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.

The quarter-deck rose into an ample elevated poop, upon the forward
verge of which, lifted, like the oakum-pickers, some eight feet above
the general throng, sat along in a row, separated by regular spaces, the
cross-legged figures of six other blacks; each with a rusty hatchet in
his hand, which, with a bit of brick and a rag, he was engaged like a
scullion in scouring; while between each two was a small stack of
hatchets, their rusted edges turned forward awaiting a like operation.
Though occasionally the four oakum-pickers would briefly address some
person or persons in the crowd below, yet the six hatchet-polishers
neither spoke to others, nor breathed a whisper among themselves, but
sat intent upon their task, except at intervals, when, with the peculiar
love in negroes of uniting industry with pastime, two and two they
sideways clashed their hatchets together,' like cymbals, with a
barbarous din. All six, unlike the generality, had the raw aspect of
unsophisticated Africans.

But that first comprehensive glance which took in those ten figures,
with scores less conspicuous, rested but an instant upon them, as,
impatient of the hubbub of voices, the visitor turned in quest of
whomsoever it might be that commanded the ship.

But as if not unwilling to let nature make known her own case among his
suffering charge, or else in despair of restraining it for the time, the
Spanish captain, a gentlemanly, reserved-looking, an