Severion's a Sailor, Right?

The story is remarkably straightforward for like a page or so. And then it gets crazy when the sailor says, okay, we'll head up north, but you should be careful because there were things on the river last night. He goes into telling us a little bit of a story. The first thing he does is say, okay, it was a dark, misty night. And we were carrying clams. That was our cargo. It's just a linking between the riverboat sailors and the space sailors,. But they have this shared history or something where this kind of manner of speaking and use of metaphor is just like a sailor's can't.