Mr. Pike, the mate, I had already met, when I visited the ship in Erie Basin .  He smiled a stiff, crack-faced smile that I knew must be painful, but did not offer to shake hands, turning immediately to call orders to half-a-dozen frozen-looking youths and aged men who shambled up from somewhere in the waist of the ship.  Mr. Pike had been drinking.  That was patent.  His face was puffed and discoloured, and his large gray eyes were bitter and bloodshot.

I lingered, with a sinking heart watching my belongings come aboard and chiding my weakness of will which prevented me from uttering the few words that would put a stop to it.  As for the half-dozen men who were now carrying the luggage aft into the cabin, they were unlike any concept I had ever entertained of sailors.  Certainly, on the liners, I had observed nothing that resembled them.

One, a most vivid-faced youth of eighteen, smiled at me from a pair of remarkable Italian eyes.  But he was a dwarf.  So short was he that he was all sea-boots and sou’wester.  And yet he was not entirely Italian.  So certain was I that I asked the mate, who answered morosely:

“Him?  Shorty?  He’s a dago half-breed.  The other half’s Jap or Malay.”

One old man, who I learned was a bosun, was so decrepit that I thought he had been recently injured.  His face was stolid and ox-like, and as he shuffled and dragged his brogans over the deck he paused every several steps to place both hands on his abdomen and execute a queer, pressing, lifting movement.  Months were to pass, in which I saw him do this thousands of times, ere I learned that there was nothing the matter with him and that his action was purely a habit.  His face reminded me of the Man with the Hoe, save that it was unthinkably and abysmally stupider.  And his name, as I was to learn, of all names was Sundry Buyers.  And he was bosun of the fine American sailing-ship Elsinore —rated one of the finest sailing-ships afloat!