A High Wind in Jamaica - Richard Hughes [1]
By this point, Hughes has subjected us to a kind of Pavlovian conditioning: every time an animal appears, we brace ourselves for the worst. But even this protective recoil cannot quite prepare us for the grisly scene in which the crew of the _Clorinda_ attempts to amputate a monkey's cancerous tail--and in the ensuing mayhem, are overtaken and captured by pirates. Nor can we possibly anticipate the brutality that transpires later, while the pirates are pleasantly occupied with their riotous efforts to make the circus lion and tiger fight. Throughout the book, both nature and human nature are sinister, threatening. The physicality of animal life--when Emily goes for a swim, "hundreds of infant fish were tickling with their inquisitive mouths every inch of her body, a sort of expressionless light kissing"--is "abominable." The setting sun--"unusually large and red, as if he threatened something peculiar"--seems predatory and perverted. The children themselves are, essentially, animate Petri dishes in which a "diabolic yeast" proliferates, and our initial fondness for the bumbling pirates is tempered by some nasty scenes. Captain Jonsen's drunken display of murky attention leads Emily to defend herself by biting his thumb, and later there is a creepy moment when he looks in on the sleeping children and, knowing that Emily is awake and watching, flicks his fingernail against baby Laura's bare and upraised bottom.
Hughes is not afraid to dwell on startling, uncomfortable verities about the world and its inhabitants, and one of the things he does most impressively in _A High Wind in Jamaica_ is to put a wicked spin on the Romantic notion of the child--the Wordsworthian innocent-savant. He suggests that children are closer than adults to nature, that the way that they view sex--mysterious, fascinating, incomprehensible, repulsive, responsible for weird alliances and even stranger behavior--is the way sex really is. Passion between consenting adults is a polite convention compared to the immediate realities of the flashy, "twittering" drag queens who assist the pirates in the capture of the _Clorinda_, or the night Emily gets to spend in bed with a pet alligator, or the suffocating kisses little Edward receives from a fat, mustachioed old woman who grabs him during the pirates' Cuban layover ("Edward could no more have struggled than if caught by a boa. Moreover, the portentous woman fascinated him, as if she had been a boa indeed. He lay in her arms limp, self-conscious, and dejected: but without active thought of escape.")
The confusions and seductions, horrors and comforts of Emily's relationship with the captain, and later with the bewitching Louisa Dawson--a passenger on the steamer to which the pirates eventually surrender the children, and which brings them to England--belong to the same polymorphous realm of attraction and repugnance as her encounter with the kissing fish. The captain amuses himself by drawing the sort of sexual doodles that might be done by a young boy. At one point he draws over the figures Emily has penciled on the wall of her bunk:
Jonsen could only draw two things: ships, and naked women . . . He took the pencil: and before long there began to appear between Emily's crude uncertain lines round thighs, rounder bellies, high swelling bosoms, all somewhat in the manner of Rubens.
This scene