A high wind in Jamaica

Basic
Advanced

Field

Condition

Type of search

Value

Search for:

Objects
Collections

A high wind in Jamaica

Jacket front illustration depicts palms tree bending in the wind, and a parrot being blown backwards by the wind.

About this item

Title:: A high wind in Jamaica

Identifier:: PR6015.U35H51947

Permalink:: https://n2t.net/ark:/81984/d33840

Type:: Image

Notes:: Dilly did the jacket front illustration. Hughes's first novel, A High Wind in Jamaica (1928) tells the story of the last pirate schooner to sail the Caribbean seas during Queen Victoria's reign. The book opens on a ruined West Indies plantation, where Jamaican slaves are starving their elderly heiress-masters to death. The narrative moves to the Jamaican home of the Bas-Thornton family, where the father is involved in a "business of some kind" and the children spend their time torturing animals. The parents' distance from their children lends itself to this feral behavior and after a typhoon blows the roof of the house off, the Bas-Thorntons seize the opportunity to ship their children to Britain to protect their from an unsafe Jamaica. Aboard the Clorinda, as the children continue to indulge their animal torture compulsions, pirates capture the ship and its inhabitants. The children are forced to live with the pirates, and their relationship to the pirates and animals, as well as pirate Captain Jonsen's relationship to them, becomes the parable with which Hughes explores the essential natures of adulthood and childhood. After a series distressing encounters, of both violent and sexual natures, take place between the captain and the children, the pirates surrender the children to Louisa Dawson and the other passengers on a passing steamship. The children recover easily from their experience, as well as their separation from their parents and a death among them. By the end of the book, as a trial related to their experience takes place, they begin to believe the narrative that the adults create to explain the events of the novel. Hughes states plainly that it is the novelist, rather than these legal and other adult agents, that is most interested in truth. A High Wind in Jamaica was an immediate bestseller in the U.K. and America.

Another version of this item exists in the collection at call number is PZ3H8735Hi.