414 A NATURAL FORTIFICATION,

of necessity, as a safe retreat, and whither they carried also the
two barrels of powder which I had sent them at my coming
away.

But, however, they resolved not to change their habitation;
yet they agreed, that as I had carefully covered it, first with a
wall or fortification, and then with a grove of trees, so, seeing
their safety consisted entirely in their being concealed, of which
they were now fully convinced, they set to work to cover and
conceal the place yet more effectually than before. To this pur-
pose, as I had planted trees (or rather thrust in stakes, which in
time all grew up to be trees) for some good distance before the
entrance into my apartment, they went on in the same manner,
and filled up the rest of that whole space of ground, from the
trees I had set quite down to the side of the creek, where, as I
said, I landed my floats, and even in the very ooze where the tide
flowed, not so much as leaving any place to land, or any sign
that there had been any landing thereabout. The stakes also
being of a wood very forward to grow, as I have noted formerly,
they took care to have generally very much larger and taller than
those which I had planted; and as they grew apace, so they
planted them so very thick and close together, that when they had
been three or four years grown there was no piercing with the eye
any considerable way into the plantation. And as for that part
which I had planted, the trees were grown as thick as a man’s
thigh. And among them they placed so many other short ones,
and so‘thick, that, in a word, it stood like a palisado a quarter of
a mile thick. And it.was next to impossible to penetrate it but
with a little army to cut it all down; for a little dog could hardly
get between the trees, they stood so close.

But this was not all, for they did the same by all the ground to
the right hand and to the left, and round even to the top of the
hill, leaving no way, not so much as for themselves to come out,
but by the ladder placed up to the side of the hill, and then lifted
up, and placed again from the first stage up to the top; which
ladder when it was taken down, nothing but what had wings or
witchcraft to assist it could come at them.

This was excellently well contrived; nor was it less than what