A High Wind In Jamaica by Richard Hughes (1929)

I have recently gotten hooked on the Friday videos by Ann Patchett that she does from her bookstore in Nashville, Parnassus Books, and this book was recommended in the series that they do on important books from the past that have been forgotten and shouldn't be. In thinking about the book and preparing to write this review, I found a review by someone who read it as a teenager and then again as a middle aged man. He found it full of adventure and strange and unknown things that enthralled him--that was definitely not my experience, nor was it his the second time around. This is an odd story, creepy even, told from both adult and child points of view and takes place sometime before 1860. The Thornton children and 2 mixed race children are placed on a ship to get them to England, where their parents are waiting for them. Their ship is boarded by pirates pirates, a profession that is no longer profitable but they haven't cross trained to do something else, but neither are they completely blood thirsty villains either. They are unable to wrench any valuables from the ship they have boarded, and they take the children to their ship in an effort to convince the Clorinda captain to hand over his money. He does so, probably more to save his own skin, but, about the children, he gets confused and thinks the pirates have murdered them, and, so, he sails away in the dark. The pirates awaken to find they have the children now as unwanted passengers. You will have to read to see what happens--it is in some ways worse than you think and in other ways better. Richard Percival Graves, in his biography of Hughes, placed this novel between RM Ballantyne’s optimistic adventure story The Coral Island, published in 1858, which shows a group of children cast away on a deserted atoll “to be naturally good, decent and self-reliant,” and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, published almost 100 years later, in which the civilized values of adult society are soon jettisoned by the schoolboys who turn to savagery on their island. A High Wind in Jamaica takes no sides as it patrols the eccentric, sometimes amoral borders between a child’s and an adult’s natural territory.