I might say that the salt-horse and biscuits of the “Zangwahee” were as ancient as the crew appeared to be. Perhaps it was natural enough that there should be an affinity between the ancient members of that crew (a few members belonged to my own century) and the horses that had apparently roamed the primeval Arabian plains! Only a great poet could describe the antique “Menu” of that forecastle. I have a brilliant imagination, and so it was easy enough for me to imagine that the corn that those biscuits were made of had ripened in Assyrian cornfields! I only had to eat a foc’sle biscuit to enter at once the realms of enchantment. Just as good wine intoxicates the brain, the fumes of those cast-iron mouldy biscuits created a gassy atmosphere in my stomach and inspired my brain with weird poetic fancies. I imagined I saw Ruth standing amid the “alien corn”; and, taking another nibble, I had visions of old rivers flowing by ancient walls, and of the desert towers of the Pharaohs! I saw tired harvest girls, sickle in hand, sleeping by their garnered heaps under Assyrian suns. Yes, reader, such dreams were mine when I had poetic nightmares after partaking of the “Zangwahee’s” forecastle menu of salt-horse and hard-tack.
Though I could fill reams with the wonders of the “Zangwahee’s” menu and all that my brain fancied, I have only space to set down the stern facts that apply to the “Zangwahee’s” crew. As I’ve said, they were hairy-chested men, real seadogs of another age. To see their thick-bearded lips and their crooked noses, as they sang and climbed aloft, made me half fancy that I had been blown across a century into the Nelson period. Notwithstanding the old skipper’s rough exterior, I found him quite human. Surely few young men who have gone to sea have had the experiences I have had, for that old skipper would get blind drunk, and, lying in his bunk, roar mighty encores as I played selections on my violin to him! He loved sea hymns, and, when I played “For those in peril on the sea,” he would mumble deep in his beard, his eyes becoming wet with tears! Though I liked that strange old captain (and I believed he liked me), my chief delight was to come off watch and sit in the forecastle with the crew as they tugged their beards, shook their fists, cursed the mate, the skipper, and the Universe! As they sat on their sea-chests in the dim-lit forecastle, they looked exactly what they were—genuine high priests who worshipped at the altar of monstrous yarns and the best rum!