The "men who said the ship [Sutpen sails on] was going to the West Indies" (197) may not have been sailors or shipmates, but the inference seems justified by the narrative fact that Sutpen "learns to be a sailor" to get himself to the Caribbean (200).
The teacher at the Tidewater school Sutpen attends is described, tautologically, as "the kind of teacher that would be teaching a one-room country school in a nest of Tidewater plantations" (195). Sutpen tells General Compson that the man "always looked dusty, as if he had been born and lived all his life in attics and store rooms" (195).
