"By Crumbs, Miss Kate, but don't you try to dictate to me about that. I'm going to see you off from the front doorsteps myself. By Crumbs, there isn't another lady in Africa I admire half as much."
Captain Image yapped out his commands to the third mate and a quartermaster in the wheelhouse in tones that supplied many missing adjectives:
"... Starboard your helm. Starboard. Hard-a-starboard, you bung-eyed son of perdition--stop her. Crumbs! but we sliced off a thumping big chunk of Africa there, and broke half the tumblers in the steward's pantry by the sound of it. I bet something big it's another case of going home on what's left of the double bottom, and Old Horny to pay in Water Street, Liverpool. Give her full ahead now, and steady your helm, quartermaster. My holy whiskers, who wouldn't sell a farm and go to sea? Starboard your helm, six points. There, steady on that. Half speed the engines." And so on over and over again for every hour since the sun rose to blister the swamps, and call forth the full volume of their earth and crushed-marigold smell.
There is a proverb bandied about amongst the sons of men which states that the unknown has always its charm, and harassed shipmasters often wonder why it is not publicly contradicted in Norie's Epitome of Navigation. Carter either forgot or never realized this, and furthermore made the fatal blunder of going up onto the sacred upper bridge without direct invitation.
For half an hour he had stood there silent, and unspoken to, listening to Captain Image's tirade against the creeks that led to Mokki, and then catching for a moment the mariner's eye, ventured on an observation. He suggested that at any rate Captain Image would have the amusement of feeling that he was an explorer; and there was the opportunity the peppery Welshman really needed.
He had not been able to say what he wished to Miss Kate O'Neill, for many reasons; but here was her whipping-boy; and on him Captain Image turned loose one of the most powerful vocabularies that has ever been carried up and down the West African seaboard. He neglected both quartermaster and third mate--and these two experts, being only too glad of the breathing space, kept the _M'poso_ accurately out of the mangroves, whilst their commander gave an undivided attention to the very highly qualified passenger who had dared to sully the unblemished deck plants of the upper bridge.