As Gates is promoted Flint's second captain aboard Vane's ship, popular, dutiful Billy Bones takes his place as quartermaster. Silver not only proves himself a dangerously incompetent cook but also undermines flint's long-standing confidence in Billy, in whom a veteran confides his mistrust about Flint's secret agenda as lover of the haughty island widow Miranda Barlow. Desperate to provide the canons she Flint promised for the second ship, Eleanor compromises her family trade, so her father steps in deceptively cooperatively. Sailors' lazy and horny neglect of Billy and engineer De Groot's instructions about beached ship-care cost a limb and trouble about the whore, which ends up forcing Vance to pull himself together and fight back.
—KGF Vissers