The Innocent Voyage

The Innocent Voyage is a novel by the English writer Richard Hughes, first published in 1929.

The book's unsettling quality comes from its point of view: the children take the pirates in their stride, adopt the ship as a home, and are never frightened in the way an adult reader expects them to be, so the novel's events have to be understood through people who have not yet learned what they mean. Jonsen is given a cargo he cannot dispose of and a crew that becomes more implicated in the children's fate the longer the voyage goes on, so the Caribbean drifting of the middle chapters is a slow accumulation of consequences rather than an adventure. Hughes wrote the novel quickly and it was recognised at once for its prose, which is exact about weather, ships and the way children talk. It is a book that has been read both as a children's adventure and as a study of how little childhood protects anybody, and the ending, which happens after the passengers return to civilisation, is the part that readers remember.