The crucial scene in A High Wind in Jamaica

Let's think about what turns out to be the crucial scene in Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica, I mean the scene in which the Danish captain, whose small steamship the pirates have just overtaken, gets stabbed to death. So the pirate ship - holding the six English children (one has died ashore) - overtakes a steamship that turns out to be carrying no useful treasure - they're transporting wild animals. They tie up the Captain and, I'm not sure why, leave him aboard the pirate ship near the captain's quarters where the oldest Bas-Thornton child, Emily, has been sleeping in the Captain's bunk recovering from a severe cut to her leg. The crew of both ships get drunk and entertain one another by provoking the captive lion to fight a captive tiger; not much happens but it distracts everyone for a time. Back on the pirate ship, the Danish captain tries to ask Emily to hand him a knife so he can cut the rope that binds him; he can't speak English, however, and she, seemingly, doesn't understand him. He wriggles his way across the floor and nearly gets the knife - but Emily takes it and stabs him multiple times, then falls back on her bed. The strange Fernandez daughter, the oldest child aboard (Margaret), who keeps to herself and says almost nothing, walks over and sits on the hatch and watches the Captain die. When the pirates come back aboard, they assume the M killed the Danish Captain, as Emily is too weak and now retreated to her bed. Nobody says otherwise. So what's happened here? For the first time, several weeks into the journey and the captivity, we see that the children are traumatized and repressing their fear and their anger. Emily is traumatized not only by the captivity but by the strange episode with the pirate captain Jonsen: the crew got him drunk one night (he knows he cannot hold his liquor and tries to avoid drink) and he approached E sexually; to fend him off she bit his thumb. Afterward, he is ashamed and avoids her but she thinks he's angry because she bit him. This scene is part of the suppressed sexuality on the periphery throughout this novel: the black men who dress as women to be decoys when the pirate ship approaches a target; the fat lady with the mustache who kisses the little boys; the bizarre letter from the captain who was entrusted with the kids assure the parents that the girls were not molested (only killed - which was not true) - and here we see Emily fighting off a sexual advance with a weirdly sexual action (biting his thumb?!) and now acting out her terror and revenge on another captain, one who had no intention of harming her. She's got a bit of the Stockholm Syndrome - even more violent and protective than her captors - but it's not hard to see that she's really protecting herself from a sexual advance and maybe, taking it a big step farther, attacking a father figure to get back at the man who abandoned her and her sibs. The reaction of the pirates - and later of the English establishment - to E and M will be revealing both about life aboard the ship and life back in so-called civilization. If English fiction is known for moving people toward civilization rather than out to the "territories," High Wind is a perversion and reversal of that trope.