Captain Blood (Penguin Classics)
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
CHAPTER I - THE MESSENGER
CHAPTER II - KIRKE’S DRAGOONS
CHAPTER III - THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE
CHAPTER IV - HUMAN MERCHANDISE
CHAPTER V - ARABELLA BISHOP
CHAPTER VI - PLANS OF ESCAPE
CHAPTER VII - PIRATES
CHAPTER VIII - SPANIARDS
THE REBELS-CONVICT
CHAPTER X - DON DIEGO
CHAPTER XI - FILIAL PIETY
CHAPTER XII - DON PEDRO SANGRE
CHAPTER XIII - TORTUGA
CHAPTER XIV - LEVASSEUR’S HEROICS
CHAPTER XV - THE RANSOM
CHAPTER XVI - THE TRAP
CHAPTER XVII - THE DUPES
CHAPTER XVIII - THE MILAGROSA
CHAPTER XIX - THE MEETING
CHAPTER XX - THIEF AND PIRATE
CHAPTER XXI - THE SERVICE OF KING JAMES
CHAPTER XXII - HOSTILITIES
CHAPTER XXIII - HOSTAGES
CHAPTER XXIV - WAR
CHAPTER XXV - THE SERVICE OF KING LOUIS
CHAPTER XXVI - M. DE RIVAROL
CHAPTER XXVII - CARTAGENA
CHAPTER XVIII - THE HONOR OF M. DE RIVAROL
CHAPTER XXIX - THE SERVICE OF KING WILLIAM
CHAPTER XXX - THE LAST FIGHT OF THE ARABELLA
CHAPTER XXXI - HIS EXCELLENCY THE GOVERNOR
FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE
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.
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.
PENGUIN BOOKS
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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
Introduction copyright © Gary Hoppenstand, 2003
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Sabatini, Rafael, 1875-1950.
Captain Blood / by Rafael Sabatini ; with an introduction by Gary Hoppenstand.
p. cm.—(Penguin classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN : 978-1-440-68422-7
1. Pirates—Fiction. 2. Physicians—Fiction. 3. British—Caribbean Area—Fiction.
4. Caribbean Area—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series.
PR6037.A2 C35 2003
823’.912—dc21 2002032983
http://us.penguingroup.com
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 identity—the one as a vigilante superman and the other as foppish buffoon—to 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.
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:
Few authors have ever sprung into
popularity with more startling suddenness than Rafael Sabatini. Yet “Scaramouche” was not his first book. He had been writing stories for twenty years. Several of these were sold in America, but in scant quantities. Even “The Sea Hawk,” now widely known, “went begging.” The Great War [World War I], when the public scarcely wished to think of a novel of any kind, was clearly responsible. But in 1921 the war was over. There was a reaction against war books, and so when an historical novel, with a thrill like Dumas, but a style all its own, suddenly came into view it was like the bursting out of the sun from behind a mass of cirro-cumulus clouds after a threatening morning.2
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).