Table of Contents
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CAPTAIN BLOOD
RAFAEL SABATINI is regarded as the most important and popular author of historical fiction to have published during the first half of the twentieth century. He was born in Jesi, Italy, on April 29th, 1875. His father was Italian, and his mother was British, and he was educated in both Portugal and Switzerland. Moving to England, he worked briefly for a Liverpool newspaper before turning to a career as a full-time writer. His first novel was
The Lovers of Yvonne
(1902), and during the course of his professional life, he wrote a variety of fiction and non-fiction, including short stories, historical novels, and histories. His most notable historical fiction includes
The Sea-Hawk
(1915),
Scaramouche: A Romance of the French Revolution
(1921), and
Captain Blood: His Odyssey
(1922). He also wrote a number of plays for the theater, as well as for the emerging medium of motion pictures. His last novel,
The Gamester
(1949), appeared a year before his death in 1950 while he was visiting Adelboden, Switzerland.
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GARY HOPPENSTAND is a professor in the Department of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University. He has researched and published widely in the areas of popular culture and popular fiction studies, and he edited the Penguin Classics editions of Anthony Hope's
The Prisoner of Zenda/Rupert of Hentzau
and A.E.W. Mason's
The Four Feathers
. He is the past president of the Popular Culture Association, and the current editor of
The Journal of Popular Culture
.
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First published in Great Britain by Hutchinson & Co. 1922
First published in the United States of America by Houghton Mifflin Company 1922
This edition with an introduction by Gary Hoppenstand published in Penguin Books 2003
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Introduction copyright © Gary Hoppenstand, 2003
All rights reserved
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Sabatini, Rafael, 1875-1950.
Captain Blood / by Rafael Sabatini ; with an introduction by Gary Hoppenstand.
p. cm.â(Penguin classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN : 978-1-440-68422-7
1. PiratesâFiction. 2. PhysiciansâFiction. 3. BritishâCaribbean AreaâFiction.
4. Caribbean AreaâFiction. I. Title. II. Series.
PR6037.A2 C35 2003
823'.912âdc21 2002032983
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Introduction
The explanation of Rafael Sabatini's
Captain Blood
's continuing longevity as one of the most famous adventure stories ever written is intimately connected to the evolution of the historical novel as a popular literary genre and to the subsequent development of the swashbuckling trickster hero as an important character archetype in the genre. Indeed, as popular fiction discovered its audience during the nineteenth century, a relationship developed between story and reader that was both intimate and escapist in nature. The people who wrote and published the dime novel in America, the penny dreadful and story papers in England, and serial magazine fiction in both Europe and America quickly realized how important it was to meet the needs and execrations of the evolving working class readership that was increasingly consuming fiction as a means to spend increasing amounts of leisure time. Simple tales of good against evil predominated, whether set on the pirate-infested waters of the Caribbean, or in hostile jungles of Africa, or on the harsh landscape of the American frontier, or in the equally dangerous urban environment of the city. Plucky boy heroes discovered grand adventure while searching for lost pirate treasure. Great white hunters uncovered magic and mystery in lost civilizations on the Dark Continent. Gun-slinging frontiersmen eliminated Indians and outlaws with equal enthusiasm, making the West safe for the pioneer town while, in the city, ingenious detectives apprehended crooks and vigilantes executed those dastardly villains who were beyond the reach of the law. Closely mirroring the worldview of its audience, early popular fiction was racist, sexist, imperialist, classbound, and entirely ideological in content, mirroring the highly conservative social expectations of workers who wanted to enter the middle class, or recent foreign immigrants to America who wanted to distance themselves from their past and become assimilated into their newly adopted society. Popular fiction was purchased in tremendous quantities, radically transforming the way stories were conceived, written, and published, as well as changing the fundamental purpose of both the novel and short story from something that was morally instructive (as was the early English novel) to something that offered pure escapism.
Certain literary types in early popular fiction thus began to assume heroic, even mythic, proportions. The H. Rider Haggard adventurer, the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches boy hero, the Owen Wister cowboy, the Edgar Allan Poe sleuth, and the Jules Verne scientist-explorer: all these (and many more) became stock characters in trade, easily recognizable literary figures that offered readers a wealth of cultural and social contexts with a minimum of intellectual effort. One of the more commercially successful genres of popular fiction to have appeared during the Victorian and Edwardian periods was the historical novel that (especially at the turn of the twentieth century) provided a rich venue for the mythic popular fiction hero. Created by Walter Scott in novels such as
Waverley
(1814) and
Ivanhoe
(1819), historical fiction over the next one hundred years enjoyed periods of great success. Authors such as James Fenimore Cooper in America and Alexandre Dumas in France offered significant contributions to the genre, and contributed even more significant heroes. Several decades later, the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson helped to create the boy's adventure story in his immortal
Treasure Island
(1883). Peter Keating states in his
The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875-1914
(1989): “That it was possible to make a comfortable living by writing mainly historical fiction was demonstrated in the 1870s by the successful partnership of Walter Besant and James Rice, and subsequently by a very large number of individual novelists, including Edna Lyall, Stanley Weyman, H.S. Merriman, Quiller-Couch, S.R. Crockett, Neil Munro, Baroness Orczy, Marjorie Bowen and Rafael Sabatini.”
1
Most important, it was in the efforts of British author Stanley J. Weyman in his
A Gentleman of France
(1893) and
Under the Red Robe
(1894), among others, that the historical novel reinvented itself for a new generation of readers, as it had done earlier in the work of Cooper, Dumas, and Stevenson. One of the more crucial developments in historical fiction to have emerged out of Weyman's literary efforts was the popularization of the swashbuckling trickster hero, the prototype of which was to be found in the character Gil de Berault, the mercenary protagonist of
Under the Red Robe
.
Narrative elements of the swashbuckling trickster began to appear in the sea adventure fiction of British novelist Frederick Marryat and later in Stevenson's
Treasure Island, Kidnapped
(1886), and
The Black Arrow
(1888), as well as in Dumas's Musketeers series, beginning with
The Three Musketeers
(1844). The character found a new level of popularity near the end of the nineteenth century in Weyman, as well as in Anthony Hope's classic cloak-and-dagger tale,
The Prisoner of Zenda
(1894), despite the fact that Hope's short novel, featuring the derring-do of Rudolf Rassendyll in the invented kingdom of Ruritania, is technically not a historical romance (though it certainly reads like one), since it featured a contemporary Balkan setting. Arguably, an even more important trickster swashbuckler was Hungarian-born Baroness Orczy's
The Scarlet Pimpernel
(1905), and its numerous sequels, featuring Sir Percy Blakeney as the wily Pimpernel, an aristocratic hero who dedicated his life to combating the terror of the French Revolution by thwarting the designs of villains such as the French agent Chauvelin. Orczy's
Scarlet Pimpernel
was profoundly influential on the evolution of the swashbuckling trickster hero in that she created a protagonist who used a dual identityâthe one as a vigilante superman and the other as foppish buffoonâto confound and defeat his enemies, usually by escaping death-defying traps or reversing the fortunes of his opponents by the use of clever tricks. American pulp magazine author Johnston McCulley borrowed liberally from Orczy's model with his own swashbuckling trickster, Zorro, who first appeared in
The Curse of Capistrano
(1919). The larger-than-life trickster figure was also successfully adapted and revised for the American crime fiction pulps, appearing as Carroll John Daly's and Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled detectives in America during the 1920s and 1930s. In fact, Orczy's noble Pimpernel is a close relative of the American comic book superhero, first appearing in the late 1930s; his features can be readily found in the four-color likenesses of Superman and Batman. But perhaps the most important author during the early decades of the twentieth century to have adopted the swashbuckling trickster hero was the international bestselling novelist, Rafael Sabatini. Two of Sabatini's most important (and most memorable) historical adventures, in fact, featured the swashbuckling trickster. The first was
Scaramouche: A Romance of the French Revolution
(1921), the tale of a young man named André-Louis Moreau who seeks to overcome personal and social injustice during the early years of the French Revolution. The second was
Captain Blood: His Odyssey
(1922), the epic story of a surgeon named Peter Blood, who is unjustly convicted of treason during the Monmouth Rebellion and sent to the Caribbean as a plantation slave, and who later escapes to become a notorious gentleman pirate of the Spanish Main.