“It is a fact that it takes experience before one can realize what is a catastrophe and what is not. Children have little faculty of distinguishing between disaster and the ordinary course of their lives.”
It is quite rare lately that a book stays with me. I’ll remember key aspects — whether I enjoyed or disliked it— and yet most memories are fleeting. A High Wind in Jamaica, provided a vastly different reading experience. I’d expected a children’s swashbuckling pirate adventure and had not banked on the horrors that would unfold.
Written in 1929, perhaps the first thing that jars the modern reader is the liberal use of racist epithets including the ‘n’ word, when depicting life on a plantation in Jamaica in the 1830s. John, Emily, Edward, Rachel and Laura are sent home to England by boat when a massive hurricane destroys their Jamaican home. On board the Clorinda they meet two other children, Margaret and Harry, also bound for England.
When pirates seize the ship, things take a dark turn and the children are moved onto the pirates’ schooner. Captain Marpole (captain of the Clorinda), writes to inform the children’s parents of their death by pirates, not knowing that they have been kidnapped instead. Left to the care of the rough pirates the children become wild and even greater trials lay ahead.
A death, suggested sexual assault, and all-round trauma ensue before the children finally return to England and a PTSD laden denouement.
When I first completed the novel, I found myself re-reading it immediately after to see whether I had missed certain aspects. Menace and violence occur swiftly, at a ‘blink and you’d miss it’ pace, while the ramifications of those actions brew slowly. The children’s English stoicism hiding, in the most part, the trauma beneath. Their loss of innocence has grave repercussions leading to an unexpected end.
4 out of 5 - leaves a deep chill that won't thaw easily.
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