"Mind, don't let the boat come up and squash you."
"Don't flurry the man so. Put your feet in your pocket if you see a shark."
A stream of advice, much of it satirical, pelted him from above. Looking over his shoulder, he saw beneath him the leaping boat and a ring of negro grins. It was these last that stiffened him into action. The surf-boat swooped up sideways, and when it seemed to him that she had reached the zenith of her leap, he let go the Jacob's ladder and sprang for her.
It is a matter of nice judgment, this determination of the psychological moment for a jump; and the amateur has it not. As a consequence Carter's foot slid on the wet gunwale; he buttocked painfully onto a thwart; and was saved from spinning overboard by rough and ready black fingers. The new pith helmet received its first crack, the white drill clothes were further soiled, and he was left to gather himself out of the slop of water on the bottom of the boat as best he pleased. Already the Krooboy crew were perched ape-like on the gunwales, and stabbing strenuously at the water with trident-headed paddles. The headman straddled in the stern with the muscles standing out in him like nuts, as he sculled with the steering oar.
It had all passed so quickly that the steamer had only accomplished one-half of a roll. The white faces that he had seen last beside him were now small and far away at the top of an enormously high iron wall, and to their shouts of farewell and fluttering of handkerchiefs he could not bring himself to return more than a curt hand-wave. It seemed to him that he was cut off entirely from white men and white man's territory, and was launched beyond release into West Africa with all its smells and accoutrements.
He settled himself in the mid thwart of the surf-boat with the water on the floor flowing merrily in and out of his pipe-clayed shoes. Whatever a white man may feel, he always assumes coolness and indifference before the black, and Carter picked up the instinct of his race.
His progress shoreward had two distinct phases. At one time he and the boat lay in a watery ravine with high sides towering above him, and no view save of sleek bottle-green water and cobalt sky overhead. The next moment he was expressed upwards on to an eminence and there before him lay landscape and seascape of most pleasant qualities. At these last moments of exaltation, he saw a glaring beach set along the sea's edge, carrying white factory buildings, and backed in by an orderly wall of green.
He saw also palm-oil puncheons being brought off, and an interest in the work bit him immediately. Here was the commodity which (bar death) would for years to come be his chiefest intimate. Between eclipses of the rollers, he watched every stage of the work—the great white-ended barrels rolled down the glaring beach, naked savages swimming them through the surf with unimaginable skill, a green painted surf-boat at anchor outside the breakers making them fast to a buoyed hawser. He saw another hawser-load being heaved out to the steamer's winch, with the great casks popping about like a string of gigantic cherries. Already on the M'poso he had seen other puncheons howked on board by a steam-crane which was driven by a one-eared Krooboy.
He had grasped this much of his new trade when sight seemed to grow misty to him, and his body was chilled with an unpleasant perspiration. It is one thing to take one's regular meals on a fine-sized steamboat, whatever weather may befall; it is quite another to do one's voyaging in a leaping, lancing, dancing, wallowing surf-boat. Few men take their first surf-boat ride over a bad roll without being violently seasick, and Carter was no exception to the normal law.
In a hazy sort of way he noted that the paddlers had stopped their song and their monotonous effort, and he was seized with a tremendous desire to hurry them forward and get himself and his gladstone bags planted on the stable beach. Ahead of them were roaring, spouting breakers, which it seemed impossible for any boat to live through; but waiting outside their fringe was even more intolerable.