Hughes's first novel, it was set in the late nineteenth century and followed a group of seven children captured by pirates on a voyage from Jamaica.

[1][2] The Bas-Thornton children — John, Emily, Edward, Rachel, and Laura — are raised on a plantation in Jamaica at an unspecified time after the emancipation of slaves in the British Empire (1834).

Accompanied by two creole children from Jamaica, Margaret and Harry Fernandez, they leave on the Clorinda, a merchant ship under the command of Captain Marpole.

The pirates first pretend they need to seize the ship's cargo and will refund the price of the goods taken, but when the lie becomes obvious, they menace Captain Marpole by threatening to shoot the children if he does not disclose where the Clorinda's safe is kept.

The pirates stop at their home base of Santa Lucia — in current-day province Pinar del Río, Cuba — to sell the seized goods.

Having made no further captures, the pirates quickly take the first ship they finally see, a Dutch vessel transporting some wild animals.

Disguised as a British merchant vessel, the captain claims that some pirates abandoned the children on the Cuban shore and that he then picked them up to bring them to England.

The younger children have distorted and contradictory memories of the facts, and after unsuccessfully attempting to extract any information from them, the family solicitor decides that only Emily should testify at the trial against the pirate crew and then only to repeat a statement written by him.

Hughes was struck by the fact that the pirates, despite holding the children as hostages in an attempt to extort money from the ship’s captain, treated them with kindness and consideration.

It was while Hughes was on his way back to Britain that the novel was first published there, in a slightly abbreviated form, and now titled A High Wind in Jamaica.

The book version, published by Chatto and Windus, appeared in September 1929 under the same title, which was then used for most subsequent American editions as well.

At the same time, however, there was some unease at Hughes' portrayal of the children and controversy about his understanding of child psychology, with critics such as Humbert Wolfe and J. E. S. Arrowsmith among those unconvinced.

[5] An extensive correspondence took place in Time and Tide; the headmistress of a school in Bath objected to the novel as "a disgusting travesty of child life.

[9][10] The novel was filmed in 1965 as A High Wind in Jamaica, directed by Alexander Mackendrick and starring Anthony Quinn as Chavez.

The cast also included a young Martin Amis, who described the original novel as "a thrillingly good book” in his autobiography.