Critical Evaluation
Although it is fiction, Captain Blood is based firmly on historical events. The Monmouth Rebellion took place, but it came to an abrupt end with the Battle of Sedgemoor (early July, 1685), the battle in which Lord Gildoy is wounded. Rafael Sabatini based the opening scenes of his book on the diary of a real doctor named Henry Pitman who cared for some of the soldiers wounded in that battle. Pitman, too, was arrested and tried by Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys during what are remembered as the Bloody Assizes, and he too was sentenced to death—a fate he avoided only because he was transported to the West Indies as a slave.
Blood’s subsequent career as a privateer was based loosely on the exploits of seventeenth century Welsh privateer Henry Morgan, as related by Alexandre Exquemelin in his famous De Americaensche Zee-Roovers (1678; The Buccaneers of America, 1684). Sabatini’s narrative voice, however, claims to draw his material from the account of Blood’s activities kept by Jeremiah Pitt, and he establishes an air of verisimilitude by noting the latitude and longitude of certain events as supposedly recorded by Pitt. Acknowledging the resemblance between Blood’s career and Morgan’s, Sabatini cleverly suggests—in a fiction within a fiction—that Morgan’s chronicler must have had access to Pitt’s account in compiling his own.
The shifting political alliances that Sabatini dramatizes as taking place in the Caribbean are accurate. The British colony of Barbados and the buccaneers’ lair of Tortuga were much as the novelist depicts them, and buccaneers did attack Maracaibo and Cartagena, although Sabatini alters the details to suit his story. It is in his seemingly perfunctory treatment of such places that twenty-first century readers may find Sabatini disappointing, for he is more interested in analyzing character than in describing coastlines and pinpointing the location of cities and islands. Realizing that he is dealing with inherently dramatic, even sensational material, Sabatini writes in a restrained, coolly ironic style that generally increases its drama, although here again modern readers may occasionally find his treatment to be offhanded. He handles set pieces such as sea battles and personal confrontations agilely but supplies only the most essential details. He employs nautical terms naturally but sparingly.
The greatest appeal of Captain Blood, and one of the reasons for its continued popularity, lies in its protagonist’s predicament, that of an honorable man wronged and misunderstood even by the woman he loves. Acting under the dictates of his own personal code, Blood strives to maintain a modicum of honor by following the career of a privateer rather than a pirate. Privateers operated as commissioned agents of a government and were expected to attack only the ships and settlements of hostile nations, while pirates, who became more common in the eighteenth century, regarded all ships and men as potential prey. Blood derives bitter satisfaction from his recognition that Don Miguel and de Rivarol—ostensibly honorable representatives of their governments—behave more like pirates than he does.
After Blood’s escape from Barbados, the novel’s plot is for the most part episodic, but Sabatini treats every episode as an opportunity to dramatize Blood’s predicament or to advance, however indirectly, the story of his ongoing struggles with Bishop and Don Miguel. Coincidence plays a large role in the novel, and, realizing perhaps that even the most forgiving readers may find his use of the device excessive, Sabatini elevates it to a kind of historical principle: “Life itself is little more than a series of coincidences. . . . Indeed, coincidence may be defined as the very tool used by Fate to shape the destinies of men...
(This entire section contains 709 words.)
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and nations.”
Peter Blood proved to be such an intriguing and successful protagonist that Sabatini added two collections of stories to his odyssey: Captain Blood Returns (1931; also published as The Chronicles of Captain Blood) and The Fortunes of Captain Blood (1936). These are not so much sequels as episodes drawn from the same period covered in the novel. Adding to the figure’s popularity was the 1935 Michael Curtiz film adaptation of Captain Blood. Starring Errol Flynn and featuring rousing music by noted composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the film is a faithful adaptation and reproduces the gallant and swashbuckling spirit of its source.