When they came from their gorging to the garden, they picked flowers, smelled the many kinds of blossoms, and then the sailors lighted their cigars.  This pair were Steve Drinkwater, a Dutchman; and Alex Simoneau, a French-Canadian of Attleboro, Massachusetts.

“Where’s the El Dorado?” I asked of the captain.

Again he looked at me, suspiciously.

“She went down in thirty-one degrees:  two minutes, south and one hundred twenty-one:  thirty-seven west,” he said curtly, and turned away.  There was pride and sorrow in his Scandinavian voice, and a reticence not quite explicable.  The three, as they stood a moment before they walked off, made a striking group.  Their sturdy figures, in their worn and torn clothes, their hairy chests, their faces framed in bushes of hair, their bronzed skins, and their general air of fighters who had won a battle in which it was pitch and toss if they would survive, made me proud of the race of seamen the world over.  They are to-day almost the only followers of a primeval calling, tainted little by the dirt of profit-seeking.  They risk their lives daily in the hazards of the ocean, the victims of cold-blooded insurance gamblers and of niggardly owners, and rewarded with only a seat in the poorhouse or a niche in Davy Jones’s Locker.  I was once of their trade, and I longed to know the happenings of their fated voyage.

Next morning the three were quite ordinary-looking.  They were shorn and shaved and scrubbed, and rigged out in Schlyter’s white drill trousers and coats.  They had rooms under mine in the animal-yard.  They were to await the first steamship for the United States, to which country they would be sent as shipwrecked mariners by the American consulate.  This vessel would not arrive for some weeks.  The captain sat outside his door on the balcony, and expanded his log into a story of his experiences.  He had determined to turn author, and to recoup his losses as much as possible by the sale of his manuscript.  With a stumpy pencil in hand, he scratched his head, pursed his mouth, and wrote slowly.  He would not confide in me.  He said he had had sufferings enough to make money out of them, and would talk only to magazine editors.

“There’s Easter Island,” he told me.  “Those curiosities there are worth writing about, too.  I’ve put down a hundred sheets already.  I’m sorry, but I can’t talk to any one.  I’m going to take the boat with me, and exhibit it in a museum and speak a piece.”

He was serious about his silence, and as my inquisitiveness was now beyond restraint, I tried the sailors.  They would have no log, but their memories might be good.