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He drives straight through the typhoon's center; mid-storm, the coolies' sea chests burst and their silver dollars scatter, provoking a brawl below that first mate Jukes and the crew quell by herding the men and gathering the coins. MacWhirr then resolves the dispute by dividing the collected money equally among all the coolies, since no one can prove which dollars were whose.
A person too literal to picture disaster cannot be paralysed by dread of it, so they keep executing the next practical step while imaginative subordinates freeze or despair. The same deficit that makes such a leader dull, tactless, and blind to nuance in calm conditions becomes steadiness under extreme stress, because fear feeds on anticipated scenarios they never construct.
When ownership of mixed, indistinguishable goods cannot be established, splitting the total equally among all claimants ends conflict faster than any attempt at accurate restitution. The rough justice works because it is transparent, removes the incentive to fight over individual claims, and imposes a loss everyone can see is shared rather than one someone else won.
In a crisis, restoring small concrete order — securing the loose cargo, counting the coins, keeping the engines turning — is what holds people together, not grand strategy or rousing words. MacWhirr's insistence that the rolling dollars be collected and the men treated fairly, even while the ship may founder, shows that attending to obligations to those in one's charge preserves authority when everything else is out of control.