But there was nothing Jack could do about that, so he tried to concentrate on matters nearer to hand. There was a veritable crowd down here! Yevgeny, Gabriel, and Nyazi had jumped from the galleot moments before the collision, and had evidently had better luck with their boarding axes than Jack—perhaps because they had not been half-drowned to start out with. They had converged on the stempost, which was one enormously thick piece of solid wood, and after pulling in bags of tools and weapons tethered to their ankles they had driven spikes into that wood with muffled hammers and hung little rope slings from the spikes, just big enough to serve as footholds. Jack let go of one of his axes, flailed out, and grabbed an empty one. With some thrashing around he was able to get a foot into it. Yevgeny, also coated in black grease, was barely visible above, standing in another one of these foot-loops. He offered Jack a hand, and pulled him all the way up out of the water. Jack and Yevgeny were now plastered up against the hull together, just to one side of the stempost. Yevgeny thumped Jack’s shoulder five times, meaning "we are five." So on the opposite side of the stempost, Gabriel and Nyazi must have established footholds of their own. Apparently Dappa had avoided the fate of keel-hauling, too.