Though neither Tempest nor Dave knew it, the day they laid the keel of the _Mud Turtle_ the crew of the _Manihiki_ were being landed at Melbourne, their plans having gone somewhat astray. They had covered half the distance to Fiji laboriously by tacking against adverse winds most of the time, and had reduced their ration of water by half, as their supply of that precious liquid was getting perilously low, when a steamer nearly ran them down in the middle of the night, the only lamp on the long-boat having been broken. The helmsman on the steamer heard their cries just in time to swing aside, and the men from the _Manihiki_ were only too thankful to accept the offer of a passage to the first port the vessel was bound for. There was no wireless on board, so until he reached Melbourne Captain Peters was unable to notify his owners of the loss of their vessel and the plight of those he had left on the island. A month was to elapse, moreover, before the next vessel was to leave Sydney for the scene of the shipwreck. The task of building the _Mud Turtle_ was a more formidable one than even Tempest had anticipated. To begin with they had very few planks that were of any service for the purpose. One of the spars off the _Manihiki_ made a rough keel, but almost all the rest of the material had to be hewn out of green trees. They had plenty of tools, however, and though the skeleton of the craft would probably have convulsed a professional boat builder with laughter, it had at least more resemblance to a boat than a dog kennel, as Tempest pointed out. The _Mud Turtle_ was sixteen feet in length, and somewhat narrow in order to overcome some of the difficulty of getting curves. As a matter of fact she consisted chiefly of angles. From the first she had no pretentions to elegance, and in spite of her builders’ ingenuity there were awkward gaps where the rough planks positively refused to meet, this necessitating a great deal more caulking and patching than was consistent with beauty. “How fast do you think she will sail?” Dave asked when they had her about half finished. “About a knot an hour, if we get out and push,” Tempest replied lugubriously. “Pity we didn’t let that engineer bring the donkey engine ashore. We could have rigged it up and converted our wonderful boat into a steamer, maybe p’raps, as Jim says.” The Kanaka, who had distinct ideas on the subject of boat building, but whose ideas had been overruled because Tempest thought a catamaran such as they could construct would be as dangerous as a bundle of dynamite, viewed the _Mud Turtle_ with something akin to suspicion, if not actual distrust; but he worked on her just as cheerfully as the others, putting in long hours with the saw on green timber and using other carpenter’s tools with remarkable skill considering they were all strange to him.