While Captain Delano was thus made the mark of all eager tongues, his
one eager glance took in all faces, with every other object about him.

Always upon first boarding a large and populous ship at sea, especially
a foreign one, with a nondescript crew such as Lascars or Manilla men,
the impression varies in a peculiar way from that produced by first
entering a strange house with strange inmates in a strange land. Both
house and ship--the one by its walls and blinds, the other by its high
bulwarks like ramparts--hoard from view their interiors till the last
moment: but in the case of the ship there is this addition; that the
living spectacle it contains, upon its sudden and complete disclosure,
has, in contrast with the blank ocean which zones it, something of the
effect of enchantment. The ship seems unreal; these strange costumes,
gestures, and faces, but a shadowy tableau just emerged from the deep,
which directly must receive back what it gave.

Perhaps it was some such influence, as above is attempted to be
described, which, in Captain Delano's mind, heightened whatever, upon a
staid scrutiny, might have seemed unusual; especially the conspicuous
figures of four elderly grizzled negroes, their heads like black,
doddered willow tops, who, in venerable contrast to the tumult below
them, were couched, sphynx-like, one on the starboard cat-head, another
on the larboard, and the remaining pair face to face on the opposite
bulwarks above the main-chains. They each had bits of unstranded old
junk in their hands, and, with a sort of stoical self-content, were
picking the junk into oakum, a small heap of which lay by their sides.
They accompanied the task with a continuous, low, monotonous, chant;
droning and drilling away like so many gray-headed bag-pipers playing a
funeral march.