George Manville Fenn
"The Black Bar"
Chapter One.
Two Middies and a Monkey.
“We’ve done wrong, Van. There’ll be a jolly row about it.”
“Get out! What’s the good of talking now? You were as ready to have him as I was. Lie still, will you? or I’ll pitch you overboard.”
Two middies talking in the stern-sheets of the cutter belonging to Her Majesty’s fast little cruiser Nautilus, stationed on the west coast of Africa “blackberrying,” so the men called their duty, Tom Fillot, one of their jokers, giving as the reason that the job was “black and berry nasty.” The sun shone as it can shine in the neighbourhood of the equator, and the sea looked like so much glistening oil, as it slowly heaved up and sank with the long ground swell, the light flashing from the surface attacking the eyes with blinding power, bronzing the faces of some, peeling the noses of others.
Setting aside the smart crew of the cutter in their white duck shirts and trousers and straw hats, with faces, necks, and hands of a mahogany brown, the two speakers may be taken as fair samples of what the sun could do with a fresh-coloured English lad of sixteen or seventeen. Mark Vandean, who leaned back and had wrenched himself round to sharply adjure something behind him in the bottom of the boat, was burned of a good warm Russian leather brown, while his companion, Bob Howlett, who held the rudder-lines, displayed in addition to ruddy brown cheeks a nose in a most disreputable state of rag.