Exhausted by exertion and anxiety, I was fast asleep within
half-an-hour after stepping up the junk's side. I slept far into the
day, and when I emerged found that she had been successfully floated
off the bank, and got out to sea without so far attracting the notice
of the Japanese ships.




CHAPTER VII


A very queer craft is a Chinese junk. Few Europeans have any defined
idea what they are like. They are of different sizes, most of them
suited to the numerous rivers and canals which intersect the country
in every part. The largest are of about one thousand tons burden. The
whole mode of building is most peculiar. Instead of the timbers being
first raised as with us, they are the last in their places, and the
vessel is put together with immense spiked nails. The next process is
doubling and clamping above and below decks. Two immense beams or
string pieces are then ranged below, fore and aft, and keep the other
beams in their places. The deck-frames are an arch, and a platform
erected on it protects it from the sun, and from other injuries
otherwise inevitable. The seams are caulked either with old
fishing-net or bamboo shavings, and then paid with a cement called
chinam, consisting of oyster-shells burnt to lime, with a mixture of
fine bamboo shavings, pounded together with a vegetable oil extracted
from a ground nut. When dried it becomes excessively hard; it never
starts, and the seams thus secured are perfectly safe and water-tight.
All the work about her is of the roughest kind. The trees when found