All this while the crew went on quietly with the work of the ship, giving me no trouble nor occasioning me further anxiety than such as arose from my fear of how it might prove with us should the captain die. This will I say of Bol: a better boatswain never trod the decks of a vessel. I carried by nature a critical eye, and while Greaves lay ill my vigilance was redoubled; but not once had I cause to find fault with Yan Bol’s part in the duties of the brig. We wanted, indeed, the freshening of the paint pot, but in all other respects we were as smart a little ship, as we blew toward the Horn, as though we had quitted the Thames but a week before. Our brass guns sparkled, our decks were yacht-like with holy-stoning, our rigging might have been newly set up by riggers of the king. Every detail of the furniture aloft was carefully seen to, from the eyes of the royal rigging to the lanyards of the channel dead-eyes. The men feared Bol; his vast bulk of beef and the granite lumps which swelled in muscle to the movement of his arms made him the match for any two of them. The delivery of his lungs was the cannon’s roar. I have seen a stout fellow stagger as though to a blow--sway in the recoil of a man who is hit hard, on Yan Bol thrusting his huge mouth into the fellow’s face and exploding in passion an order betwixt his eyes. But though the crew feared him they also liked him; he acted as second mate, indeed, but throughout with reluctance; was their shipmate and forecastle associate first of all, the man who ate out of their kids and drank out of their scuttle butt, who slung his hammock in their bedroom, showed them what to do and often how to do it, occasionally went aloft with them, yarned and smoked with them. So much for Yan Bol. Greaves had a just and considerable admiration for him, the fullest confidence in him as a sailor, and counted him the best boatswain he had ever heard of; and I agreed with him. Going, however, rather farther, for I had distrusted the man from the beginning, and my distrust of him was now deeper than ever it had been, and I would have given half my share of the money in the lazarette had we been blown away from the island when he was ashore and forced to proceed without him. The two Spaniards were bad sailors, lazy and reckless. Bol could do nothing with them. They skulked when there was business to be done aloft, were not to be trusted at the wheel, and it came at last to our putting them to help the cook and do the dirty work of the ship when they were not at sail-making--for, to be sure, they were smart hands with their palms and needles. There were no more fights, no more assertions by Antonio and his mate Jorge of their claims to a share. In talking to me one day about them Bol said it was the wish of the crew to turn them out of the brig at the first chance. “The captain won’t hear of it,” said I. The Dutchman asked why.