When S finally gets to the room that the sailors are in, the first thing he notices is that some of them are women. This defies the gender roles that defined society at the time that S wrote “Ship of Theseus,” which says something about his forward-thinking views. More establishment authors would not likely place women aboard such a rough ship. It is worth noting that S never notices this fact before now, showing that he did not expect to see women on the ship. That said, S does not react to his realization beyond merely acknowledging it, which makes one question why Straka included the detail in the book in the first place.

S notices the young sailor that he saw board the ship from the ghost ship “fumbling with something small in his hand, trying to perform some delicate action with his fingers” (215). As the man does so, the humming becomes louder and louder until it resembles “the sound of insanity (215), and the young man looks dazed. The small thing in the man’s hand is a needle. This implies that he may be attempting to perform the gruesome act of sewing his lips shut-something that all of the other sailors on the ship have done.

In the margins, Eric notes that “The Tradition” includes women. Jen responds by questioning if Ilsa is disadvantaged in her field because it is so dominated by males, to which Eric responds that that may be the case, he had never considered it.

There is a footnote about how Straka’s description of the sailors’ singing mocks a composer named Ragnar Rummo. In his first read, Eric asks whether or not Rummo was real. Jen and Eric then go into a discussion of the man, noting that he was made up (as well as his most famous piece “Fantasia for Strings and Whistles”). Their discussion quickly becomes jovial, as it often does, when Eric pokes fun at Jen’s sentimentality when she writes that Rummo’s story of finally hearing his work performed is touching.