"A High Wind in Jamaica"

[fiefoe]

The book has a way of dispatching things summarily - the boy John and the big pig, once the children's supreme nemesis on ship, both met their ends between one sentence and another with little foreshadowing or ceremony. Consequently, the reader is held in dreadful suspense almost constantly. During one episode, the poor pirate captain spent an entire starless night watch certain that something was creeping towards his ship. When dawn came and something revealed itself to be a drifting dead tree, instead of relief one feels a tightening - because one's sure there will a next time, when and because nobody is watching.

• That was all: a few moments. Then silence, with a rapid countermarch, recovered all his rebellious kingdom.
• Philosophically speaking, a ship in its port of departure is just as much in its port of arrival: two point-events differing in time and place, but not in degree of reality.
• The aerial ballet was over, in its middle, with no final tableau.
  

The children hold notions, hilarious or/and perilous.

• She could even summon up maternal feelings for a marline-spike, and would sit up aloft rocking it in her arms and crooning. The sailors avoided walking underneath: for such an infant, if dropped from a height, will find its way through the thickest skull.
• The children were highly scandalized: they had never seen grown-ups being rude to one another before.
• To parody Hobbes, she claimed as her own whatever she had mixed her imagination with;
• Not so Rachel: to her, Conscience was by no means so depressing an affair. It was simply a comfortable mainspring of her life, smooth-working, as pleasant as a healthy appetite.
• No one really contends that children have any insight into character: their likings are mostly imaginative, not intuitive.
• Much the best way of escaping from an embarrassing rencontre, when to walk away would be an impossible strain on the nerves, is to retire in a series of somersaults. Emily immediately started turning head over heels up the deck.
• If that was his intention, there was nothing whatever she could do to hinder him. To scream, struggle, attempt flight-they would be absolutely useless, and-well, a breach of decorum. If he chose to keep up appearances, it behooved her to do so too.
  

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