The incredible cruelty and indifference of adults in HIgh Wind in Jamaica

Re-reading Richard Hughes's 1929 High Wind in Jamaica for upcoming book group - much easier 2nd time thru, esp the first chapters - this novel has a notably odd beginning in which we're not quite sure which characters to focus on, which the novel will be about and which are peripheral. And just as we're settling in for a novel about a British colonial family w/ 5 young children struggling to make it in Jamaica after a hurricane blows their house away, the parents put the children aboard a ship for England and the novel truly begins - 2nd time through I knew what to look for and what to overlook (atmospherics aside). Even w/ that advantage, though, it's still hard to know exactly which children and how many children get aboard the ship: I'm pretty sure now its 7, 5 from the Durant (?) family and two from the Fernandez family, along w/ their "nurse." The 5 sibs, amazingly, have no adult accompaniment. Among the many astonishing things about this novel, even more so 2nd time thru, are the parents' incredible indifference to the fate of their 5 children, the childrens' general lack of interest in or longing for their parents, the abominable cowardice and cruelty of the seemingly friendly captain who write the parents a horrible letter full of lies telling them they were overtaken by pirates and their children were killed, saying he saw that w/ his own eyes, which he did not - he's protecting his reputation. I also read Francine Prose's intro to this edition (another fine NY Review of Books Press rediscovery), and she notes the cruelty to animals - yes, true - and the strange attitude toward sex (yes, also true - so weird how the captain in his letter makes such a point of telling the parents that the children were killed quickly so there was no time for them to be sexually abused - hoping this will put the parents' minds at rest!), and the general sense that the adults in the novel just never want to know the truth about anything. These are good observations, but I still think the strangest thing of all is the gulf between parents and children - how little they seem to care about each other. Hughes makes a point of showing the parents getting back to their farm in Jamaica and putting the children out of their minds; and what he says by omission is equally important - even the youngest child - I think they go down to age 3? - never seems to cry in fear or in longing for a parent or for any adult company. On the surface, this is a story like Peter Pan or Treasure Island - a pirate adventure of kids on their own, etc. (Prose also notes that is is often compared w/ the much more schematic Lord of the Flies), but High Wind is much darker not so much in its view of children as in its view of adults.