A High Wind in Jamaica

High-seas piracy and the complex psychological lives of children are brought together, quite strikingly, in Richard Hughes’s 1929 novel "A High Wind in Jamaica." This book looks ahead to William Golding’s "Lord of the Flies" in the way it suggests that the outward innocence of children may conceal a capacity for cruel and wicked acts; but Hughes’s presentation of these ideas seems to work at a subtler and more disturbing level than does Golding’s better-known 1954 novel."A High Wind in Jamaica" begins in, unsurprisingly, Jamaica, at a time when that singularly lovely island is still an English colony. I took this book along with me on a trip to Jamaica, and I found that the descriptive passages from the early part of the book capture well the paradoxical beauty of the island: “The air was full of the usual tropic din: mosquitoes humming, cicalas trilling, bull-frogs twanging like guitars. That din goes on all night and all day almost: is more insistent, more memorable than the heat itself, even, or the number of things that bite” (p. 18). The evocation of natural beauty, closing on a note of menace: it is strongly characteristic of the manner in which Hughes conveys setting and tells his story.The “high wind” of the novel’s title is a hurricane that strikes Jamaica and destroys the home of the Bas-Thorntons, an English family who, like many other Britons of that time, have come to Jamaica to recoup fortunes lost in the mother country. Struck by how narrowly the family survived the tempest that destroyed the family home, and concerned that their proper English children seem to be taking on “wild” island ways, Mr. and Mrs. Thornton decide that it is a propitious time to send their children to live in England, along with the children of a nearby Creole family.Yet Hughes’s narrator places considerable emphasis on the idea that the Thorntons – and, by implication, most parents – know almost nothing about the actual emotional lives of their children, in passages like this one:“It would have surprised Mrs. Thornton very much to have been told that hitherto she had meant practically nothing to her children….[I]t would undoubtedly have surprised the children also to be told how little their parents meant to them. Children seldom have any power of quantitative self-analysis: whatever the facts, they believe as an article of faith that they love Father and Mother first and equally. Actually, the Thornton children had loved Tabby [the family cat] first and foremost in all the world, some of each other second, and hardly noticed their mother’s existence more than once a week. Their father they loved a little more: partly owing to the ceremony of riding home on his stirrups.” (pp. 44-45)But the Clorinda, the ship in which the Thorntons have booked passage “home” to England for their children, is waylaid by pirates; and once the children have been taken onto the pirate ship, Hughes gets on to his real subject: the question of what children – especially the two oldest Thornton children, John and Emily – are capable of, once the restraints of ordinary civilization have been stripped away.The children-and-pirates scenario may seem like something reminiscent of J.M. Barrie’s "Peter Pan" (1904); but if anything, "A High Wind in Jamaica" works as a sort of anti-"Peter Pan." For one thing, the pirates, as led by a Danish captain named Jonsen and his Viennese first mate Otto, are not figures of operatic menace, like Captain Hook from Peter Pan or Long John Silver from Robert Louis Stevenson’s "Treasure Island" (1883); rather, they emerge as feckless and rather pathetic figures. Taking advantage of the indulgent attitudes of Spanish colonial authorities in the port of Santa Lucia, Cuba, they are operating a good 150 years after the supposed “golden age” of piracy: “Piracy had long ceased to pay, and should have been scrapped years ago; but a vocational tradition will last on a long time after it has ceased to be economic, in a decadent form. Now, Santa Lucia – and piracy – continued to exist as they always had: but for no other reason” (p. 96). And as their nautical misadventures unfold, Jonsen and Otto and the rest of the pirates show a remarkable capacity for poor and ill-informed decision-making. The more fateful, and more existentially troubling, words and actions and decisions come from the children."A High Wind in Jamaica" offers a couple of real surprises. When, for example, one major character leaves the novel, the circumstances of said event are described so routinely – in a single, declarative, 24-word sentence, about one-third of the way through the book – that the reader is likely to flip through the next couple of pages in search of a passage saying “It was only a dream” or “It was not as serious as had been expected”; but no such passage is to be found. Comparably surprising is an action that Emily carries out after Captain Jonsen’s pirate ship has captured a Dutch merchantman.Hughes is one of those early-20th-century British modernists whose literary consciousness seems to have been molded in large part by the devastation of the First World War. His narrator sets forth the events of "A High Wind in Jamaica" with a knowing, rueful outlook on human flaws and failings, occasionally moving from the novel’s characteristic third-person omniscient point of view to passages of first-person narration in which the narrator stresses what he does not know – as when the narrator says of Mrs. Thornton that “She was a dumpy little woman – Cornish, I believe” (p. 44).This work reminded me of the novels of Robert Graves and Malcolm Lowry, fellow Britons who lived and wrote during the same period; and if you like books like Graves’s World War I memoir "Good-Bye to All That" (1929) or Lowry’s novel "Under the Volcano" (1947), then "A High Wind in Jamaica" will probably appeal to you as well.

I have just begun reading New Yorker critic James Wood's wonderful handbook,  HOW FICTION WORKS , and so am particularly attuned to questions of narrative voice: who is telling the story, with whose thoughts, and for what audience? A perfect focus for Richard Hughes' 1929 novel, a subversive masterpiece of apparently straightforward narrative used for disturbing ends.Hughes writes like an adult telling stories to children. He is not a parent, but black-sheep Uncle Richard with a deliciously cavalier attitude towards convention. The book begins with five English children leading a carefree life on a run-down plantation in mid-nineteenth-century Jamaica. Their parents having little time for them, they amuse themselves by such pursuits as catching small animals and swimming. Here is Emily, the eldest girl: "Once, when she was eight, Mrs. Thornton had thought she was too big to bathe naked any more. The only bathing-dress she could rig up was an old cotton night-gown. Emily jumped in as usual: first the balloons of air tipped her upside down, and then the wet cotton wrapped itself round her head and arms and nearly drowned her. After that, decency was let go hang again: it is hardly worth being drowned for -- at least, it does not at first sight appear to be." Decency go hang -- how great for a child! You would not find such laissez-faire attitudes in genuine Victorian children's literature such as E. Nesbit's  THE RAILWAY CHILDREN , and you certainly don't find it in C. S. Lewis' high-minded  CHRONICLES OF NARNIA  a quarter century later. But what about that authorial aside, "at first sight"? A warning of more serious trespasses still to come?Or consider this passage. The children, on a visit to a neighboring plantation, are swimming in a lagoon. It is heavy, close, and suddenly very still: "The water of the bay was as smooth and immovable as basalt, yet clear as the finest gin: albeit the swell muttered a mile away on the reef. The water within the pool itself could not reasonably be smoother. No sea-breeze thought of stirring. No bird trespassed on the inert air." By giving nature a well-bred sense of decorum with his "reasonably," "thought," and "trespassed," Hughes is playing to the children -- but the comparisons to basalt and gin are disconcertingly adult. The switches of voice, together with the brilliant description of the earthquake which follows, keep the reader off-balance for a page or two; but when it is over, he returns to Emily, surprised that her hosts take the Big Event as a matter of course: "How funny Creoles were! They didn't seem to realize the difference it made to a person's whole after-life to have been in an Earthquake."Soon it will not be merely a matter of stylistic hints, though these have laid the groundwork. The story proceeds like a wonderful adventure. The children survive a hurricane, but are shipped off to England for safety. Their ship is captured by pirates and they remain on the pirate boat for several weeks, getting dirty as mudlarks, climbing the rigging, and making friends with the ship's menagerie, which at one point even includes a lion and a tiger. But animals from the beginning have been more than childhood playmates -- more like predators and prey, and a primal image of an animality that the children themselves share. Not that Uncle Richard's child listeners would notice; he already has them in thrall. But imagine the shock in their bright eyes when he suddenly kills off one protagonist, involves another in homicide, and makes to drown a third. And any adults reading over his shoulder would certainly pick up on the burgeoning sexuality and loom of puberty just over the horizon. Not a story for children, after all.The children turn out to be more feral than the basically benevolent pirates, but it is not evil coming out, so much as the inherent amorality of childhood, the darker side of innocence. I thought, of course, of William Golding's  LORD OF THE FLIES  (1954), but while Hughes' actual events are less horrific than Golding's, the implication of that horror is more pervasive. Golding wrote of the breakdown of boarding-school order into savage mob rule; Hughes' children are in their natural anarchic state to begin with and they keep a sort of innocence to the end. To some extent, Golding was writing a political novel in the shuddering transition from hot to cold war. Hughes would go on to write political fiction later, in his planned trilogy on the rise of the Second World War that began with  THE FOX IN THE ATTIC  in 1961, but here he is doing something deeper; his battlefield is mapped by Freud and Jung. Yet he was subliminally aware of the currents of his time. I cannot do better than quote the ending of Francine Prose's fine introduction to the NYRB edition: "Published in 1929, just as history was preparing events that would forever revise the terms in which one could talk about innocence and evil, A High Wind in Jamaica is one of those prescient works of art that seems somehow to have caught (on the breeze, as it were) a warning scent of danger and blood -- that is to say, of the future."

The novel is about a group of five children who, after their home in Jamaica had been destroyed by a hurricane, were sent by their parents to England. (Also on board were two Creole children, whose role in the story: they don’t add much to it.) The ship on which they embarked was captured by pirates, and most of the book is about their time on their frigate. The pirates’ captain became uneasy about being found to have the children aboard, and persuaded an England-bound steamer to take on the children, having bound them to support his story that he had in fact saved them from being kidnapped by pirates. However, one of the children, ten-year old Emily broke that promise when she was on the steamer. The frigate was captured; its crew was put on trial for piracy and possibly for two murders (John, the eldest of the children had died, but was not murdered; a captured Dutch sea-captain had indeed been murdered, but not by any of the pirates); and, back in London, Emily was called as a witness and behaved in such a way in the witness box that some of the pirates were hanged.I don’t think Hughes understood children. The age of the eldest is not given, Emily, the second-oldest, was ten, and the youngest was four. None of them seem to have minded in the slightest leaving their parents; none of them ever spoke about John when he had died or said anything about him when they were reunited with their parents. They enjoyed their life on the frigate, became very friendly with the crew, didn’t want to leave the frigate for the steamer, but quickly felt at home on the steamer. There are elements of humour, but the humour seems to me heavy-handed. I can’t see why the book has been regarded as a classic.

Is this really a book for children? Certainly Robert Hughes captures the points of view of the young main characters but he doesn't really seem to be talking to another child. There is quite a bit of violence and possibly some inappropriate sexual advances. I'm not fond of trigger warnings but I feel bound to make the comments above. Despite these concerns, I did enjoy the story which put me very much in mind of the Lemony Snicket books. So, they weren't so new after all.

This is the story of children from two English families living in Jamaica in the late 1800's who are sent to England by boat and whose boat is captured by pirates. The novel recounts their life on board the pirate vessel. The trouble is that whereas the subject matter is basically a children's story, the style and innuendos are clearly intended for adults, who may not be that interested in the children's antics, particularly as the author seems to have little insight into the characters of children . As far as this reader is concerned, the children never really came alive, but remained the playthingst of the author's imagination, in fact as a friend put it, the main character in this book is the author himself. Acclaimed though it may have been when it was first published, this book does not stand the test of time.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a family of English children sent back from Jamaica to England by their parents fall into the hands of pirates, who find they have bitten off more than they can chew. Published in 1929, this book is thought to have influenced and paved the way for novels such as Lord of the Flies by William Golding. It also reminded me of What Maisie Knew by Henry James. The children’s naive and fanciful (mis)understandings of what is happening rebound on their captors in an eventually deadly way. Very readable, often funny, a children’s-eye-view of life, the universe and everything. Some passages are brilliant.

Well, this is just the best book ever, and this edition is so much nicer than the UK Penguin-RH with the dumb bird on the cover. Henry Dargar is the perfect choice for the cover of this dark dark funny funny 1929 novel about five children on a boat headed for England and the Pirates whose lives they end up destroying. It's chilling and utterly unforgettable.