A Piratical Interlude

The ship is another of Margaret Cohen’s maritime chronotopes, one of rigid hierarchy and work. As in many hierarchical societies, ships often need a “carnival” to let off steam (c.f. the sperm scene in Moby-Dick). And meanwhile,

The pirate communities that shadow lawful ships are a kind of permanent carnival, where the ship’s structures of authority are inverted and undone. The alternatives offered by pirate communities to the authoritarian societies on ship include an order founded on utopian aspirations of equality, a comic version of the medieval ship of fools concerned only with pleasure, and presocial communities where all are out for themselves dedicated to the sheer pursuit of gain.

The pirate ship in Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica offers a ship of fools of sorts. Our first encounter with the pirates there is as cross-dressers. Instead of violently boarding the ship carrying the Bas-Thornton children, the pirates wait for a moment when the sailors of the Clorinda are having their own little carnival, at play with a drunken monkey, then approach dressed as women and board totally unnoticed.

But it is precisely to accomplish the constant hard work necessary to avoid danger on blue and white water that the rigidness of the ship exists. The pirates manage to navigate around the Caribbean, but bungle just about everything else. It’s by accident that they ended up with the children, and by accident that one of the children is killed. They can’t sell their plunder or figure out what to do with the half-dozen toddlers running around their ship. When the children first start to feel comfortable on board, they realize the wet deck of the schooner is perfect for tobogganing across on their bottoms. Captain Jonsen lets it go at first, but finally he has had enough, realizing that the ship really does need a degree of order.

“Hi! You! Stop that!”
They gazed at him in astonishment and disillusion.
…
“Stop it! Stop it, I tell you!”
(They had already done so, of course.)
The whole unreasonableness, the monstrousness of the imposition of these brats on his ship suddenly came over him, and summed itself up in a single symbol:
“If you go and wear holes in your drawers, do you think I am going to mend them?—Lieber Gott! What do you think I am, eh? What do you think this ship is? What do you think we all are? To mend your drawers for you, eh? To mend…your…drawers?”
There was a pause, while they all stood thunderstruck.
But even now he had not finished:
“Where do you think you’ll get new ones, eh?” he asked, in a voice explosive with rage. Then he added, with an insulting coarseness of tone: “And I’ll not have you going about my ship without them! See?”

Now, who would be surprised that the children don’t take such pirates seriously? That they don’t keep much order on their ship?

They let Rachel, one of the smaller girls, play with a marlinspike as if it were a doll. She sits up on the mainmast and cradles it like a baby. But funny pirates and small children don’t banish danger from maritime life, and sure enough Rachel drops her spike right onto Emily’s leg. The injury is serious enough that Emily is bedridden for the rest of the trip, touching off her own violent episode.

Even on this ship of fools, though, some hierarchy is maintained. The difference between the forecastle and the cabin is still a stark one, and Captain Jonsen and first mate Otto keep their distance from the crew, while remaining strangely close to one another. I still don’t quite understand their relationship. The mate passive-aggressively ignores Jonsen after a slight at the helm; eventually Jonsen gives over, shouting out, “Otto! Mein Schatz…!” And they go below together. They spend a lot of time below together. But they also spend a lot of time below with Margaret. In any case, not entirely ship-shape.

By the latter part of the book, Captain Jonsen realizes this cannot go on, and re-inverts his pirate carnival into a serious, hard-working crew. He has a plan for getting rid of the kids, and needs to pull it off without anyone realizing they are pirates. He manages to keep things together long enough to deposit the children safely on a steamer, and it looks as though his take-charge authoritarian turn has worked. But it’s not to be. On the ship of fools only people on the outer edges were in real danger; the pirates made out okay. Now that they’ve pulled together and accomplished something, though, it comes back to bite them.