The ceiling, floors and walls enclose the action. Two bare-headed women are highlighted in the foreground: the one to the right has two men paying attention to her, and the woman on the left sits on a sailor's knee. Impropriety is implied in their conduct.

In the Dutch seventeenth-century tradition, the artist incorporates a still-life in the foreground, with a clay pipe, discarded playing cards, coins and bottles. Sailors, several with their arms around women, sit on low benches around a table to the right. This bears a china punch bowl and drinking mugs, with a sailor boy also dancing on it. To its left, a group are dancing to the music of the two fiddlers on the far left. Some of the dancers are in couples and others are groups of men carousing (including a sailor dancing with a Jewish pedlar, a class well known as purveyors of frippery to seamen). In the foreground on the right a woman attends to a sailor lying on the ground. An empty bottle to the right indicates that he has had too much to drink, and the young woman is attempting to revive him.

The painting, which hovers at the interface of celebration, disorder, chaos and disruption, was regarded as a fine example of Ibbetson's work in his own time.