Captain Blood (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading) by Rafael Sabatini | eBook

Introduction

Captain Blood, one of the most popular adventure tales of the early twentieth century, recounts the story of a seventeenth-century medical doctor who becomes a pirate when his respectable, quiet life is overtaken by political events beyond his control. A work in the historical-fiction genre, the novel imagines how lives were altered by the turmoil surrounding the English succession following the death of Charles II in 1685. The author provides in Peter Blood a hero whose actions reassured readers living in the aftermath of World War I that a talented individual of average means, could overcome accidents of birth and cataclysmic world events; prevail over corrupt governments, institutions, and individuals; and reclaim a peaceful, respectable life. In the early years of the movie industry, the book spawned several films, including a 1935 film that catapulted Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland to stardom. Despite elements that are occasionally racist or sexist by today's standards, Captain Blood remains an entertaining page-turner and an excellent example of early historical fiction.

Rafael Sabatini (1875-1950) was born in Jesi, Italy, to Vincenzo and Anna Trafford Sabatini, both professional opera singers. Early in his life, he attended school in Switzerland and Portugal, learning five languages before he moved as a teenager to England, where he also mastered English. His skill with languages enabled him to work briefly in international commerce, later for a publishing house, and during World War II as a translator for the Intelligence Department of the British government's War Office. As a novelist, Sabatini's linguistic abilities helped him to read a widevariety of historical materials in their original languages, and he freely adapted their content for his novels. Stylistically, Sabatini was influenced by the work of Victorian writers who, following Sir Walter Scott, wrote historical novels. He respected Joseph Conrad as another multilingual writer who settled upon English rather than his native tongue for his writing and admired his descriptive writing style and romanticized subject matter. Both Conrad and Sabatini, in fact, were criticized by writers such as H. G. Wells, who believed in the sparer language and subjects of realism.

Although Sabatini honed his skill for many years before he became a successful novelist, his reputation grew following the publication of his first story in 1904 and Bardelys the Magnificent in 1906. By the time his most famous works were published-Sea Hawk in 1915, Scaramouche in 1921, and Captain Blood in 1922-Sabatini enjoyed a loyal readership, and his reputation was bolstered by the rising popularity of historical romances in Europe and the United States following World War I. Captain Blood was so popular that several years later Sabatini published two collections of short stories, Captain Blood Returns and The Fortunes of Captain Blood, which featured new adventures and more detailed versions of Blood's exploits in the 1922 book. Aside from the three works about Peter Blood, Sabatini wrote thirty novels, seven short-story collections, several works of nonfiction, many short stories printed in the periodical press, and one play. Sabatini died in Switzerland in 1950; his epitaph was taken from the opening lines of his book Scaramouche and reads, "He was born with a gift of laughter, and a sense that the world was mad."

The enduring appeal of Captain Blood as a historical novel can be traced in part to its use of conventions drawn from earlier popular literature. Peter Blood's arrest, trial, and transportation to Jamaica recall similar stories from early criminal literature, such as criminal biographies, execution and gallows literature, and trial reports, all popular in the eighteenth century. Such sensational accounts of actual trials are recycled throughout eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction. In the novel's historical context, Blood finds himself enmeshed in the religious and political turmoil surrounding the succession of the English monarchy between 1685 and 1688. After Charles I had been deposed and executed in 1649 by the Puritan-led Commonwealth government under Oliver Cromwell, his son, Charles II, went to Scotland and later fled to France. Following Cromwell's death in 1658, he returned by invitation to rule England in 1660. Although nominally Anglican, Charles II died a Catholic. Without a legitimate child as heir, his Catholic brother James II succeeded him in 1685, much to the chagrin of the Protestant establishment, which urged Charles II's illegitimate son, James, Duke of Monmouth, to rebel against his uncle's rule. Monmouth's rebellion failed, and he was executed, but nonetheless his daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William deposed James II in 1688.

Captain Blood begins with Monmouth's rebellion and ends with Peter Blood's appointment as Governor of Jamaica by King William's representative. As the story opens, Peter Blood, an Irish-Catholic physician, is a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Although Peter Blood's Catholicism would seem to make his alliance with James II natural, Blood has a twentieth-century sensibility in that he appears to have no particular political or religious allegiance, a position that a seventeenth-century audience would find inconceivable. Blood finds himself on the wrong side of the law because his personal and professional ethics lead him to tend the wounds of a Monmouth supporter, Lord Gildoy. Captured in Gildoy's company by the historically ruthless Kirke's Dragoons, Blood is arrested and brought before Judge Jeffreys as a Monmouth supporter. The fictitious Blood is convicted, sentenced, and ultimately transported, during the proceedings known as the Bloody Assizes, by the historical Judge Jeffreys. Sabatini's narrative tapped into readers' expectations about eighteenth-century court proceedings and about Jeffreys, whose actions in hanging Monmouth's followers earned him the nickname "Hanging Judge Jeffreys" and are still remembered in England today. To twentieth-century readers, such proceedings appear unfairly skewed in the favor of the prosecution (the judge and the empanelled jury). Blood's transportation is consistent with the outcome of the Bloody Assizes, in which 1,100 prisoners convicted of treason were transported to the Americas for a period of ten years rather than facing the usual punishment, that called for the convict to be briefly hung before being disemboweled, dismembered, and drawn and quartered. Although transportation was not regularized until after 1714 with the Transportation Acts, it was a punishment of expedience when labor was needed in the colonies.

Drawing upon the conventions of exploration and travel narratives, Captain Blood establishes through its narrator the importance and value of the narrative by identifying as its source an eyewitness, Blood's trusted navigator Jeremy Pitt. To establish the veracity of a travel account, narrators also frequently dismiss what appear to be their sources by accusing earlier writers of plagiarizing from what is actually a later account. This tactic is particularly prevalent among the successors of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Similarly, the narrator of Captain Blood claims that A. O. Exquemelin plagiarized from Jeremy Pitt when he wrote accounts of Captain Morgan in Buccaneers in America. A careful reading of Morgan's exploits in Exquemelin's seventeenth-century narrative, however, reveals that Blood's military tactics-for example his raids on Maracaybo and Gibraltar and his subsequent escape from the Spanish despite overwhelming odds-are borrowed directly from the pages of Exquemelin. Other parallels that appear both in Captain Blood and in Exquemelin's account include the code of the "Brethren of the Coast," details about history of the Isle of Tortuga, and the possibility that a pirate can enter into legitimate military and political service after engaging in piracy.

However, if Peter Blood's military tactics are drawn from Exquemelin's account of Morgan's exploits, his character is not. By all accounts, Morgan became a pirate by choice and was notorious for his ruthlessness toward the Spanish prisoners and towns he attacked. Peter Blood resorts to piracy to escape unfairly enforced servitude to Jamaica's ruthless governor Colonel Bishop and willingly attempts to give up piracy three times: in service to James II, in service to France, and in service to William III. Only the Dutch and English representatives of King William deal honestly with Blood, and only this attempt to leave piracy is successful.

Aside from his innate sense of morality and ethics, Blood is inspired by Arabella Bishop, Colonel Bishop's niece, to stick to his ideals despite the treachery of nearly every figure in authority. Blood exercises mercy and compassion where possible, and, if he cannot always act honorably in the eyes of legitimate authority, at least he can follow the least dishonorable course. In her positive influence on Blood's actions, Arabella Bishop resembles many Victorian heroines. Readers will also find in Peter Blood the embodiment of several earlier heroic types, all of which combine in the hero of historic romance novels. Blood resembles earlier picaresque heroes of the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries in that he is a rogue (from the perspective of those in authority) who traverses an episodic plot by using his wits; in some ways, he is a victim of circumstances whose character does not change dramatically. Unlike earlier picaresque heroes, however, Blood differs from such characters as Don Quixote, Candide, and Tom Jones in that he is not a passive victim or a satiric vehicle; instead, he is an adroit hero whose incredible resilience allows him to remain a few steps ahead of government officials appointed by three imperial powers-England, France, and Spain. He repeatedly turns adversity into advantage with unbelievable dexterity. As a result, he resembles the heroes of late nineteenth-century adventure novels in his ability to take control of his own destiny and extricate himself from any disaster through his superior intellect and capacity for strategic planning; in this sense, he can be seen as the sort of hero still present today in action-adventure films.

Despite the novel's seventeenth-century setting, Peter Blood embodies heroic qualities that earlier readers would have found perplexing, if not downright objectionable. Early novels featured heroes whose progress could often be measured in spiritual terms, as evidenced by their explanations of natural adversity as the workings of Providence. Despite the centrality of religion to seventeenth-century life, Blood's Catholic faith, which would have made him an expected ally of James II by seventeenth-century standards, is only tangentially important to the plot, mentioned only to demonstrate Judge Jeffrey's stupidity in his inability to identify Blood as "a papist." Like religiously motivated heroes, Peter Blood often acts against his own self interest in trying to do the right thing, but unlike earlier heroes, his motivation comes not from religious belief, but from his unwillingness to compromise a personal ideal and a personal code of ethics anchored in his innate sense of right and wrong-and noticeably missing from virtually any sanctioned institution, whether religious, or political. Earlier audiences would have found Peter Blood's strongly individual, non-Providential ethic objectionably unreligious. They would also have considered it ludicrous that an Irish-Catholic doctor of low descent would be the sole repository of virtue and heroism.

The idea that Peter Blood turns out to be a twentieth-century hero in a seventeenth-century setting says much about Sabatini's approach to historical material. Although he read widely in several languages for inspiration in his works, Sabatini never attempts or pretends accuracy. Harold Orel suggests that Sabatini distrusted the idea that history could be equated to truth, and that his primary interest was in the truth that could be revealed through the type of hero represented in his novels, a hero who is a "scoundrel by the world's light, but ethically consistent, gallantly faithful to his true love, and in all his actions motivated by burning hatred and a desire for revenge." Such a character, especially one who could overcome the influence of corrupt institutions, was particularly attractive to a post-war, middle-class audience. Peter Blood was made possible, according to Margery Fisher, by writers such as Stanley Weyman, whose individualistic romantic heroes influenced Sabatini to "put a respectable man into a dangerous situation with no way out but villainy."

Roxanne Kent-Drury is an associate professor at Northern Kentucky University, where she publishes and teaches courses in early world literature, eighteenth-century British and American literature, and the literature of exploration and travel. She holds a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from the University of Oregon.

Captain Blood (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

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