Ford of H.M.S. Vigilant: A Tale of the Chusan Archipelago

I think that the Commander and he wanted them to come very badly, and I didn’t mind either, because I wasn’t so cold now, and the flames lighted the place all round grandly.

"They’ve broken in!" the Scotchman groaned, and Sally shrieked and buried her head in her lap. Miller seized a rifle and jumped across, pushed her out of the way, opened the shu...

"Haul in the sheet, sir! Quick, sir! or she’ll be on to us and carry away the sails," and everyone jumped to the sheets and began hauling in the huge booms of the foresail and m...

"That’s all right, sir, never mind about the island; you’ll be getting her out in the open, and she’ll think you’re just trying to give her a wide berth." Then I remembered Dick...

I was just going, when he called out, "In case anything happens, you had better take this," and he opened a drawer and pulled out a revolver and a couple of packets of ammunitio...

"I didn’t fire it myself, though, Sharpe, did I?" he asked; and Sharpe said, "No, sir, you didn’t hardly do that, but you was a-steadyin’ of the cartridge belt, and seeing as ho...

He made up his mind in no time. "They’ll try and burn down the door at the back, there’s no window from which we can shoot them," and he gave Miller ten men to go and close the...

This story is written more or less on the same lines as my previous story of naval adventures—_Mr. Midshipman Glover, R.M._—and describes events subsequent to those narrated in...

We got most of the filth out of ours by the middle of the second day, and the holds didn’t smell so badly, though we could never get the Chinese kind of smell out of the living...

One happened, once, when I’d brought Rawlings and Ponsonby with me, and stumbled over a Chinaman, crawling along the ground. He fled like a rabbit, but the two mids were on him...

He ought to have been a detective, ought Trevelyan, and was off in a "jiffy" to search for fresh traces. "Footmarks! bootmarks! plenty of them, sir," he shouted presently, and I...

There was a lot more rifle firing and machine-gun firing farther to the right, and the field gun stopped shooting; but we couldn’t see the marines and those others now, because...

I had six long letters from my mother, the first I had had since leaving home, and I sat on my chest in a corner by myself and read them, and it was very jolly to hear all that...

As I hurried past the Skipper, he sang out, "Drive those fellows off that hill!"—pointing with his big stick. "Travers will go with you, and I’ll send a Maxim along after you, a...

"Now, what you have to do is this"—we all got fearfully excited—"I’ve asked the Commander for his gig to-night, told him I wanted it for a special purpose, and he played the gam...

Then Mr. Rashleigh sent for me. He was angry that I hadn’t reported to him directly I had come alongside. I told him all that had happened, and how Scroggs had done nearly every...

Hoffman had for years owned quite a small fleet of merchant steamers, and had endeavoured to compete with the native junks for the coastal trade between Ningpo, Shanghai, and th...

Gradually all the officers commanding companies came up, except "B.-T.", who had a bayonet wound through his thigh and couldn’t walk, and the _Omaha’s_ First Lieutenant, who had...

It was jolly good to have got him back safely, but we were all awfully disappointed that we hadn’t found where Sally and her father were. We had thought we had done so, but he t...

Dicky came down to help me find my things—he was not to land—and the strange little beggar excitedly strapped on my gaiters, to save time. As you know, I was one of the Mids of...

Directly the Skipper believed that the rascally Englishman and his pirate crews were at last cornered and unable to escape, he sent a letter ashore demanding the immediate relea...

I made a hasty exploration of the creek, and found that a quarter of a mile inland it opened out, and that anchored there were a number of war junks, and a very large number of...

His main idea was that the pirates must have, somewhere in the archipelago, a base from which they operated, where they repaired and revictualled their ships, and where they war...

"Not yet; things are going all right so far;" and I raced back and began reading the messages, till I came to the station master’s, and then I got red and spluttered a bit and d...

Some of us had expected to be made a fuss of when we arrived at Portsmouth; but it was four months since the papers had been full of our exploits, and everyone had forgotten all...