Jim's decision after the attack to leave the stockade — for no apparent reason — is another instance of impulsive behavior, foreshadowed by his earlier having joined the shore party. It is necessary to the plot, in order for him to decide later to take Ben Gunn's boat and cut the ship loose, but, in fact, the whole episode would seem to have been contrived to allow Jim, as protagonist, really to act rather than simply to observe or follow orders. When he does so, Jim's reckless behavior callously leaves only three men at the stockade and only Trelawney and Gray able to defend against another attack, should one come. (Silver has taken one of that morning's attackers back to the ship, leaving only a few mutineers on shore for the time being, but Jim does not discover this until after his desertion of his friends.) Thus this instance of his impulsiveness is much more serious — and much more dangerous — than the previous one, and he will be reproved for it later; indeed, he will reprove himself.
This part contains a small editorial oversight: Jim sees Silver at the ship, talking with Israel Hands and the man whose name he'll later learn is O'Brien. Then he says that Silver has returned to shore in the jolly-boat. Actually, Silver is in one of the two gigs that the mutineers took to go ashore the previous day; the pirates later destroyed the smaller jolly-boat to make sure that Captain Smollett and his group couldn't use it again.
