By July 3, as the boat neared completion, Lewis’s doubts were assailing him. He nearly convinced himself that none of his experiments in finding a substitute for pitch was going to work. No matter what he tried, he could not produce tar. Without tar, “I fear the whole operation of my boat will be useless.” There was something else: “I fear I have committed another blunder also in sewing the skins with a nedle which has sharp edges these have cut the skin and as it drys I discover that the throng does not fill the holes as I expected.”
