Are the pirates victims or villains in A High Wind in Jamaica?

And then suddenly - not much explanation - the six captive children are aboard a British ship bound for England. A lady aboard the ship in particular befriends the 10-year-old Emily, and they try delicately to get her to talk about her experiences - she's very reluctant and evasive - and when the ask her if she saw anyone killed she goes blank. Of course they assume her trauma comes for her memories of the pirates killing someone - not from her memory of her killing the Dutch captain. The same scene plays out later - in the final courtroom episode - when E screams at the mention of murder and killing, and this terror becomes crucial "evidence" in the case against the pirates. We see at the end that the pirates were railroaded on the way to execution - that, as Prose notes in her intro., none of the English adults is interested in learning the truth, only in justifying their opinions and prejudices. And yet, and yet - though it's true that the pirates more or less befriended the children and that they didn't kill anyone in their two (or more?) attacks on passing ships, let's not forget what they did do: they took the children hostage, though they certainly had no reason to do so other than potential profit; they tried to essentially sell them into slavery on a Caribbean island, taking them back again only when negotiations failed; were so irresponsible that one of the children died in a fatal accident that they could have prevented; kept the children locked in the hold of the ship in conditions worse than that of any of the sailors, shot at the locked cabin in which the children were captive in order to terrorize sailors into disclosing where they'd hidden $ (a missed shot could easily have killed one of the children), made no effort to bring the children to safety over the course of what seems to be several months, and essentially tried to execute one of the children (Margaret) whom the belief killed the Dutch captain (which she didn't), making no effort to get at the truth - much like the English court. So this novel - A High Wind in Jamaica - is full of edges and ambiguities. Though the English adults behave horribly throughout, the pirates who hold the children captive aren't exactly heroes, either. The life aboard their ship may to some of the children have felt like a glorious adventure, to others - esp E and M - there was a great deal of fear and trauma and on E's part in particular perhaps a version of Stockholm syndrome.