GR translation: he had written it down for her, as sailors do

[Mike Jing]

V351.33-352.7, P357.1-16   The girl may have stood on some promontory
watching the gray ironclads dissolve one by one in the South Atlantic
mist, but even if you’d like a few bars of Madame Butterfly about
here, she was more probably out hustling, or asleep. She was not going
to have an easy time. Tchitcherine had left her with a child, born a
few months after the gunner went down in sight of the steep cliffs and
green forests of Tsushima, early in the evening of 27 May.
       The Germans recorded the birth and the father’s name (he had
written it down for her, as sailors do—he had given her his name) in
their central files at Windhoek. A travel pass was issued for mother
and child to return to her tribal village, shortly after. A census by
the colonial government to see how many natives they’d killed, taken
just after Enzian was returned by Bushmen to the same village, lists
the mother as deceased, but her name is in the records. A visa dated
December 1926 for Enzian to enter Germany, and later an application
for German citizenship, are both on file in Berlin.

Here the aside "as sailors do" is not serious, is it?

Also, what does "hustling" refer to here, most likely?
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l