Captain Blood (2 page)

Sabatini well understood the value and role of the trickster hero, and he employed this character to great effect as an agent of political change in his stories. The function of the trickster in popular fiction is twofold. At one level, this hero has appealed to the early-twentieth-century working-class reader (one of the major audiences of popular fiction) since the trickster is often a rebel figure who thwarts the unscrupulous might of those in power. This protagonist's aims are often subversive, battling the representatives of corrupt leadership, and even treasonous by the standards of the established political authority, as this character seeks to right wrongs and protect those who are helpless and victimized by the powerful elite. Such a hero, no doubt, engendered a strong following among working-class readers of popular fiction in both Europe and America who, at times, would themselves feel exploited by their employers, or by a less-than-sympathetic government. The trickster's popularity was based in a nineteenth-century socialist ideology that was in conflict with an evolving capitalistic economic system, which explains why the character hero came into being following the Industrial Revolution in the late-nineteenth century. Peter Blood is thus not unlike the legend of his real-life Western counterpart, Jesse James, an American rebel hero who was perceived to have thwarted the injustices of the larger societal institutions (such as banks and the railroads) in order to defend the interests of the exploited farmer or laborer.

At another level, the trickster appeals to the contemporary middle-class reader, as well to as that nineteenth-century working-class audience, in that this hero is able to defy social expectations and successfully rise above the restrictions of social class. Often, the trickster hero is a master of disguise, which is one of the most prevalent formulaic motifs in all of popular fiction. The ability to transform into someone else, through elaborate disguise, is emblematic of fluid upward mobility, an aspiration of the middle class, as its members seek to better their station in life by hard work and perseverance. Peter Blood is, of course, a master of disguise and deception, and throughout his many adventures he is able to baffle his enemies and defeat his opponents, whether they be thick-headed English antagonists, or hostile Spanish or French adversaries. Typically, he triumphs in the face of certain defeat. For example, Peter Blood is reduced from his secure middle-class occupation as physician to a state of slavery by an immoral and ruthless court early in Sabatini's novel. Yet, by his wits and fortitude (and obvious good fortune), he is able to overcome terrible adversity and establish himself as a noble leader of men, and is eventually offered “the governorship of Jamaica in His Majesty's name.” Peter Blood's rise to power is emblematic of the American middle class myth of success. It is also emblematic of the British love of social grace displayed under the most difficult of circumstances. By his actions, Blood demonstrates that nobility is innate. It is achieved by chivalrous behavior and not by aristocratic birth. It is not happenstance that some of Blood's most vicious enemies are from the privileged English class. Interestingly, Peter Blood himself is not English, but Irish, and his author is neither American nor British, but Italian (though Sabatini did become a British citizen in 1918). Peter Blood's dramatic rise from slave to pirate captain, in fact, parallels Sabatini's own rise to international notoriety, from a relatively unknown, struggling writer to the most important and popular author of historical fiction to have published in the years between the two world wars.

Rafael Sabatini was born on April 29, 1875, in Jesi, Italy, the central portion of the country. His mother was British, which explains his proficiency with written English, and his father was Italian. His education bore a continental flavor, as he attended both the Lycée of Oporto, Portugal, and the École Cantonate of Zoug, Switzerland. He eventually ended up working for a Liverpool newspaper, though he left the newspaper business to become a full-time creative writer and historian, going on to publish novels, short stories, theatrical plays, and non-fiction histories. His entry into fiction writing, however, was not without a difficult internship. In a small, promotional pamphlet published in 1927 by Houghton Mifflin entitled
At the Home of Rafael Sabatini
, Charles S. Olcott writes:

 

Horrible weather metaphor aside, Olcott's point was a good one in its description of Sabatini's twenty-year “overnight” success with
Scaramouche
. St. John Adcock reports in his
The Glory that Was Grub Street: Impressions of Contemporary Authors
(1928) that Sabatini had to work his way through a number of rejections slips before discovering his rhythm as a writer. “He wrote short stories,” Adcock notes, “and, like most beginners, had manuscripts rejected and accepted by the magazines.”
³

Sabatini's first published novel was
The Lovers of Yvonne
(1902), which was followed by
The Tavern Knight
(1904), a title that is occasionally identified incorrectly as Sabatini's first novel. At the onset of World War I, Sabatini worked in the Intelligence Department of the British War Office. During that decade, he began to gain some measure of success as both a fiction writer and as an historian. He published two excellent historical biographies—
The Life of Cesare Borgia of Grance
(1911) and
Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition
(1913)—as well as several good historical novels, including
The Strolling Saint
(1913) and
The Sea-Hawk
(1915). But it was with the appearance of his novel
Scaramouche: A Romance of the French Revolution
in 1921 that he achieved both his breakthrough success and his introduction to a wide readership on both sides of the Atlantic. Charles S. Olcott reported that Sabatini encountered difficulties in the writing of
Scaramouche
, destroying some fifty thousand words of an early draft before beginning the version that eventually found its way to print.
⁴
He followed
Scaramouche
the next year with the publication of an historical novel that would finally establish his reputation as a bestselling writer,
Captain Blood: His Odyssey
(1922). Sabatini continued to write prolifically throughout his life, his major work including
Mistress Wilding
(1924),
The Carolinian
(1925),
The Black Swan
(1932),
The Lost King
(1937),
The Sword of Islam
(1939),
Columbus
(1942), the collection
Turbulent Tales
(1946), and
The Gamester
(1949), his final novel before his death in 1950 while vacationing in Adelboden, Switzerland. Several omnibus editions of Sabatini's work were released posthumously—
Sinner, Saint, and Jester
(1954) and
In the Shadow of the Guillotine
(1955), as was the collection
The Fortunes of Casanova and Other Stories
(1993). Sabatini wrote a number of plays as well, during the first three decades of the twentieth century, beginning in 1903 with
Kuomi, The Jester
(co-authored with Stephanie Baring), and including several others, such as
Scaramouche
(1922), that were based on his own novels. The International Movie Database lists Sabatini in the “writing credits” for three films that were released in the 1920s—
Bluff
(1921),
The Recoil
(1922), and
The Scourge
(1922)—and in the 1930s Sabatini edited two massive anthologies of fiction,
A Century of Sea Stories
(1934) and
A Century of Historical Stories
(1936).

In his preface to
A Century of Historical Stories
, Sabatini explained his philosophy in the writing of historical fiction. He claimed that historical fiction requires its author to be both novelist and historian, an enviable predicament that he views as a prestigious occupation for a storyteller. Sabatini went on to say that the historical novelist must be a dedicated researcher, even though only a small percentage of the research may actually end up in the story itself. One of the important benefits of such work, he argued, is to provide the reader with the impression that what he or she is reading is realistic, to provide a “sense of period,” in Sabatini's words. And, as a storyteller first and foremost, the historical novelist must also ensure that factual details and historical trivia do not interfere with the “sweep of the narrative.” Sabatini recognized that the primary goal of the popular novelist is entertainment, and that too many details about such things as weapons and furniture may hinder a story's pacing.
⁵
Sabatini expanded this argument in an essay entitled “Historical Fiction,” which appeared in the collection of essays,
What Is a Book?: Thoughts About Writing
(1935), edited by Dale Warren:

What is being asserted in this passage is the endorsement of realistic fiction, and the rejection of the romance. A definition of romance states that it involves “a prose narrative treating imaginary characters involved in events remote in time or space and usually heroic, adventurous, or mysterious.”
⁷
Throughout the nineteenth century—in the work of Scott, Cooper, Dumas, Stevenson, and Weyman—the romance was the primary narrative form of the historical novel. Sabatini objected to the romancer's excess of imagination, and by distancing himself from this school he subsequently establishes himself as a modern writer, an author who values the use of realism in historical fiction. But his was not a total conversion. Sabatini's novels are actually a blend of romanticism and realism, an artistic stance that allowed him great flexibility as a novelist. He could move his plot from the larger-than-life deeds of his swashbuckling tricksters, like Captain Blood, to well-researched descriptions of actual historic people and events. He could therefore have his hero woo his lady love according to the most stringent high romance rituals of courtly love, as Blood does with Arabella Bishop, or he could plunge his reader straight into the heat of battle with the gripping force of authenticity, as seen in Chapter XVI of
Captain Blood,
entitled “The Trap,” or in Chapter XXX, “The Last Fight of the
Arabella.
” Not many historical novelists, before or since, could manage as effectively this merging of two such different and distinct literary styles.

In addition, Sabatini believed that historical fiction could be categorized in one of three areas. The first category features stories in which entirely invented characters and events are placed in actual historical moments. The second deals exclusively with period authenticity, examining a specific period in time and restricting the narrative point-of-view to an interpretation of the facts. The third category, the one that Sabatini himself employed with
Captain Blood,
presents history as a narrative that: “weave[s] the author's inventions, mingling historical with fictitious characters and actual with imagined happenings.” This third type of historical fiction, according to Sabatini, was the variant Alexandre Dumas favored. “It is the form preferred also by Stanley Weyman,” adds Sabatini, “whom we may regard as responsible for the revival, some forty years ago, of the historical novel, and for giving it the impetus towards the form in which we now possess.”
⁸

Sabatini made no mystery of the fact that he greatly enjoyed researching the past, and he greatly relished his role as historian. In his stories, he placed significant clues indicating that the persona of the historian is never too far from the action of the narrative. In
Captain Blood,
Sabatini's voice interrupts with an historian's omniscient commentary of the events that are transpiring. At the end of Chapter XII, “Don Pedro Sangre,” for example, Sabatini writes: “It says much for Peter Blood that the argument should have left him unmoved. It is a little thing, perhaps, but in a narrative in which there is so much that tells against him, I cannot—since my story is in the nature of a brief for the defense—afford to slur a circumstance that is so strongly in his favor. . . .” And, at the beginning of the next chapter, “Tortuga,” Sabatini further reveals that Peter Blood's “exploits” were, in fact, recorded by the Somersetshire shipmaster, Jeremy Pitt, as part of a “twenty-odd volume” log of the frigate
Arabella
. Sabatini takes care to establish his own personal pronoun in the story, as the individual examining Pitt's log, which is “preserved in the library of Mr. James Speke of Comerton.” Thus, the reader is presented with not one, but two historians at work in the novel. The reason Sabatini does this is fairly obvious; his goal is to frame Peter Blood's seemingly impossible accomplishments with the appearance of reality. It is a narrative device, framing the wild action of the novel's plot with the sobering pretense that what has occurred is part of an actual recorded history. Obviously, in Sabatini's view, if one historian is a good thing to have, then two are that much better.