High Wind in Jamaica

Childhood and piracy: an unlikely pairing, in a tragi-comic adventure. Neither Treasure Island nor Peter Pan prepares one for the kind of delight afforded by A High Wind in Jamaica. Hughes’ pirates fit no preconceived model. They are preeminently men, with vivid and differing personalities, and puzzling relationships—with one another and with the children in their (grudging) charge. They are only secondarily pirates, although the world outside their schooner sees them as pirates first, as men no