I often marvelled how any shipping-office officials came to engage such ancient-looking sailormen. They looked infirm and useless. I sometimes half fancy that I dreamed them, or that I am quite a thousand years old, as they come to me in some memory of the night, and dance till I distinctly hear their sea-boots tapping on my bedroom floor in this old inn. Olaf was clean-shaven, and was so wrinkled and tanned that he looked like some neptuonic mummy clad in modern duck-pants and a belt. Steffan wore a peculiar-shaped bristly beard round his neck only, which looked like an old, frayed, grey woolly scarf, a fixture round his throat. Hans, the boatswain, who always said “Thou canst,” and “thee,” and “shiver-me-timbers,” would look straight into the mate’s eyes and say, “Avast there, you lubber!” He had one enormous tooth that protruded from his compressed lips, which seemed ever grinning, were he awake or asleep. At other times he would remind me of a wonderfully carved heathen idol, a kind of South Sea Laocoön that I had once seen in a tambu-house in New Guinea. For he would stand on deck bathing in a large tub that hardly reached to his knees, his muscles and veins swollen, vividly standing out as though through some mental and physical agony, while he stared on the skyline, then once again scanned his tanned arms and chest, whereon were tattooed the strange names of women he had known! Olwyn Saga, who wore a beard that brushed against his hips and where through the winds whistled eerie melodies when storms blew, had cornflower-blue eyes that had ogled the women of Shanghai and Callao before any modern sailor was born.
Even the skipper would tug his huge beard in a kind of meditative way whenever he met Olwyn on deck. As for the mate, a Scot, he almost apologized before shouting out his orders to those grand old fathers of the sea. Even their songs sounded like echoes from another age, as the old fo’c’sle dog, Moses, sat upright before them, tears coursing down his cheeks as the strains seemingly awakened memories of other days. And when Olwyn jigged in the forecastle by night, the hands would sit huddled on their sea-chests, their chins leaning on their horny hands as they dreamily watched. And I would fiddle a weird obligato, shivery-like, as I stood beneath the fo’c’sle’s oil-lamp, playing, not to Olwyn’s dancing figure, but to his shadow that mimicked him as it bobbed up and down in the gloom of the bunks and wooden bulwark side, first to port and then to starboard, as, folding his arms under his beard, he slewed round and round! Only the shuffling sounds of the big sea-boots, “Tump-er-te-tump-er-thump-er-te-thump,” told of the reality, as I, avoiding Olwyn and staring at his silently moving shadow in the gloom, was enabled to feed my imagination and extemporize an eerie accompaniment to a melody that had been sung on the Spanish Main a century before.