He was able to see some good, a little at least, in everybody.

Searching his mind in after years, he could even find excuses for Adrian Van Zoon.

He would say to Willet that the man loved nothing but money, that perhaps he had been born that way and could not help it, that he had made his attempts upon him under the influence of what was the greatest of all temptations to him, and that while he paid the slaver to carry him away he had not paid him to kill him.

As for Garay, he would say that he might have exceeded orders.

He would say the same about the shots the slaver had fired at him at Albany.
This tolerance came partly from his own character, and partly from an enormous experience of life in the raw in his young and formative years.
He knew how men were to a large extent the creatures of circumstances, and on the individual in particular his judgments were always mild.