Captain Blood (4 page)

The larger injustice, of course, in these opening chapters of
Captain Blood,
beyond the hijacking of the application of law in Jeffrey's court, is the even more reprehensible practice of slavery, another thematic point in Sabatini's novel. After being convicted of treason, Peter Blood is saved from the hangman's noose when his sentence is commuted to transportation to Jamaica as a slave, along with eleven hundred other prisoners. Despite the drunken and frenzied objections of Chief Justice Jeffreys, claiming “misplaced clemency” on the king's part, Sabatini makes it quite clear that clemency had nothing to do with this decision. The reader is told frankly that King James II, in his diabolical wisdom, had realized that he was wasting the valuable resource that his captives offered as exploitable labor, and hence wasting an unrealized profit. Sabatini adds: “He [King James II] knew that to spare lives in this fashion was to convert them into living deaths. Many must succumb in torment to the horrors of West Indian slavery, and so be the envy of their surviving companions.” The reader understands this to be a grotesque rationale, enacted by a heartless ruler for the meanest of purposes, and the depiction of this grim stage of Peter Blood's odyssey transforms the erstwhile swashbuckling adventure story into a captivity narrative, a story of slavery in the New World that certainly resonates with an American audience all too familiar with the horrors of America's colonial slave-trading and antebellum slave-owning past. Sabatini's portrayal of slavery is an interesting one, however, in that it reveals that slavery, as an institution, extended beyond the African slave trade in this hemisphere, and that its existence, in any form and for any reason, was a crime against all humanity. Sabatini underscores in Peter Blood's enslavement the immoral economic and political underpinnings of the practice of slavery, and Blood's escape from this pernicious condition makes Sabatini's novel a truly American story in its celebration of personal freedom. Regrettably, elements of racist nationalism are nevertheless still evident in
Captain Blood,
in the author's stereotypical portrayals of the Spanish and French as stock villains.

The popularity of
Captain Blood
spilled over into the medium of the motion picture, and two film versions were released in the 1920s and 1930s. The first, a silent film produced by Vitagraph and directed by David Smith, appeared in 1924 and starred J. Warren Kerrigan as Peter Blood and Jean Paige as Arabella Bishop. The second version, released in 1935 by Warner Brothers, was the more famous of the two. It was directed by Michael Curtiz and featured an unknown Australian actor named Errol Flynn in the starring role as Peter Blood (Olivia de Havilland, another relative unknown, appeared as Arabella Bishop, and Basil Rathbone as Levasseur). Robert Donat was originally cast in the lead, but failed to appear when the shooting began. The studio then wanted to cast Brian Aherne in the starring role, but he declined. For Errol Flynn and Warner Brothers both, the final casting selection was a fortuitous one. With
Captain Blood
, Warner Brothers helped to reinvigorate the popularity of the swashbuckling pirate film with movie audiences and with other Hollywood studios, and Errol Flynn himself became the foremost of cinematic swashbucklers.

In his Preface to his edited collection of fiction,
A Century of Sea Stories
(1934), Rafael Sabatini comments eloquently on the function of the sea adventure story, reminding us indirectly that a substantial portion of
Captain Blood: His Odyssey
takes place on ships sailing the ocean. Sabatini writes:

 

Captain Blood
is, of course, itself a classic sea story, one of the most famous and influential adventures of the sea ever published. It remains as fresh and exciting to readers today as it did when it was first published some eighty years ago. And, as Sabatini informs us in the above passage, as a classic sea adventure,
Captain Blood
does indeed present its protagonist with a number of conflicts, internal and external, practical and philosophical. The resolution of Peter Blood's conflicts during his odyssey is entirely satisfying. His various triumphs celebrate the victory of the virtuous hero in a world of inequity, and celebrate the final attainment of love and honor for those who deserve them, achievements snatched from the designs of a sometimes malicious Fate. Many readers would probably agree that, all else aside,
Captain Blood
is simply no less than a wonderfully entertaining story, replete with action, romance, and adventure, and this quality alone is enough to guarantee its lasting immortality.

 

 

NOTES

Suggestions for Further Reading

Bloom, Clive.
Cult Fiction: Popular Reading and Pulp Theory
. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996.

Brantlinger, Patrick.
Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914
. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Cawelti, John G.
Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Curtis, Sandra R.
Zorro Unmasked: The Official History
. New York: Hyperion, 1998.

Drew, Bernard A.
Action Series and Sequels: A Bibliography of Espionage, Vigilante, and Solder-of-Fortune Novels
. New York: Garland Publishing, 1988.

Fisher, Margery.
The Bright Face of Danger: An Exploration of the Adventure Story
. Boston: Horn Book, 1986.

Green, Martin.
The Adventurous Male: Chapters in the History of the White Male Mind
. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Hoppenstand, Gary.
Popular Fiction: An Anthology
. New York: Long-man, 1998.

Howarth, Patrick.
Play Up and Play the Game: The Heroes of Popular Fiction
. London: Eyre Methuen, 1973.

Hughes, Linda K., and Michael Lund.
The Victorian Serial
. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1991.

James, Lawrence.
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1997. Note: This is a paperback reprint of the 1994 edition.

Judd, Denis.
Empire: The British Imperial Experience from 1765 to the Present
. New York: BasicBooks, 1996.

Levine, Lawrence W.
Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Lofts, W.O.G., and D.J. Adley.
The Men Behind Boy's Fiction
. London: Howard Baker, 1970.

Lukács, Georg.
The Historical Novel
. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Note: this is a translation by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, copyright 1962.

McCann, Sean.
Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism
. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

McClure, John A.
Late Imperial Romance
. London: Verso, 1994.

McCracken, Scott.
Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction
. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1998.

Mitch, David F.
The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England: The Influence of Private Choice and Public Policy
. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992.

Noel, Mary.
Villains Galore: The Heyday of the Popular Story Weekly
. New York: Macmillan Company, 1954.

Orel, Harold.
The Historical Novel from Scott to Sabatini: Changing Attitudes toward a Literary Genre, 1814-1920
. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.

Pyle, Howard.
The Book of Pirates
. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2000. Note: this is a paperback reprint of the 1921 Harper & Brothers Publishers edition.

Slotkin, Richard.
Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America
. New York: Atheneum, 1992.

Smith, Erin A.
Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines
. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.

Smith, Evans Lansing.
The Hero Journey in Literature
. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997.

Taves, Brian.
The Romance of Adventure: The Genre of Historical Adventure Movies
. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.

Twitchell, James B.
Preposterous Violence: Fables of Aggression in Modern Culture
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Watson, Colin.
Snobbery with Violence: Crime Stories and Their Audiences
. New York: Mysterious Press, 1988. Note: this is a paperback reprint of the 1971 edition.

Zweig, Paul.
The Adventurer: The Fate of Adventure in the Western World
. New York: Basic Books, 1974.

CHAPTER I

THE MESSENGER

Peter Blood, bachelor of medicine and several other things besides, smoked a pipe and tended the geraniums boxed on the sill of his window above Water Lane in the town of Bridgewater.

Sternly disapproving eyes considered him from a window opposite, but went disregarded. Mr. Blood's attention was divided between his task and the stream of humanity in the narrow street below; a stream which poured for the second time that day towards Castle Field, where earlier in the afternoon Ferguson, the Duke's chaplain, had preached a sermon containing more treason than divinity.

These straggling, excited groups were mainly composed of men with green boughs in their hats and the most ludicrous of weapons in their hands. Some, it is true, shouldered fowling pieces, and here and there a sword was brandished; but more of them were armed with clubs, and most of them trailed the mammoth pikes fashioned out of scythes, as formidable to the eye as they were clumsy to the hand. There were weavers, brewers, carpenters, smiths, masons, bricklayers, cobblers, and representatives of every other of the trades of peace among these improvised men of war. Bridgewater, like Taunton, had yielded so generously of its manhood to the service of the bastard Duke that for any to abstain whose age and strength admitted of his bearing arms was to brand himself a coward or a papist.

Yet Peter Blood, who was not only able to bear arms, but trained and skilled in their use, who was certainly no coward, and a papist only when it so suited him, tended his geraniums and smoked his pipe on that warm July evening as indifferently as if nothing were a foot. One other thing he did. He flung after those war-fevered enthusiasts a line of Horace—a poet for whose work he had early conceived an inordinate affection:

And now perhaps you guess why the hot, intrepid blood inherited from the roving sires of his Somersetshire mother remained cool amidst all this frenzied fanatical heat of rebellion; why the turbulent spirit which had forced him once from the sedate academical bonds his father would have imposed upon him, should now remain quiet in the very midst of turbulence. You realize how he regarded these men who were rallying to the banners of liberty—the banners woven by the virgins of Taunton, the girls from the seminaries of Miss Blake and Mrs. Musgrove, who—as the ballad runs—had ripped open their silk petticoats to make colors for King Monmouth's army. That Latin line, contemptuously flung after them as they clattered down the cobbled street, reveals his mind. To him they were fools rushing in wicked frenzy upon their ruin.