THE INNOCENT VOYAGE

AN EXCERPT

by Richard Hughes

Who hasn't

WHAT'S in a child's mind? wondered in adulthood, just what our first wordless concepts were really like, before we clothed them in ever more luxuriant trappings of words and emotional experiences. Here is a story of children written with that flair peculiar to the British. As an insightful, rewarding experience, it ranks with Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan.

Jamaica, where the story starts, "was a kind of paradise for English children to come to, whatever it might be for their parents: especially at that time, when no one lived in at all a wild way at home. Here, one had to be a little ahead of the times: or decadent, whichever you like to call it. The difference between boys and girls, for instance, had to be last to look after itself. Long hair would have made the evening search for grass-ticks and nits interminable: Emily and Rachel had their hair cut short, and were. allowed to do everything the boys did: to climb trees, swim, and trap animals and birds: they even had two pockets in their frocks."

It was after a particularly devastating hurricane that the five children were sent back to England-to safety and to school. As the ship left the shelter of the islands and headed toward the open Atlantic, the children entered their fascinating piratical adventure whose description occupies the greater portion of the book. The author describes the encounter with the pirate ship in these words: "on that passenger-schooner" (the disguised pirate ship)....

"sighted drifting towards them...the ladies had left the shade of the awning and were crowding at the rail, parasols twirling, lorgnettes and opera-glasses in action, all twittering like a cage of linnets... They were so interested that presently a boat was hoisted out and the ladies--and some gentlemen as well-crowded into it...That was how the Clorinda really was taken. There was no display of artillery... The actual number of the men who had effected the capture cannot have been more than eight or nine, most of them 'women' at that, and not armed--at least with any visible weapon. But a second boatload soon followed them from the schooner. These, for form's sake, were armed with muskets."

The children accepted their new life on the pirate schooner with complete equanimity. Children cannot make such sweeping comparisons as adults; they haven't the experiences behind them. But certain things about their captors' vossel did excite their interest. It was their second day on the chip that they encountered the machanics of the unique system by which the pirates cffected their bloodless conguests. It is described to us as follows: "At the same time there emerged from scwnhero aft a collection of the oddest-locking you if men. ill.reret decided she had iɛ never seen such beautiful young mun before. They were slim, yet nicely rovnied; and dresɛgd in exquisite clothes (if a trifle thard-lars). But their fucos! Those beautiful olive-tinted ovals! Those larьз, black-ringed, soft brown eyes, those unnaturally carmine lips: They minced across the dech, chatte: ing to each other in high-pitched tones, 'twittering like a cage of linnets...' and made their way on shore, "Who are they?: Emily asked the captain, who had just emerged from below.

"ho are who' he murmured, absently, without looking round: 'Oh, those?--Fairies.'

"Hey! Yey! Yey! cried the mato, more disapprovingly than ever.

"Fairies?' cried Emily in astonishment." She was acquainted with fairies, of course.

Her