As a novelist, Hughes is a peculiar mixture of craftsman, savant and amateur. He is capable of marvelous, hypnotic prose, but can also write a sentence like this: “But it was not her, it was the meal which raped Jose’s attention.” Even Homer nodded, but details also get tangled, as “the ship’s monkey” becomes the novel’s focus briefly and meets a startling end. Not long afterward another monkey appears, with no introduction or explanation. Most frustrating of all is the inconsistency or narrative voice. Throughout most of the tale, the narrator is allowed access to the minds of the characters, but at some junctures, he (or “it”) confesses in a manner reminiscent of Fielding that a particular motive or outcome is beyond his knowledge or understanding. And yet, the raw power and contained hysteria of the story make these errors forgivable. What this book witnesses about decaying imperialism and the parallel decline of a certain brand of outlawry is mostly implicit, but delegates from the Wordsworth and Rousseau schools of natural childhood should beware. Though the narrator cites, and seems to concur with, Southey in his description of psychology as “the Art Bablative,” the novel is rife with invitations to unriddle the knots of personality amid the deceptions, inventions and misunderstandings that create a weather more discernible than typhoons and sweaty, becalmed nights on the bowsprit. And ninety years after its first appearance, A High Wind in Jamaica is still a powerful, truthful, exciting and controversial read, and one of Richard Hughes’ most enduring literary legacies. Hughes did not publish his next novel for 22 years. A Fox in the Attic was planned as the opening volume of a tetralogy bearing the portentous title “The Human Predicament”. It was an impressive and unusual historical novel, based on lengthy research and chronicling the rise of Nazism. The book had a similar divergence of tone - what Kenneth Allsop called “the sinister and the frolicsome” - that he had employed so brilliantly in A High Wind in Jamaica. What possible meaning could Emily find in such an eye? Yet she lay there, and stared and stared: and the alligator stared too. If there had been an observer it might have given him a shiver to see them so - well, eye to eye like that.

During one snowy day, I read the whole book in one gulp. It was remarkable, tiny, crazy. I felt just like I did as a kid.”— Andrew Sean Greer, All Things Considered, NPR Harold Cohen: "The Drama Desk: Addenda,'" The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Tuesday, 23 October 1943), p. 24 The story begins in Jamaica sometime around the middle of the nineteenth century. Slavery having been outlawed in 1838 (the Emancipation), the sugar plantations have crumbled into disuse, and more and more of the buildings associated with them have fallen into ruins. One of the former estates, Ferndale, is now occupied by a British family, the Bas-Thorntons, who have come out from England a few years previously.Not a breath of breeze even yet ruffled the water: yet momentarily it trembled of its own accord, shattering the reflections: then was glassy again. On that the children held their breath, waiting for it to happen. A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes is like those books you used to read under the covers with a flashlight, only infinitely more delicious and macabre. But such examinations of character are not just limited to Emily, as Hughes explores Jonson, along with some of the smaller children, and the increasingly catatonic Margaret - who by novel’s end is being treated cruelly by the children. Jonson has his own dark side and so escapes being a lovable cutout, but succeeds in being very human. At one point we are told he can only draw things related to the ship -- and naked women from every angle. Thus, the reader is rightly troubled by Jonson’s attentions toward Emily. As departure for the children looms, Jonson asks Emily if she loves him. It isn’t an innocent question - though Jonson himself seems uncertain of his impulses toward prepubescent girls. They gazed at him in astonishment and disillusion. There is a period in the relations of children with any new grown-up in charge of them, the period between first acquaintance and the first reproof, which can only be compared to the primordial innocence of Eden. Once a reproof has been administered, this can never be recovered again. New York Guild Enters 3rd Play: 'Innocent Voyage' Follows on Heels of 'Oklahoma'; and 'Othello,'" The Gazette (Montreal) (Tuesday, 16 November 1943), p. 3

This 1929 novel is the masterpiece of the British author Richard Hughes (1900-1976). He wrote other works, several of which, like this one, have been reprinted in recent years by NYRB. But High Wind in Jamaica (also called Innocent Voyage) has been rated on GR by more than twenty times the number of readers as any of these other works. I first became aware of the novel forty or fifty years ago, from my old copy of Good Reading, in which it is described as “a revealing study of the separate world of childhood.” But as for Emily, it was too much. The earth quake went completely to her head. She began to dance, hopping laboriously from one foot onto another. John caught the infection. He turned head over heels on the damp sand, over and over in an elliptical course till before he knew it he was in the water, and so giddy as hardly to be able to tell up from down. The setting also deserves a comment: although I don’t deny that this story may be historically accurate – I would not doubt that newly freed slaves would not kill their previous masters, be it by starvation or more deliberately feeding them ground glass. Piracy was also probably still very common in the middle of the 19th century. Hangings certainly were, and the inefficiency of the judicial system still is. Hughes’ Jamaica and later London are not the Jamaica and London of this realm, but one from a parallel world, barely more colourful than reality, yet different, more comic or caricature. The eye of an alligator is large, protruding, and of a brilliant yellow, with a slit pupil like a cat’s. A cat’s eye, to the casual observer, is expressionless: though with attention one can distinguish in it many changes of emotion. But the eye of an alligator is infinitely more stony, and brilliant - reptilian.

Did you find this helpful?

When the ship put into Tampico, where the Captain hoped to leave them behined with the local Madame, played by Lila Kedrova who seemed to have taken acting lessons from Carmen Miranda, the children were spruced up and returned to their clean clothes and with their hair combed. As the crew member doing the grooming explained: "the Captain wants you to look your best for the ladies". "What ladies?" asked the children. Under his breath the seaman muttered "You'll find out." Of course, the local ladies were the ladies of ill repute in a Godforsaken part of the Carribean where anything goes and the law would never set foot. She's a decent actress too, for a young girl. Her confusion at the climactic trial puts a definite period at the end of Quinn's career. And she turned quite beautiful in the next few years. That's why she was cast as Teddy Roosevelt's daughter in "The Wind and the Lion." Her character in that film, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, was a no-nonsense woman who lived into a candid late old age and died just one or two decades ago. You know the song, "Alice Blue Gown"? She's the "Alice."

The book opens on the island of Jamaica, in the early to mid-1800s, introducing readers to the Bas-Thornton children - in particular John and Emily. The setting is Edenic, with the children often going about naked -- being quite comfortable in having gone “native.” They spend their days swimming, climbing trees, and capturing animals. At one point -- morally telling -- the children muse over the fact that “jiggers” (maggots) are “not absolutely unpleasant” and there is now a “sort of thrill” rubbing the skin (like the natives) where their eggs are laid. In 1998, A High Wind in Jamaica was included as number 71 in the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels, a list of the best English-language novels of the 20th century. Richard Arthur Warren Hughes OBE (19 April 1900 – 28 April 1976) was a British writer of poems, short stories, novels and plays. He was born in Weybridge, Surrey. His father was Arthur Hughes, a civil servant, and his mother Louisa Grace Warren who had been brought up in the West Indies in Jamaica. He was educated first at Charterhouse School and graduated from Oriel College, Oxford in 1922. A Charterhouse schoolmaster had sent Hughes’s first published work to the magazine The Spectator in 1917. 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 The 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? A hurricane hits Jamaica in 1870. The Thorntons ( Nigel Davenport and Isabel Dean), parents of five children, feel it is time to send them to England for a more civilised upbringing and education.

Contribute to This Page

One can only be thankful that Disney did not get hold of Richard Hughes' novel. The saccharine sweetness would have made one gag. The only disappointment that I had with the film was that it did not follow the book. Otherwise, this was a superb film in its own right. Anthony Quinn proved that he could play other characters than Zorba, an often overlooked fact. There is little reason that one can see why it should not have happened to her five years earlier, or even five later; and none, why it should have come that particular afternoon. The novel presents these idiosyncratic and imaginative children first in the lush and exotic tropics, shaken by earthquakes, threatened by a hurricane, surrounded by servants and serpents and clueless English adults. They operate almost as a cult with its own system of taboos and holies, and the genius loci is a fierce cat named Tabby, assailed by wilder beings during a lightning fusillade, and who screeches about “with a tone of voice the children had never heard before and which made their blood run cold.” This is where Hughes goes over the top, as he often does, with language which still never quite loses its voltage and prevents the reader from believing this is an adventure story of the usual sort: “He seemed like one inspired in the presence of Death, he had gone utterly Delphic: and without in the passage Hell’s pandemonium ruled terrifically.” Not easy going, this syntax, but it serves as a reminder that the children have something of the demonic about them. The braid of innocence and wiliness have much to do with the flavor of this novel in which the pirate crew and the gaggle (or perhaps “pride”) of children alternate between peaceful playfulness and terrorizing one another. Possibly a case might be made that children are not human either: but I should not accept it. Agreed that their minds are not just more ignorant and stupider than ours, but differ in a kind of thinking (are mad, in fact): but one can, by an effort of will and imagination, think like a child, at least in a partial degree--and even if one's success is infinitesimal it invalidates the case: while one can no more think like a baby, in the smallest respect, than one can think like a bee.

Contado así puede parecer un simple libro juvenil de aventuras, pero la novela por suerte no se queda en la superficie. Richard Hughes se dedicará durante diez capítulos a diseccionar y bucear en la mente de esos niños hasta dejarnos boquiabiertos. Su actitud, su comportamiento, el más pequeño de sus pensamientos, la frialdad con la que reaccionarán ante determinados hechos...nada escapa a la pluma de Hughes mientras nos cuenta la fascinante relación amor-odio-miedo que es establece entre los piratas y los niños. I would like to discuss all the queasy moral stuff in detail but that would be Spoiler City so I cannot, my lips are sealed.

Once aboard the steamer, the children are delighted with the boat's luxury and the loving treatment by the passengers, who know of the story of the children told by Captain Marpole. While drunk, Captain Jonsen makes a sexual overture to Emily. She bites his hand before anything happens, but she is frightened by the look in Jonsen's eye as he reaches for her. The author gives no explicit details for her fright, just a veiled description from Emily's point of view. Emily later suffers an injury to her leg, in an accident caused by Rachel, and is confined to the captain's cabin. Meanwhile, Margaret, who has become alienated from the other children, becomes Otto's lover and moves into his cabin. Next, the narrator: he is so funny. He's always coming in at odd times to tell us his opinion, but rarely outright. He's subtle about it.