No more of the plot will be revealed here, except to say that an unpredictable series of events causes disaster for all involved. The very ending is one of the most poignant scenes I've ever seen in any film. So this was an alligator! She was actually going to sleep with an alligator! She had thought that to anyone who had once been in an earthquake nothing really exciting could happen again: but then, she had not thought of this. 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. En cuanto a la obra literaria nos encontramos ante una autentica joya, por desgracia también algo olvidada como la obra del cineasta británico. Tras un huracán la familia Bas-Thornton decide enviar a sus hijos desde Jamaica a Londres donde pretenden darles una educación mas civilizada, pero en el trayecto el barco en el que viajan sufre un abordaje pirata durante el cual los niños acabarán como pasajeros del barco atacante.

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. Frank Swinnerton: "Books: Novel Changes Its Name for British Readers; 'Innocent Voyage' Soon to Be Reprinted," The Chicago Tribune (10 August 1929), p. 6. "The novel by Richard Hughes, published with so much and such welcome success in the United States under the title of The Innocent Voyage, is to be issued in England in the autumn. Its title will be 'High Wind in Jamaica.'" I first saw "A High Wind in Jamaica" in the late sixties one evening on late night TV. It's a compelling, realistic, well-filmed action movie with outstanding performances by Anthony Quinn and James Coburn and a fast-paced, exciting storyline. It even features a brief appearance by Gert Frobe, of "Goldfinger" fame. After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion: the lawyer does not, cannot be expected to go further than show what the ordinary man would be most likely to do under presumed circumstances." He was omnipresent: the faeries were more localized, living in a small hole in the hill guarded by two dagger-plants.farkında olmadan yaşamlarındaki değişikliği kabullenmişlerdi. İnsanın, felaketin ne demek olduğunu anlaması için onu yaşaması gerekir.’ I had watched this eons ago on Italian TV but had long forgotten it - the film does come across as somewhat unmemorable at the end of the day, but this offbeat pirate-adventure-with-child-interest has a beguiling charm all its own. That said, the film's very low-key nature might not win it much approval among action-film fans... New edition of a classic adventure novel and one of the most startling, highly praised stories in English literature--a brilliant chronicle of two sensitive children's violent voyage from innocence to experience. 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.

Others [ who?] lauded Hughes for contradicting the Victorian romances of childhood by portraying the children without emotional reduction. The book is often given credit for influencing and paving the way for novels such as Lord of the Flies by William Golding. 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. 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.

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And so on - with Emily barking like a dog, and John swimming as if going to Cuba. The point here - and throughout the novel - is that from an adult point of view, children are mad. To maintain this psychological high-wire act must be very demanding for a writer. To succeed for the length of a novel is simply a tour-de-force - and Hughes does succeed. Also, the one comment below is to keep an open mind. So I did, although I'm not sure what it is my mind was to be open to. Perhaps I was to recall the psychology of my childhood. Needless to say, I have very different feelings about this book as a whole than I was led to believe I might have. Even if I were a person who re-reads, this would never make such a list. The slapdash extemporised off the cuff fumbling and wambling way Richard Hughes leads us through this very morally dodgy story is delicious. You never know when another bit of casual violence will sandbag you or if he’ll just tell you about three-year-old Laura’s dolls made of bits of rope. Subconsciously, too, everyone recognizes that they are animals--why else do people always laugh when a baby does some action resembling a human, as they would at a praying mantis? If the baby was only a less-developed man, there would be nothing funny in it, surely.

The book ends with Emily playing with her schoolmates. She is so similar to them that "only God", but no one else, could tell them apart. 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. 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. 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. 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.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. Perhaps the gleam of hope, however twisted, is due in part that the pirate Captain Jonsen and his mate Otto are adults and complicated in very different ways from the Bas-Thornton children whose adventures and trials drive the book’s primary narrative. When adults an author presents are simultaneously culpable and vulnerable, it may be harder to make the children formulaic. Of course, this novel originally appeared in 1929, so it may be closer kin to the children in The Turn of the Screw than to Twilight. Anthony Quinn is the captain of a pirate ship in the middle 1600s. The ship and its crew loot a British passenger ship. Half a dozen young kids, mostly British, board the victim ship accidentally sail away aboard the pirate ship. Quinn, a drunken and pediculous lout, comes eventually to care about the children in his own crude way, before a British Naval steamship capture him and his superstitious crew and rescue the kids, who are by this time wearing tattered clothing and are filthy.

Early in the novel, the Bas-Thornton children go to spend a few days with the Fernandez children -- Margaret and Harry. It is during this stay the children witness the first of the two natural disasters that open the novel: an earthquake. Hughes’ particular genius is his ability to see --without sentiment - through the eyes of a child. His description of their reaction to the earthquake, in all its disorienting effects, rings true: 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. 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 Published in 1928, the book received strong reactions due to its subject and characters. Nowadays, I am sure sensitive parents will react the same (that is, if they find the time to read). That’s why this is such a good book. It was fascinating to read how easily children adapt to something or the environment, the right and wrong concepts. Moreover, it was absurdly enlightening for me to see how “bad” a child could be in its most natural form. It has a significant impact on my decision not to have any children, and I love it a lot.

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. 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. A few days later, while browsing through what I bought, I realised that I actually bought a book that I couldn’t find the original if I wanted. I’ve always loved books that came into my life with strange coincidences, and this book was no exception. Beginning this tale of adventure rising out of a tropical fever-dream, I somewhat baffled by Hughes' take on his child-cast, and by why exactly he wanted to write about them so oddly. But really, his portrayal is only odd by comparison to more usual treatments. Hughes actually understands exactly what children are like, and exactly how difficult they are to understand by normal adult interpretations. His entirely unsentimental portrayal is as brisk and funny as it is disconcerting, and both of these sides feel nothing but excruciatingly accurate. It's really quite remarkable that people can live with them around (children, that is). But then, perhaps the irrational and occult world of childhood has its benefits over a rationalized adult world that does such as this: