Pirate fiction should be an easy sell. Adventure is baked into the formula; so is violent death, unbounded freedom, and the raging seas. Whatever your age or gender, cannon shot bouncing across a crowded deck is nourishment for that twisted 12-year-old inside you.
Captain Blood, one of the most successful pirate fiction titles of all time, demonstrates both the promise and the limits of this genre. Over a hundred years since its publication, it retains the power to thrill and enthrall. But how can you really root for pirates?
Country doctor Peter Blood wonders, too. He takes to piracy early in the book when fate gives him no other options. Though he leads a fairly nasty crew who preys on cargo vessels, he longs only for respectability and the love of a decent woman who scorns the life he leads.
At one point early in his career, he makes this startling vow:
“It is not human to be wise,” said Blood. “It is much more human to err, though perhaps exceptional to err on the side of mercy. We’ll be exceptional. Oh, faugh! I’ve no stomach for cold-blooded killing.”
This no doubt helped Captain Blood become a staggering success. Its protagonist gives you the menace and swagger you want from piratical life while sidestepping most of the evil of history’s real buccaneers.
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| The Monmouth Rebellion kicked off when the Duke of Monmouth landed at Lyme Regis in 1685 to overthrow England's King James II. Peter Blood witnesses the commotion as a neutral, realizing the rebels have no chance with their poor training and weaponry. Events prove him right. Image from https://lovelymeregis.co.uk/themonmouthrebellion |
When we meet Peter Blood, he is a peaceful landlubber watching a civil war break out under his windowsill. This is the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685, which would culminate at the Battle of Sedgemoor, the last military engagement fought entirely on English soil. Blood has seen too much of war to want any part of this, and stays home that day. But when asked to save the life of a wounded rebel leader, his merciful response lands him in irons, branded a traitor.
After a mockery of a trial, Blood is sentenced to hang but then exiled instead to Barbados to die quickly doing hard labor under the hot sun. He is only spared so the greedy king can sell slaves to his colonists:
Slaves were urgently required in the plantations, and a healthy, vigorous man could be reckoned worth at least from ten to fifteen pounds. Then, there were at court many gentlemen who had some claim or other upon His Majesty’s bounty. Here was a cheap and ready way to discharge these claims.
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| Captain Blood observes many pirate story conventions. There is even a plank-walking scene, though in the book the prisoner is being released unbound in swimming range of a friendly island. Blood may scheme as well as anyone, but he is not diabolical unless cornered. Image from https://pirates.hegewisch.net/odd_plank.html |
Being a physician lands Blood in a relatively cushy situation from where to plot his escape. A timely Spanish raid on Barbados advances his scheme. Throughout the novel, Blood is always getting himself in and out of scrapes, mostly by sheer impulse and luck: “Sluggishness of decision was never a fault of Blood’s. He leapt where another crawled.”
All the while, he nurses the memory of a young woman, Arabella Bishop, whom he met while a slave in Barbados:
He vowed that the thought of her should continue ever before him to help him keep his hands as clean as a man might in this desperate trade upon which he was embarking. And so, although he might entertain no delusive hope of ever winning her for his own, or ever even seeing her again, yet the memory of her was to abide in his soul, as a bitter-sweet, purifying influence. The love that is never to be realized will often remain a man’s guiding ideal.
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| Henry Morgan, a British privateer and later lieutenant governor of Jamaica, was a real-life model for Peter Blood. Like his historical counterpart, Blood preys on Spanish shipping, as Spain was a geopolitical rival of Britain. Morgan had a dark reputation which he claimed was the result of calumny, even successfully suing one biographer for libel. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Morgan |
The opening chapters of Captain Blood set a high bar with its sumptuous period detail and a talent for invention reminiscent of Alexandre Dumas. Sabatini takes time to flesh out every new scene with picturesque detail and wit, yet the story is in constant motion.
Blood is always at its center, undaunted by authority as he gets in the last word. Told what he says sounds like treason, he grins back: “I trust I am not obscure.” When a Spanish baddie sneeringly dubs him an English dog, Blood points out he is actually Irish by birth.
On the one hand, Captain Blood is juvenile folderol, packed with improbable coincidences, ever-so-piquant dialogue, villains without the slightest trace of shade or nuance, and just enough racist description around the margins to make you feel guilty for enjoying it. Originally assembled from several short stories featuring Blood which had been published earlier in magazines, the narrative jumps around like a string of lit firecrackers, exciting and fluid enough in their presentation, but not trying too hard to sell you on a coherent underlying reality.
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| The first of many screen adaptations of Captain Blood was a 1924 silent feature starring J. Warren Kerrigan in the title role. A masterpiece of visual design, some battle scenes in it were borrowed for the sound remake over a decade later. Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0014759/ |
Sabatini even acknowledges this in a couple of places, humorously but defensively: Open the history of the past at whatsoever page you will, and there you shall find coincidence at work bringing about events that the merest chance might have averted. Indeed, coincidence may be defined as the very tool used by Fate to shape the destinies of men and nations. Okay, I guess, but it’s something he leans on too much.
On the other hand, it is riveting reading, with Blood’s ability to continually foil his British and Spanish foes displaying a timeless gift for humor and storycraft. The classic pirate novel when this came out was Treasure Island; one can see how Sabatini takes that material into harder, more adult territory with elements of debauchery and gore, like when prisoners are flogged for disobeying their leader:
You know, perhaps, the sting of a flexible bamboo cane when it is whole. But do you realize its murderous quality when it has been split into several long lithe blades, each with an edge that is of the keenness of a knife?
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| Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone settle their differences in the 1935 remake of Captain Blood. This was the film that launched Flynn and helped popularize movie swashbucklers. In the book, it is a rare occasion to see Blood duel a foe; here he has had enough of a deceitful underling. GIF from https://365days365movies.tumblr.com/post/738513515454808064/action-january-ii-captain-blood-1935 |
At
moments I felt the presence of Robert E. Howard in some of Sabatini’s more
violent sections, in its grim and spare prose and unwillingness to rest on any
break in the action for long. I suspect the British-Italian Sabatini was an
influence on the slightly later Texan.
So enrapt was I in the many narrative twists that I was well over halfway through before realizing the novel was just alternating vignettes in which Blood either makes an alliance that proves unwise or finds himself risking his neck for the sake of dear Arabella. This repetitiveness would annoy more if the ride wasn’t so much fun.
Beyond his wisecracks, Blood also has some inner tension to resolve. He is torn between the material needs of his loyal crew, who just so happen to enjoy the pirate life; and his desire not to descend to the level of a Captain Morgan or a Blackbeard. He prefers Spanish targets, as they are traditional enemies of his British heritage:
Never had buccaneers been so rigidly held in hand, never had they been so firmly restrained, never so debarred from the excesses of rapine and lust that were usual in their kind as were as those who sailed with Captain Blood.
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| Captain Blood has been remade by filmmakers across the generations since its initial release over a hundred years ago. In recent decades, it has been repurposed as a video game. Image from https://waytoomany.games/2025/05/05/review-captain-blood/ |
Sabatini gives little information about Blood’s men. Only a few lieutenants are named. One, a ship’s pilot, has been at Blood’s side since their initial imprisonment. Another has one eye. But the book never gives them much to do beyond register surprise at Blood’s boldness.
There is a lot of that; Blood’s capacity for risk leads him to take many chances. This is no flaw since he always comes out ahead, even if he does thin out his crew in the process. In one incident, apparently taken from a historical battle, he steers his lone ship between two enemy vessels so as to direct their fire against each other.
To accept Blood is a naval genius, one has to look past the convenient idiocy of his foes at every turn. But since Sabatini succeeds in making them so despicable, there is something satisfying in this.
While
not a first-class adventure yarn of the type that holds up on reflection, Captain
Blood is pure adrenaline. Like his protagonist, Sabatini knew how to get
the most with pluck and trusting his instincts.
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