The prose of Richard Church is peculiarly whiffy at times and his reportage of events strangely cruel at many points in his novel. These eccentricities don’t seem to be simply a matter of the story’s pre-Edwardian setting; they even enhance its unique flavour. Some calmer moments, such as the departure of the children from Jamaica, have a vivid poetry:

'Passions were running far too high for any one to be aware of how the final separation took place. The next thing Mrs Thornton could remember was how tired her arm had been, after waving and waving at that dwindling speck which bore away on the land breeze, hung awhile stationary in the evening calm, then won the Trade and climbed up into the blue.' :

The nautical language has a visionary exactness. When Emily, just before this, says "But I don't want any more adventures: I've got an Earthquake!" she refers to an earlier descriptive passage of poetic power, in which the rude treble of the childrens' voices is antiphonal to giant rumblings of Nature: 'The water of the bay began to ebb away, as if someone had pulled the plug'.:

In making extracts I was led unconsciously into Found Poetry: :

Along with the poetry, however, are more sinister elements. John the eldest child, who has been introduced at greater length than the others, so that we readers are quite intimate with him, dies in a fall from a high warehouse opening. This is all the more shocking in that it happens out of the blue and is all over in a paragraph: :

'He lost his balance and fell clear to the ground, forty feet, right on his head. José (a sailor) sprang on to the cow's back' (the cow is in a sling) and was instantly lowered away just as if the cinema had already been invented. He must have looked very comic... the crowd beneath made no attempt to touch the body they stood back and let him have good look at it, and shake it, and so on. But the neck was plainly broken' :

Note the semiasides of the cinema reference and Josés comical descent, and 'the' neck which was so plainly broken, like that of a not even very favourite animal. Captain Marpole's letter to the parents, after the children have been abducted by the privateers (pirates seems too strong) administers an even greater shock in that it opens with a formally benign flourish::

'Honoured Sir and Madam, I hasten to write to you to relieve you of any uncertainty!' :

but goes on to tell of the childrens' murder by the pirates: :

'...I am glad to say, (they were) done to death immediately and their little bodies cast into the sea, as I saw with great relief with my own eyes. There was no time for what you might fear to have occurred, and this consolation I am able to give you...' :

That the old fool is wrong in that it was packing cases which were thrown into the sea is neither here nor there, in the light of 'there was no time for what you might fear' (additional to the mere murders, that is) 'considering the sex of some of the poor innocents' (earlier in his letter). The author's intention obviously is comical - ironic but he is dealing with children at the centre of his fiction. His tone seems less that of a Victorian grownup to whom children are inadequate miniature adults, than that of a great child, carelessly and cruelly imperceptive and dismissive::

'Being nearly four years old, she was certainly a child: and children are human (if one allows the term 'human' a wide sense): but she had not altogether ceased to be a baby: and babies of course are not human they are animals: one of the most developed species of lower vertebrates.' :

'For what you might fear considering the sex... ' is almost a subplot or theme of the novel, at the level of some dire Victorian ambivalence. Margaret (14) is portrayed almost wholly in terms of what might have happened to her while sequestered in the cabin with Otto the mate. This reader supposes that he didn't rape her since he is shown generally as sympathetic and she as unattractively dim but the author's attitude seems more like that of the childrens' parents, anxious over a tabooed undescribable. Emily, (10) principal character and seen more from her thoughts, has a sadomasochistic relationship with the pirate captain Jonsen: :

'...she caught his thumb and bit hard as she could ...’:

'...she was so full of joy at being at last forgiven that she reach up her arms and kissed him...' :

Emily, who actually knifed to death (yet another) ship's captain, eventually blurts out in court::

'He was all lying in his blood he was awful!' :

so implicating her erstwhile beloved Jonsen and condemning him to his terrible end::

'The night before the execution, Jonsen managed to cut his throat; but they found out in time to bandage him up. He was unconscious by the morning, and had to be carried to the gallows in a chair: indeed, he was finally hanged in it':

As emotional language this is either earlier than Victorian (Dr Johnson's) or later (20thcentury horrific). In either case it points up the strongest disparity in the novel, that between the Little and Big Worlds. Richard Church was a queer fish. Allowing for a few anachronistic authorial squints from the 20th or much earlier centuries, he could make poetry of the lives of 19thcentury children but could only marry these to the lives of their adults by withdrawing, as it were, from psychological involvement, so that some of his strongest scenes have the conviction yet ambivalence of a film shot: the privateers, scrambling back on board, think that dim, 14-yearold Margaret has knifed their bound-up captive captain (when, remember, it was lively, 10 year old Emily): :

'She was lifted by the arms from the stair where she still sat, and without a moment's hesitation (other than that resulting from too many helping hands) was dropped into the sea'