This part of the arrangement completed, I ate a hearty breakfast, when I began to secure the hatches, as a sort of floor, on my primitive joists. This was not difficult, the hatches being long, and the rings enabling me to lash them, as well as to spike them. Long before the sun had reached the meridian, I had a stout little platform, that was quite eighteen inches above the water, and which was surrounded by a species of low ridge-ropes, so placed as to keep articles from readily tumbling off it. The next measure was to cut all the sails from the yards, and to cut loose all the rigging and iron that did not serve to keep the wreck together. The reader can easily imagine how much more buoyancy I obtained by these expedients. The fore-sail alone weighed much more than I did myself, with all the stores I might have occasion to put on my platform. As for the fore-top-sail, there was little of it left, the canvass having mostly blown from the yard, before the mast went. My raft was completed by the time I felt the want of dinner; and a very good raft it was. The platform was about ten feet square, and it now floated quite two feet clear of the water. This was not much for a sea; but, after the late violent gale, I had some reason to expect a continuation of comparatively good weather. I should not have been a true seaman not to have bethought me of a mast and a sail. I saved the fore-royal-mast, and the yard, with its canvass, for such a purpose; determining to rig them when I had nothing else to do. I then ate my dinner, which consisted of the remnants of the old cold meat and fowls I could find among the cabin eatables.