A High Wind in Jamaica, by Richard Hughes
I searched this book out because I saw, by chance one time when I was a young teen, the movie version on television and remembered it ever after. I wasn't able to find it anywhere again, but I found the book.
A High Wind in Jamaica was published in 1929 but takes place in the late 19th century, after Emancipation, in Jamaica and on the high seas. It opens with the five Bas-Thornton children, who are being raised with benign neglect by their plantation-farming parents. Much of English-occupied Jamaica is half-decayed or in ruins with the demise of slavery and the Bas-Thornton elders have moved the family into one quadrant of the old mansion and let the rest go to vines. The children have a blissful sort of life, swimming and playing and running wild, and the parents have very little idea of what goes on in their uncivilized little minds.
I have to stop here and note the casual racism. I rarely encounter this sort of thing in a book and it's, well, so disappointing and disgusting. Hughes treats the "Negroes" on the plantation as buffoons or comic relief, portraying them as ignorant simples or dirty jungle dwellers. I'm not just talking about the N-word, which, for instance, Mark Twain used because it was historically accurate, but without shorting the humanity and complexity of his black characters - it's the ugly and demeaning stereotypes that marred my experience here. But once the children leave Jamaica, there are many fewer instances of that, to my relief.
A hurricane blows the rest of the house flat while the family and the plantation workers huddle in the cellar, and the Bas-Thornton parents decide that they should send the children to England to school, where they will become proper, civilized English children. The plan is to put them on a ship in the care of the kindly sea captain, along with the two children of another family, as unaccompanied minors of a sort.
Everything goes well for the first few days, as the children explore the ship and enjoy themselves. Then the ship is boarded by pirates and in the sort of mishap that many pirates would slap their foreheads about, the pirates take the loot, and without meaning to, the children, away with them.
But the pirates are decent chaps - they are careful never to commit murder, which would bring more attention than they wish - and in time they grow accustomed to the children and the children in turn attach themselves to the pirates. Emily, age ten, is the main protagonist, and she grows to really love the pirate captain. The only part of this I found hard to credit is that the youngest child is Rachel, age 3, and I really couldn't imagine a three-year-old wandering around a ship safely or being sanguine about having no one really looking after her.
The Bas-Thornton children have quite a different time on a pirate ship than is assumed when they finally make it to England. In the end, there is a murder, and a betrayal which Emily does not fully understand at the time the book ends. The book is a meditation on the difference between childhood and adulthood, between the child mind and the adult. The children have spent a good long time as amoral little savages, so fully content that nothing in their experience is guessed by their parents or teachers afterward.
Oh, and I did find the film at last, on DVD from Amazon. It must have become available. It stars Anthony Quinn and James Coburn. I haven't watched it yet, but I'm looking forward to it.
A High Wind in Jamaica was published in 1929 but takes place in the late 19th century, after Emancipation, in Jamaica and on the high seas. It opens with the five Bas-Thornton children, who are being raised with benign neglect by their plantation-farming parents. Much of English-occupied Jamaica is half-decayed or in ruins with the demise of slavery and the Bas-Thornton elders have moved the family into one quadrant of the old mansion and let the rest go to vines. The children have a blissful sort of life, swimming and playing and running wild, and the parents have very little idea of what goes on in their uncivilized little minds.
I have to stop here and note the casual racism. I rarely encounter this sort of thing in a book and it's, well, so disappointing and disgusting. Hughes treats the "Negroes" on the plantation as buffoons or comic relief, portraying them as ignorant simples or dirty jungle dwellers. I'm not just talking about the N-word, which, for instance, Mark Twain used because it was historically accurate, but without shorting the humanity and complexity of his black characters - it's the ugly and demeaning stereotypes that marred my experience here. But once the children leave Jamaica, there are many fewer instances of that, to my relief.
A hurricane blows the rest of the house flat while the family and the plantation workers huddle in the cellar, and the Bas-Thornton parents decide that they should send the children to England to school, where they will become proper, civilized English children. The plan is to put them on a ship in the care of the kindly sea captain, along with the two children of another family, as unaccompanied minors of a sort.
Everything goes well for the first few days, as the children explore the ship and enjoy themselves. Then the ship is boarded by pirates and in the sort of mishap that many pirates would slap their foreheads about, the pirates take the loot, and without meaning to, the children, away with them.
But the pirates are decent chaps - they are careful never to commit murder, which would bring more attention than they wish - and in time they grow accustomed to the children and the children in turn attach themselves to the pirates. Emily, age ten, is the main protagonist, and she grows to really love the pirate captain. The only part of this I found hard to credit is that the youngest child is Rachel, age 3, and I really couldn't imagine a three-year-old wandering around a ship safely or being sanguine about having no one really looking after her.
The Bas-Thornton children have quite a different time on a pirate ship than is assumed when they finally make it to England. In the end, there is a murder, and a betrayal which Emily does not fully understand at the time the book ends. The book is a meditation on the difference between childhood and adulthood, between the child mind and the adult. The children have spent a good long time as amoral little savages, so fully content that nothing in their experience is guessed by their parents or teachers afterward.
Oh, and I did find the film at last, on DVD from Amazon. It must have become available. It stars Anthony Quinn and James Coburn. I haven't watched it yet, but I'm looking forward to it.