side, together with a stack of planks. The mast logs and the spar were probably for one of the ships left at Port Jackson.
The sawpit itself was lined with boards to prevent its walls crumbling; it was seven feet deep, eight feet wide and fifteen feet long. Two squared-off beams were mounted across it at five-foot intervals, with rocky rubble banked against the ends of the beams to form sloping ramps. A log minus bark had already been rolled up onto the beams, lying wedged and supported on them lengthwise above the pit, but no one was working and he could see no one in attendance. He found five pit saws varying between eight and fourteen feet in length lying in the bottom of the pit covered with an old sail.
Along came Nathaniel Lucas.
“This is the worst air for iron and steel tools I have ever encountered,” he said, dropping into the pit as Richard uncovered the saws. “We cannot keep the wretched things free of rust.”
“They are also horribly blunted,” said Richard, running the ball of his thumb along one large, wickedly notched tooth. He grimaced. “Whoever sharpened this saw seems to think that the blade bevel goes in the same direction from tooth to tooth instead of in opposite directions. Christ! It will take hours and hours to rectify that, let alone get an edge on the thing. Is there anybody here can teach Blackall, Humphreys and Marriner how to saw?”
“I can teach,” said Lucas, a very slight and small man, “but I have not the strength for the pull. I understand what you are saying—you will have to sharpen because that must be done first.”
Richard found a ten-foot saw with reasonably sharp teeth. “This is the best of a bad lot—Nat, or Nathaniel?”
“Nat. Are you Richard or Dick?”
“Richard.” He looked up at the sun. “We will have to get a shelter over the pit as soon as possible. The sun is much stronger here than in Port Jackson.”
“It is more overhead by four degrees of latitude.”
“However, a shelter will have to wait until after Golden Grove departs.” Richard sighed. “That means hats and a good supply of drinking water. Is there some place Joey can take our belongings before we start? I had best stay here and start sharpening.” He sat himself down in the bottom of the sawpit against its eastern edge, still shaded, crossed his legs under him and pulled a twelve-foot saw onto his lap. “Joey, pass down my tool box and then go with Nat, like a good fellow. You others put your things away too, then straight back here.”
All of which means that I am once more a head man in charge of men who cannot function without constant direction.
The most popular saw was obviously the twelve-footer; staring up at the log, over five feet in diameter, Richard fully understood why. There were two twelve-footers, one fourteen-footer, one ten-footer and an eight-footer. In another pile beneath the old canvas lay a dozen hand saws also in desperate need of sharpening.
He wrapped his right hand in a bandage of rags, picked up a coarse, flat file wider than the tooth, laid it against the metal at the slight angle necessary to “set” the cutting bevel and drew it downward, always stroking toward the edge of the blade. After the coarse filing of the first section of saw was done, he fine-filed it, then shifted the saw along his lap to come at the next section. When it was all done he would have to remove the rust.
Above him, a little later, he could hear Nat Lucas explaining the saw to Bill Blackall, deputed to work on top of the log, and Willy Marriner, who was to be the bottom man.
“Each tooth is angled in the opposite direction,” Nat was saying, “so that the cut is wide enough to allow the body of the blade to pass easily through the timber. If the teeth were all angled the same way, the body of the blade would be wider and would jam. In due time ye’ll learn to saw by eye, but to begin with I’ll give ye a cord line to saw against. Norfolk pine has to be debarked because the bark oozes resin and would stick the saw in the cut better than glue after two rips. For your first cut ye start on the outside of the log at one side, making your second cut the outside of the log on the other side. Then, alternating sides, ye work inward an inch at a time to make inch-thick sheets until ye get to the heartwood, which ye’ll saw for two-inch-wide scantlings at first, then four inches wide and finally six inches wide for beams. ’Tis only on the pull upward—the rip—that the saw cuts, and the man on top is in control. Because he bends and pulls from a crouch upward some two feet—more if he is really strong—his is harder work. On the other hand, the man underneath in the pit gets a face full of sawdust. He returns the saw down by pulling from chest level to groin, farther if the man on top is one of those strong enough to rip up on a three-foot pull.”
Marriner appeared in the pit at the far end of the log, where the pair would begin, and gave Richard a wry look.
Nat Lucas was still talking, now to Bill Blackall. “There is a knack in standing, and I recommend bare feet. If ye get your foot in the path of the saw ’twill rip through a shoe like butter, so shoes afford no protection. Ye’re standing on a slight curve, one foot either side of the saw, so ’tis easier to balance and hang on firm in bare feet. Ye pull equally with both hands—rip! A pit saw is designed for cutting down the grain, so it is not as hard as cutting across the grain. Since no one in London put in any big two-ended cross grain saws, we use axes to fell and then use a rip saw to cut the logs into twelve-foot lengths, which is hideous hard work.”
“Can ye do without the eight-footer?” Richard called.
“Aye, if we have to. Why, Richard?”
“It will take a long time, but I have the instruments to turn a rip saw into a cross cut saw of a sort.”
“Oh, God bless ye!” came the fervent reply. Nat’s voice went back to Bill Blackall. “Sawing is a thinking man’s job,” he said. “If ye learn from how it happens, ye’ll learn to get the most result from the least effort. Only big men have the strength for this, and I warn ye, for the first few days ’twill kill ye.”
