Not well known today, this book was voted one of the top 100 novels of the 20th century by Random House/Modern Library. Hughes used the new theories of Freud to rip the sentimental Victorian notion of the innocence of children.
Primitive drives and forces are unleashed in the kids, and the misunderstandings and mutual exploitations of the children and their captors (who come across as inept and innocent compared to the fierce machinations of the children) make for very black comedy indeed.
But their ship is attacked by pirates off the coast of Cuba and the children (along with two creole neighbor kids) end up on the pirates' ship. The five young Bas-Thorntons live on the family's run-down sugar plantation in Jamaica until a slight earthquake, a hurricane, and the much more devastating (to them) death of their cat inspires their parents to send them back to England for school. On the high seas of the Caribbean, a family of English children is set loose sent by their parents from their home in Jamaica to receive the civilising. He always insisted subsequently that he should never have attempted the film, which was a box-office failure.A quarter century before _Lord of the Flies_, Richard Hughes published this chilling tale of children's amorality set in the early 19th century. Quinn used his considerable influence to help Mackendrick and the ensuing film was highly praised it was, however, cut by the studio by about 25 minutes, which Mackendrick claimed had ruined it. When Alexander Mackendrick was approached to direct, he was appalled by the travestying of Hughes's novel, and was able to persuade leading man Anthony Quinn that a more faithful and disturbing version of the book was a better idea. However, the studio saw it as a light-hearted Disney-style pirate adventure aimed at a family audience several years after Mason's plans had come to nothing, they revived the project along these lines with Nunnally Johnson assigned as writer and producer. Richard Hughes's original novel, published in 1929, is a dark and disturbing story, and James Mason, who greatly admired it, wanted to make a film of it in the 1950s, producing it for Twentieth Century-Fox as well as playing one of the leads. This film had a long and troubled history.
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