As is now customary, Mr Kaggsy has offered up a guest post for our reading club week and it’s a classic book which was also a very successful film. I suspect it’s a title which many are familiar with, and which will also turn up on other’s blogs this week – so let’s see what he has to say about it! 😀

A High Wind in Jamaica, by Richard Hughes (originally published as The Innocent Voyage).

A hurricane on the island of the title sets off events which in turn shape, change, or even end, the lives of this stirring tale’s main players. The Bas-Thornton family have left late-Victorian England to set up home in Jamaica. The parents and their five young children are ill-prepared for a Caribbean cyclone which destroys their property and devastates the plantation around it, while the terrified family and locals take refuge in a cellar.

The aftermath is such that the Bas-Thorntons decide to send their offspring back to Blighty, the girls and two boys having just witnessed death and heartbreak at first hand. The young group members, John, Emily, Edward, Rachel and Laura, are joined by two Creole minors, Margaret and Harry. And yet the sailing away from parents and island home is seen by the children as an adventure, a journey which will become ever more exciting and fateful when they are taken by pirates.

So begins the ‘innocent voyage’, the story being recounted by an undisclosed narrator. This standpoint allows the unnamed onlooker to observe events and characters, without being a participant in any of the goings-on or interactions. The journey proceeds as envisaged, until the ship is met by an unknown vessel and boarded by its crew, their leader claiming to be on legitimate business. However, the men are clearly pirates, intent on looting.

While transfer of booty is in progress, the youngsters hop over to the raiders’ craft, eager to explore. As a result, when the pillagers cast off the children are still on board, soon to face the appointed skipper of the vessel, Captain Jonsen. From this point onwards the true adventure begins, the young landlubbers now either unwanted stowaways to be disposed of, or kept for sale or ransom. Alarmingly, a later report from the previously attacked ship mistakenly informs the parents of the missing children that their waifs have been murdered.

Harper & Brothers 1929 US first edition; Chatto & Windus 1929 UK; Modern Library 1932 US.

Captain Jonsen puts in to the Caribbean island of Santa Lucia, for shore leave and to conduct business. However, a tragic occurrence serves to put the ship and its occupants back under sail. This is, appropriately, a watershed moment in the story, with the ‘adopted’ children henceforth leading whatever will be their lives at sea, and Emily coming to the fore. This is also a convenient point to dock and provide information about the book’s author.

Richard Hughes (1900 – 1976) spent more than a year contemplating the idea for his first novel and penning the opening chapter, after he had heard a tale of children being captured by pirates. The book was published in the United States in 1929 and in the same year in Britain, under its altered title. In his Oxford university years Hughes met with fellow students such as Robert Graves, Aldous Huxley and T. E. Lawrence. He worked as a journalist and was widely travelled. After becoming married and having five children, he eventually came to write film scripts – for Ealing productions over ten years – as well as publishing more books. In the Thirties he had moved to South Wales and for a while had Dylan Thomas staying with him. Hughes received an OBE in 1946 and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In his final years he retired to North Wales, where he died at home in 1976. He had been churchwarden of Llanfihangel-y-traethau, the village church, and was buried there. ‘Innocent Voyage’/’High Wind’ was his most famous novel, made into a major film in 1965 – as covered below and pictured on US and UK tie-in paperback covers.

Signet 1961 US; Penguin 1965 film tie-in UK; Signet 1965 film tie-in US.

The book’s story really comes alive with an account of the children’s time at sea, living alongside pirates. Their ship is described vividly, both when becalmed in high temperatures, or being thrown about by a heavy sea. Of the former condition, Hughes with his nautical experience, writes: ‘The heat was extreme. The ropes hung like dead snakes, the sails as heavy as ill-sculptured drapery. The iron stanchion of the awning blistered any hand that touched it. Where the deck was unsheltered, the pitch boiled out of the seams.’

No less graphic, but now comical, is the account of a rolling deck: ‘The schooner lying over as she did, her wet deck made a most admirable toboggan-slide; and for half an hour (the children) tobogganed happily on their bottoms from windward to leeward, shrieking with joy, fetching up in the lee scuppers, which were mostly awash, and then climbing… to the windward bulwarks raised high in the air, and so all over again.’

The play enjoyed by the minors brings forth a rebuke from the captain, whose vulgar words shock his young passengers: ‘… Jonsen at the wheel said not a single word. But at last his pent-up irritation broke… “If you go and wear holes in your drawers, do you think I am going to mend them?”… “And I’ll not have you going about my ship without them! See?” (The children) could hardly believe so unspeakable a remark had crossed human lips.’

Emily becomes the main character in the chronicling of the voyage, particularly at the end, when presented as a witness in the eventual piracy trial. Wishing not to say anything to condemn the alleged captors of herself and siblings, she struggles to give an account of what she has seen or experienced. Sadly she has been coached as to what she must testify and so feels painfully disloyal to Captain Jonsen, who became a guardian to her, however unsuitable. A fatal incident which occurred further assails Emily’s conscience, although she has no notion of what severe punishment awaits the accused.

The girl’s time at sea is over, a new school awaiting her entry. The closing words of Hughes’ unrevealed narrator contrast the youngster’s weeks without discipline and her return to a much more proper existence: ‘… (she) with the other new girls was making friends with the older pupils. Looking at that gentle, happy throng of clean innocent faces and soft graceful limbs, listening to the ceaseless, artless babble of chatter rising, perhaps God could have picked out from among them which was Emily: but I am sure that I could not.’

Penguin 1968 UK; Harper & Row 1972 US; Panther 1976.

US writer and literary critic Isabel Paterson described the book in her 1932 Modern Library version introduction as ‘… a tragi-comedy of Good and Evil, to which each reader must supply his own moral.’ This aspect is portrayed to an ample extent in the 1965 film (there have also been radio and stage adaptations). Shot in CinemaScope, the big screen photography and direction convey both the high seas elements and contrasts between ethical and instinctive behaviour, the children sometimes even teasing the superstitious crew for mischievous fun.

There is an extraordinary performance by Deborah Baxter in her first screen appearance, having not long turned ten. Her interaction with lead Anthony Quinn, as Jonsen, is remarkable and the young Baxter portrays perfectly Emily’s range of emotions. Given that the film version had to appeal to a wide audience, some of the book’s less agreeable moments could not be directly included; however, the humanity of Jonsen, and his comical side, is well drawn. The touching portrayal of his doomed character as he manages to deliver a final wink to Emily across the tribunal floor is almost paternal.

Of the book, Isabel Paterson resolved that there was ‘… no lack of incident, tragic, comic, grotesque. But throughout it is the might-have-been, the moral implications, that stop the breath’, she also highlighting the ‘profound study of the growth of consciousness in the mind of a child’. Indeed there are darker moments among the chapters, but the simplistic reactions of the children always temper the seriousness of the situation, their young minds never appreciating the gravity.