Are the children in High Wind in Jamaica "amoral"?

Book group discussion of Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica centered on question of the amorality or immorality or evil of the children - is Hughes's point of view that childhood is necessarily evil and cruel? He does at various points in the novel discuss how it is impossible to think the way a baby thinks, that alligators can never be tamed, and other asides suggesting that childhood is a state of mind or stage of life inaccessible to adults - and that may be so, for him, in that his children don't seem to be "realistic" - as M noted several times it's impossible to imagine that none of the children would express any fear or any longing for his or her parents - even given the astonishing estrangement between British children and their parents in the 1840s and to an extent even today. That said, it doesn't seen to me that Hughes views the children as "evil" - we talked briefly about comparison points between High Wind and Lord of the Flies (Prose mentions this in her intro); I noted that the point of Lord/Flies is that left to the own devices seemingly innocent children will replicate and re-create all the cruelty and class division of the adult world - maybe even more cruel and pitiless. That's not what happens in High Wind at all - yes, the children are cruel to animals (and abnormally piteous regarding the little tabby cat that was lost in the hurricane - caring more about that animal than about people), but the children don't do anything hideous, cruel, or immoral to the adults, with single major exception of Emily's stabbing the Dutch captain and letting Margaret take the hit for that. But this immoral action is to me clearly a result of her trauma - Captain Jonsen's coming on to her when he was drunk, the whole crew watching and laughing, and all her suppressed fears about their fate and the disappearance (and death) of John, whom no one will ever discuss - rather incredibly. So in other words on the surface these children look like "normal" staunch English schoolchildren of their class - the closing image of the novel in fact -- they have had a traumatic experience that comes out in Emily's sudden violent rage, in her chanting and singing to herself in the last days on shipboard, and in her hysterics in court when asked if she'd seen any killing. Someone raised the questions as to whether she was on the verge of confession, which would have cleared the pirates of the murder charge; that's really unknowable, but what is knowable is that the adults interpreted her breakdown as evidence against the accused - yes, she had seen a killing - because the adults really don't want to know anything about the truth or about the children - the indifference of the Bas-Thorntons to the fate of their children is astonishing - though maybe not exceptional.