Captain Blood
The Captain Blood series, Book 1
Rafael Sabatini
Penguin Classics
Fiction, Adventure/Historical Fiction
Themes: Classics, Cross-Genre, Pirates, Seafaring Tales
***+
Description
The Irishman Peter Blood thought himself done with his days of soldiering and fighting for king and country some years ago, having exhausted his youthful energies and retired to a quiet life as a country doctor. Indeed, as townsfolk rallied to the banner of the upstart Duke of Monmouth, who challenged the tyrant King James, he dismissed the matter as none of his concern. But Fate has other plans for the man. When, after a terrible rout, Blood finds himself summoned to treat a local lord wounded in battle, he cares not a whit for the politics and thinks only of his trade and his oath to tend the injured.. an oath that the redcoats likewise care not a whit for, when they arrive and arrest everyone they can lay their hands on under charge of treason. Blood and his fellows of circumstance are condemned in a trial with a foregone verdict, spared the noose only because the Caribbean colonies are in need of extra slaves. Thus is the Irish doctor forced upon a path that will lead him from the hold of a slaver ship to the brutality of a sugar plantation and onward to become one of the most famed pirate captains of the seas.
Review
Sabatini's classic tale has all the standard trappings of a swashbuckling adventure yarn, with a larger-than-life hero patterned on Henry Morgan and other historic figures. Peter Blood starts out confident that, by simple virtue of not getting involved, he can avoid the problems washing over his country, but is quite quickly disabused of that notion, not to mention any lingering belief of the divine virtue of the king and the inherent goodness of a broad swath of humanity besides. Nevertheless, Blood manages to avoid falling into the pit of melancholy that swallows most of his compatriots, fighting back with his wits and a somewhat barbed sense of humor, and the lesson that inaction is not an option in the face of injustice sticks. He quickly gathers enemies who despise him largely due to their own failings, most ultimately driven by jealousy that he's a better, wiser, more virtuous man than they could ever dream of being and must therefore suffer; that's not particularly uncommon in this kind of story, which is ultimately about escapism and a certain degree of wish fulfillment. His ultimate drive, though, is found in Arabella, the innocent niece of brutal plantation owner Colonel Bishop; his unspoken and often tumultuous love for her is entirely unnoticed by a girl who seems impossibly naïve for living on a slave plantation, yet it's the primary motivating factor of many of the Irish doctor's actions. (This is more or less standard for the style and era of story, though, the reduction of women to objects and a hero's love to something more like a religious devotion.) Try as Blood might, he finds his hands being bloodied more than once, but his motives generally remain pure, particularly in comparison to his enemies. In any event, there's plenty of action, many sea battles, and numerous instances where the Irishman's clever tongue and quick wit generate miraculous escapes and victories where defeat seems certain. Toward the end, the degree to which other people basically stand around singing his praises starts to get tiring, as do the borderline deus ex machina workings of Fate, plus the finale feels a trifle abrupt. Other than that (and, as mentioned, some of the flaws that are a result of the era in which it was written and the audience for which it was created, which can't help but age poorly - the less said about the story's dismissive depiction of other races, the better), Captain Blood is exactly what one would expect of an old-school swashbuckler.