A High Wind in Jamaica: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

A High Wind in Jamaica, credited to Richard Hughes, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes. Read in English by Thomas A. Copeland. Childhood and piracy: an unlikely pairing, in a tragi-comic adventure. Neither Treasure Island nor Peter Pan prepares one for the kind of delight afforded by A High Wind in Jamaica. Hughes’ pirates fit no preconceived model. They are preeminently men, with vivid and differing personalities, and puzzling relationships—with one another and with the children in their (grudging) charge. They are only secondarily pirates, although the world outside their schooner sees them as pirates first, as men not at all, and certainly not as the babysitters we know them to be. As for the children, Hughes gives a hint of his unconventional view of childhood in one casual remark: “babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the lower vertebrates.” There are no actual infants in the novel, but there are young children, whose minds are strange, alien landscapes which most adults have forgotten. Hughes defies adults’ illusions about those early, “innocent” years. The children he depicts are troubled and often confused but resilient; they adapt almost instantaneously to drastic changes in their circumstances and others’ behavior. They are decisive yet inconsistent, curious yet readily distracted, prudish yet savage, capable of fierce love and easy betrayal. A reader who longs for stereotyping can find a bit of it in Hughes’ depiction of that class called parents, where it suffers his withering ridicule. But these are the beings ultimately in charge of society, and by the end of the book a reader does not know whether to rejoice or grieve that the children will grow up to join them. (Summary by Thomas A. Copeland)

Recording facts

• Recording title: A High Wind in Jamaica
• Author credits: Richard Hughes
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 10
• Listed recording duration: 6:13:44

Catalogue topics

• children
• murder
• pirates
• childhood
• Jamaica
• memory
• piracy
• sailing ships

Track guide

1. 01 - Chapter 1 — 54:34
2. 02 - Chapter 2 — 30:10
3. 03 - Chapter 3 — 36:04
4. 04 - Chapter 4 — 33:53
5. 05 - Chapter 5 — 22:04
6. 06 - Chapter 6 — 18:40
7. 07 - Chapter 7 — 42:03
8. 08 - Chapter 8 — 40:43
9. 09 - Chapter 9 — 43:52
10. 10 - Chapter 10 — 51:41

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.