High Wind in Jamaica

Childhood and piracy: an unlikely pairing, in a tragi-comic adventure. Neither Treasure Island nor Peter Pan prepares one for the kind of delight afforded by A High Wind in Jamaica. Hughes’ pirates fit no preconceived model. They are preeminently men, with vivid and differing personalities, and puzzling relationships—with one another and with the children in their (grudging) charge. They are only secondarily pirates, although the world outside their schooner sees them as pirates first, as men not at all, and certainly not as the babysitters we know them to be. As for the children, Hughes gives a hint of his unconventional view of childhood in one casual remark: “babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the lower vertebrates.” There are no actual infants in the novel, but there are young children, whose minds are strange, alien landscapes which most adults have forgotten. Hughes defies adults’ illusions about those early, “innocent” years. The children he depicts are troubled and often confused but resilient; they adapt almost instantaneously to drastic changes in their circumstances and others’ behavior. They are decisive yet inconsistent, curious yet readily distracted, prudish yet savage, capable of fierce love and easy betrayal. A reader who longs for stereotyping can find a bit of it in Hughes’ depiction of that class called parents, where it suffers his withering ridicule. But these are the beings ultimately in charge of society, and by the end of the book a reader does not know whether to rejoice or grieve that the children will grow up to join them. (Summary by Thomas A. Copeland)