Brandon of the Engineers by Harold Bindloss

The breeze had fallen and the shining sea was smooth as glass when the launch passed Adexe. Dick, who lounged at the helm, was not going there. Some alterations to a mole along the coast had just been finished, and Stuyvesant had sent him to engage the contractor who had done the concrete work. Jake, who occasionally found his duties irksome, had insisted on coming.

As they crossed the mouth of the inlet, Dick glanced shorewards through his glasses. The whitewashed coal-sheds glistened dazzlingly, and a fringe of snowy surf marked the curve of beach, but outside this a belt of cool, blue water extended to the wharf. The swell surged to and fro among the piles, checkered with purple shadows and laced with threads of foam, but it was the signs of human activity that occupied Dick's attention. He noticed the cloud of dust that rolled about the mounds of coal upon the wharf and blurred the figures of the toiling peons, and the way the tubs swung up and down from the hatches of an American collier until the rattle of her winches suddenly broke off.