All that was now needed was a bridge. The river was more than a thousand yards wide ‘with a torrent like a mill stream’, and initially the engineers had only eight boats ‘and nothing near us but a small village . . . First we seized, by great exertion, about 120 boats,’ reported the Orcadian James Broadfoot, who was put in charge of the operation, then cut down lots of trees; these we made into strong beams. There was no rope, but we made 500 cables out of a peculiar kind of grass which grows 100 miles from here; the anchors were made of small trees joined and loaded with half a ton of
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