by Reager
the fact they don't engage you and you can voluntarily engage only 1 enemy per turn makes it hard to quest through it.It also adds a bit of flavor to the quest, you are escaping through a river in a boat and a bunch of enemies are following you so it does make sense that you aren't engaged to a bunch of enemies like if you were on open ground :P (thing that happens on the next stage once you get off the boat)
This is one of the beauties of the game, the fact that quests reflect their text description of what is going on