Overview

The idea for the novel came in 1925, when a family friend introduced Hughes to an unpublished manuscript by one Jeanette Calder. This was a record of her personal experiences in 1822, off the coast of Cuba, as one of a group of children on a brig captured by pirates. 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. To research the historical background, he read as widely as he could on Caribbean piracy in the nineteenth century. He was also able to draw on his mother's experience of growing up in Jamaica; at this time, Hughes himself had never been there. Finally, having no children himself, he 'borrowed' other people's in order to study child psychology: these included Charlotte Williams-Ellis (daughter of Hughes' friend and editor, the writer Amabel Williams-Ellis. The Author was born in Weybridge, Surrey. His father was Arthur Hughes, a civil servant, and his mother, Louisa Grace Warren, had been brought up in the West Indies in Jamaica. He was educated first at Charterhouse School and graduated from Oriel College, Oxford in 1922.

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