After the stem and stern posts had been fastened in place, ribs were pegged to the keel to form the frame of the boat. These curved ribs they made in two ways. One was to hew them from the crooked limbs of trees. The other was to take straight pieces of wood and soak them for many days in water, until the wood became soft and pliable, and then bend them to shape, and tie them that way with leather cords while they dried. When the ribs had been fastened to the keel with wooden pegs, long strips of wood were bent around the tops of the ribs, from the stem post to the stern post, and fastened to each rib with a peg. This made the framework of the boat, and now it had to be covered with planks. Modor and his helpers took the split boards they had made and bent them over the framework, with a peg at each rib to hold them, and in this way covered the whole framework of the boat. Of course a boat built in this rough way would not be water-tight; there were many joints and seams between the rough planking through which water would leak. But Modor had found, oozing from the pine trees, a black, sticky sort of gum or pitch, and this, with soft fibres from the bark of trees, he used to calk his boat and make it tight. The way he did this was to heat the pitch in a large shell, dip the fibres in it, and then drive them into the cracks with a stone wedge. In this way, after many trials, Modor at last got his boat so that it would not leak. He built a deck of wood over the forward part of the boat, and across the middle part he put five board seats. These seats were for the paddlers to sit on, but the paddles were so long, in order to reach the water, that they were like oars, and it was hard to handle them against the ocean waves. So Modor drove pegs into the edges or gunwales of the boat to hold the oars in place, and men thus began to row boats, instead of paddling them, as they had their canoes and rafts. As we have seen, the tribe had almost forgotten how to weave, because they no longer had the tough marsh grasses to make cord from. But Modor twisted the fibres from the bark of certain trees into strong cords, and took them to some of the old women, who knew how to weave, and they wove him a sail from them. Then he put a mast in the middle of his boat, with a pole or yard across it, and hung the sail from this yard, with strong cords tied to its lower corners to hold it down.