Kenway - Does not escape prison

Inside the bowl: a dry flour biscuit and a splodge of oatmeal. Not far away sat a black man, and, like me, he was eyeing the food dubiously.
‘You hungry?’ I asked him.
He said nothing, made no move to reach for the food. Instead he reached to the manacles at his feet and began to work at them, on his face an expression of profound concentration.
At first I thought he was wasting his time, but as his fingers worked, sliding between his feet and the irons, his eyes went to me, and though he said nothing I thought I saw in them the ghost of painful experience. His hands went to his mouth and for a moment he looked like a cat cleaning itself, until the same hand dipped into the oatmeal, mixing the goo inside with saliva and then using it to lubricate his foot in the manacle.
I knew what he was doing now, and could only watch in admiration and hope as he continued to do it, making the foot more and more greasy until it was slippery enough to …
Try. He looked at me, silenced any encouragement before it even left my lips, then twisted and pulled at the same time.
He would have yelled in pain if he wasn’t concentrating on keeping so quiet, and his foot when it came free of the leg iron was covered in a revolting mixture of blood and spit and oatmeal. But it was free. And neither of us wanted to eat the oatmeal anyway.
He glanced back up the deck towards the ladder and both of us steeled ourselves against the appearance of a guard, then he began working at the other foot and was soon free. Crouched on the wood with his head cocked, he listened as footsteps from above us seemed to move towards the hatch, then, thankfully, moved away again.
There was a moment in which I wondered if he might simply leave me there. After all, we were strangers; he owed me nothing. Why should he waste time and endanger his own bid for freedom by helping me?
But in the next instant, after a moment’s hesitation – perhaps he wondered himself about the wisdom of helping me – he scrambled over towards me, checked the shackles, then hurried over to an unseen section of the deck behind me, returning with keys.
His name was Adewalé he told me as he opened the shackles. I thanked him quietly, rubbing my ankles and whispering,
‘Now, what’s your plan, mate?’

Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, Chapter 32