Chapter 33

CHAPTER 11

Winter arrived with the month of June, which is the December of the
northern zones, and the great business was the making of warm and solid
clothing.

The musmons in the corral had been stripped of their wool, and this
precious textile material was now to be transformed into stuff.

Of course Cyrus Harding, having at his disposal neither carders,
combers, polishers, stretchers, twisters, mule-jenny, nor self-acting
machine to spin the wool, nor loom to weave it, was obliged to proceed in a
simpler way, so as to do without spinning and weaving. And indeed he
proposed to make use of the property which the filaments of wool possess
when subjected to a powerful pressure of mixing together, and of
manufacturing by this simple process the material called felt. This felt
could then be obtained by a simple operation which, if it diminished the
flexibility of the stuff, increased its power of retaining heat in
proportion. Now the wool furnished by the musmons was composed of very
short hairs, and was in a good condition to be felted.

The engineer, aided by his companions, including Pencroft, who was once
more obliged to leave his boat, commenced the preliminary operations, the
subject of which was to rid the wool of that fat and oily substance with
which it is impregnated, and which is called grease. This cleaning was done
in vats filled with water, which was maintained at the temperature of
seventy degrees, and in which the wool was soaked for four-and-twenty
hours; it was then thoroughly washed in baths of soda, and, when
sufficiently dried by pressure, it was in a state to be compressed, that is
to say, to produce a solid material, rough, no doubt, and such as would
have no value in a manufacturing center of Europe or America, but which
would be highly esteemed in the Lincoln Island markets.

This sort of material must have been known from the most ancient times,
and, in fact, the first woolen stuffs were manufactured by the process
which Harding was now about to employ. Where Harding's engineering
qualifications now came into play was in the construction of the machine
for pressing the wool; for he knew how to turn ingeniously to profit the
mechanical force, hitherto unused, which the waterfall on the beach
possessed to move a fulling-mill.

Nothing could be more rudimentary. The wool was placed in troughs, and
upon it fell in turns heavy wooden mallets; such was the machine in
question, and such it had been for centuries until the time when the
mallets were replaced by cylinders of compression, and the material was no
longer subjected to beating, but to regular rolling.

The operation, ably directed by Cyrus Harding, was a complete success.
The wool, previously