The ship had a charge of colonists and their belongings.

Under his affected way of speaking Don José is a man of great simplicity. Rosario, a warm-hearted but worldly woman who never enters a church, treats him as a child. She makes him salads and lets him walk about the garden, listening to his Don Quixotesque speeches with a scarcely concealed smile.

The macho loucheness of Mr. Stephens’s Jerry never disguised a needling, pose-thwarting insecurity.

to defy an enemy; to defy the power of a magistrate; to defy the arguments of an opponent; to defy public opinion