“Where you bound for?” I cried, hailing a weird-looking seadog who had suddenly stared over the bulwark side.
Placing his hand to his lips, he yelled back, “Bound for Tarhoyti!”
“Where the h——’s Tarhoyti?” I yelled back. But no response came; the old sailor simply pulled his dilapidated cap over his eyes and spat melancholy-wise into the ocean. In a few moments I had taken one of the beach canoes and paddled out to the “Zangwahee.” Clambering up the rope gangway, I went on board. As I stood on deck, I stared in astonishment. The crew, who were busy coiling up the ropes on deck, all stood up, and looked like rows of mummies clad in rags. They were wrinkled and sun-tanned to a yellowish hue! They might have been the crew of the “Flying Dutchman,” so weird did they look, those old-time sailormen. And talk about blasphemous oaths, when I meekly asked if they thought there was any chance of a job!
“Captain Vanderdecken aboard?” I said, hoping to break the ice by such an evident bit of humour on my part. One old sailorman, who had a Rip Van Winkle look about him, stared at my blue serge suit of the nineteenth century, and then, touching his cap respectfullike, said, “Thar’s the Ole Man aft; cawn’t ye see ’im?”
Looking aft, I got a bit of a shock, I can tell you. The skipper looked as ancient as his ship! He had a monstrous grey beard and O, the expression on his face! I might have made a bolt over the side but for the fact that he had already spotted me. Going straight aft, I looked him in the face and said, “Any chance of a job, sir?”
Metaphorically speaking, he picked me up by the heels, smelt me, looked at my teeth, screwed my neck round twice, examined my spine, thumped me on the ribs, and said, “Um!”
I fancied I saw the dust of ages on his bony neck as a whiff of wind came across the Pacific and divided the tresses of his beard. Then he looked down on the deck and said, “Wha’s thawt?”
“My violin, sir,” I responded, as curiosity toned down much of the funk I was in.
“Ho ho! He he! Haw haw!” he yelled, as he gazed on the deck at my fiddle-case. In obedience to his commands, I at once took my instrument from its case and commenced to play! It was like seeing God smile as his wrinkled face lit up with delight. “Yoom’ll do,” he said. Then, taking hold of me by the scruff of the neck, he pitched me headlong down the alley-way into the dingy cuddy (saloon). Alighting gently on a rather soft-plushed settee of prehistoric pattern, I murmured my thanks. You see, I had sailed on sailing ships and well knew that the treatment I was receiving was of marked courtesy in comparison with that which I had experienced whilst on the Clipper Lines.
So did I become a member of a crew who, I should think, were the last of the genuine old seadogs.