Well, thought I, this, no doubt, is as it should be, though it seemed to me that Greaves was making too much of Yan Bol, too much of his own anxieties, indeed, sinking the skipper in the adventurer, and a little heedless of Nelson’s axiom that at sea much must be left to chance. If, thought I, he is cocksure that his ship and her dollars are where he says he beheld them, then how can it matter to him one jot whether his crew believe in his story or not? But conjecture and speculations of this sort were to no purpose. In a few weeks the problem would be solved; either the money would be aboard, or we should have found the ship broken up and everything gone out of her to the bottom--to such bottom as she rested upon, twenty or thirty feet, maybe, but as unsearchable to us, without diving equipment, as the floor of the mid-Atlantic; or we should have discovered that there was no ship and no island, and that ours had been the expedition of a dream. And still no matter, I would think. There are wages to be pocketed in the end, and I can only be worse off _then_ by being so many months older than I was when I was fished up out of the Channel by the people of the brig. The letter I had written to my uncle Captain Round, when I agreed to sail in the _Black Watch_ in the room of Van Laar, I had not yet been able to send. I forgot all about that letter when I went aboard Tarbrick’s ship to arrange for the reception of the Dutch mate, and I had not witnessed in the little _Rebecca_, with her two of a crew, a very likely opportunity for communicating with Uncle Joe. But when we were somewhere about six degrees south we fell in with a large snow homeward bound. She was from round the Horn and proceeding direct to the Thames. I had several selfish as well as respectable and honorable motives for desiring to send the news of my being alive to my uncle, not to mention the pleasure it would give him and my aunt and cousin to learn that I was alive; I was down in his will for what you might call a trifle, but such a trifle as would prove very acceptable to me should it come to my having to continue the sea life for a living. There were other reasons why I desired that my uncle should know that I was alive, and let the one I have given suffice.