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:It is demanded of the writer of fiction, whether novelist or dramatist, that the events he sets forth shall be endowed with the quality of verisimilitude. What he writes need not necessarily be true; but, at least, it must seem to be true, so that it may carry that conviction without which interest fails to be aroused. The historian appears to lie under no such restraining obligation. Whilst avowed Fiction is scornfully rejected when it transcends the bounds of human probability, alleged Fact would sometimes seem to be the more assured of enduring acceptance, the more flagrantly impossible and irreconcilable are its details.6
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.
Working as an historian, then, in the writing of his novel, Sabatini claimed to have taken great pains in researching the background of both his setting and his protagonist. As reported by Charles S. Olcott, Sabatini once informed him that Captain Blood “was based on his reading of Esquemeling, the Dutch chronicler, who sailed with Sir Henry Morgan and recorded his exploits.”9 Other sources were also read as background detail for his story and, according to Sabatini, the character of Peter Blood was based on an actual west country doctor named Pitt who, like Blood, was unjustly punished for his treatment of a “wounded follower of Monmouth.” As happened with Peter Blood in his adventures, Pitt was also “sentenced to transportation for the high treason of succoring a rebel,” shipped to the Caribbean, to Barbados, and there sold as a slave. “The realistic descriptions,” Olcott adds, “of Bridgetown, Maracaibo Bay, Port Royal, and other scenes of the Caribbean Sea are the result of careful reading and study, for Mr. Sabatini never visited this side of the Atlantic.”10 In his introduction to a reprint of Captain Blood, noted British author of the Flashman series (and a fine historian in his own right), George MacDonald Fraser, cites a somewhat different version of Captain Blood’s source origin than does Olcott:The first part of the book [Captain Blood] is based on the experiences of a surgeon named Henry Pitman who, according to Sabatini’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, was accused of succoring rebels in Monmouth’s ill-fated attempt to overthrow King James II, and subsequently condemned by Judge Jeffreys at the Bloody Assize, that notorious travesty of justice in which both rebels and innocents were sent to the gallows and the plantations. 11
Fraser then notes that the second part of Sabatini’s novel, which recounts Peter Blood’s ascendancy to a buccaneer captain, is based loosely on “the spectacular career of Sir Henry Morgan (c. 1635-88), the Welsh adventurer whose piratical exploits against the cities and shipping of New Spain were given sensational publicity by one of his followers, the Dutchman Alexander Esquemelin, in The Buccaneers of America, which became a seventeenth-century best-seller in several languages.” 12
Bernard Cornwell, himself a popular historical novelist and the author of the popular Sharpe series, states that Sabatini placed the setting of his novel a generation after Morgan, employing the Bloody Assizes as the beginning of Blood’s adventures. Describing this violent episode in English history, Cornwell writes:In 1685 the ineffectual Duke of Monmouth led a rebell
ion against James II of England. His ragamuffin troops were mostly raised in the west country (the southwestern counties of England) and fought a disastrous battle (the last on English soil) at Sedgemoor. In the wake of their defeat, Baron Jeffreys, the Lord Chief Justice, was sent on a circuit of the west country to act as judge in the treason trials. What followed was an orgy of royal revenge. Around two hundred people were executed, and Jeffreys, whose cruelty was famous, probably would have killed even more had he not hit upon the expedient of condemning most of the prisoners to slavery instead.13
Scholar and historian David Cordingly, in Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates (1995), outlines the critical difference between pirates and privateers. A pirate, states Cordingly, is someone who commits robbery on the ocean. A privateer, on the other hand (defined as either the name of a ship or the name of the commander and crew of a ship), was authorized by a government to attack any sea vessels of a hostile nation. This governmental authorization was documented in an elaborate “letter of marque and reprisal.”14 Henry Morgan was therefore a privateer (or buccaneer) rather than a pirate. Cordingly states that Morgan was no common buccaneer. For his services to England, he was given a knighthood, and King Charles II appointed him Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica.15 Sabatini built his protagonist, Peter Blood, out of these similar historical materials, using the oppositional nature of what Blood does and what he desires as a prominent theme in the novel. Blood’s personality encompasses both the profane and the sacred. He wrestles with that notion that we all wrestle with: the longing to gain something better than what we already have.
Blood attempts several times during the course of his odyssey to escape the despised occupation of piracy, trying to become instead the more respectable privateer. At one point in the novel, he serves the English, and at one point the French, as a privateer. Both commissions are fraught with conflict. But Blood abhors the thought that he is a pirate. It challenges his innate sense of justice and serves as a constant reminder of his inferior and unacceptable social station as an outlaw. In Chapter XVIII, “The Milagrosa,” the reader learns that Lord Julian Wade is on a mission from the English government to offer Blood the King’s commission, which attempts to solve the problem of Blood’s continuing hostilities with the newly appointed Deputy-Governor of Jamaica, the dastardly Colonel Bishop: “[Lord Sunderland] bethought him of the plan adopted with Morgan, who had been enlisted into the King’s service under Charles II. It occurred to him that a similar course might be similarly effective with Captain Blood.” Blood reluctantly decides to accept the offer in Chapter XXI, “The Service of King James,” telling his crew: “Don’t think I accept it [the King’s commission] willingly . . . I accept it as the only way to save us all from certain destruction. . . .” And later, in Chapter XXVI, “M. de Rivarol,” after being recruited as a captain in the service of France, which is at war with Spain at this point, Blood rankles at the French plan to raid Spanish Cartagena. (“He had been deluding himself that he had done with piracy,” Sabatini writes.) Blood tells the French that he will withdraw from his commission, stating: “I accepted the service of the King of France with intent to honor that service. I cannot honour that service by lending countenance to a waste of life and resources in raids upon unimportant settlements, with plunder their only object.”
Like his real-life counterpart, Henry Morgan, Peter Blood finally realizes his dream of becoming respectable. His odyssey (the word “odyssey” is an essential part of the novel’s subtitle) is, foremost, one of personal redemption, as well as social ascension. Blood’s aspirations mirror the reader’s own, in that he sought to find some higher meaning in life, to advocate justice for those who are victimized by unjust laws, and to act with decorum and fairness, while others prefer to engage in selfish brutality. Such a personal journey, Peter Blood’s internal odyssey, struck a powerful, resonating chord with Sabatini’s audience, and secured Peter Blood’s place in the genre of historical fiction as one of its most popular and enduring characters.
Today, Captain Blood enjoys continuing high regard with contemporary literary critics, as well as with its legion of devoted readers. Representative of this enthusiastic reception is George MacDonald Fraser, who claims in his foreword to The Fortunes of Casanova and Other Stories (1994), that no other author—from Scott, to Dumas, to Stevenson—“brought the past to life more vividly.” For writing action, melodrama, or period detail, Fraser adds that there was no one better at this than Sabatini, who was effectively able to demonstrate that history, rather than being some boring subject, was the story of adventure.16 Referring to Captain Blood as a celebrated literary work, Fraser states that it is “the most authentic account in fiction of a remarkable breed of men who played a not unimportant part in the making of the New World.”17 Fraser’s literary peer, Bernard Cornwell, concurs with Fraser’s glowing assessment of Captain Blood, calling it “one of the world’s great stories.”18
American pulp magazine historian Robert Sampson, in Yesterday’s Faces: A Study of Series Characters in the Early Pulp Magazines, Volume 5—Dangerous Horizons (1991), establishes that the 1922 edition of the novel was pre-dated by a series of nine short stories that appeared in the pulp Adventure from June through mid-October, 1921.19 This fact reminds us that, in America, Sabatini wrote fiction for the lowly pulp magazines before he made the jump to the “slicks,” and before he became a best-selling novelist, hence illustrating his appeal to a wide audience, both working and middle class. Following the initial book publication of Captain Blood: His Odyssey, the novel enjoyed continuing success in hardcover reprints, and because of the character’s ongoing popularity, Sabatini later returned to expand Peter Blood’s story in two additional books—Captain Blood Returns in 1931 (also titled The Chronicles of Captain Blood) and The Fortunes of Captain Blood in 1936. These two sequels are essentially collections of loosely connected short stories that, according to Sabatini in his introductory note to Captain Blood Returns, fill in the missing gaps of Jeremy Pitt’s log that were omitted in the first book.20 Captain Blood: His Odyssey is itself a highly episodic novel, one that allowed Sabatini to explore several notable thematic concerns.
The first of these thematic concerns involved the larger question of social justice, a question that was framed by the tyranny of the excesses of political conflict during the reign of King James II of England. Despite the fact that sea battles account for an important share of the novel’s plot, Captain Blood is ostensibly an anti-war novel. Sabatini uses the Monmouth Rebellion as an incident emblematic of the stupidity of war, and the arrest and subsequent trial of Peter Blood as an argument against extremist expressions of blind patriotism. Early in Chapter I, “The Messenger,” Sabatini makes it clear that Blood is a physician concerned only with doctoring those in need and in peacefully tending his geraniums. Sabatini also makes it clear that Blood, though a pacifist, is certainly no coward. He has a military past and is skilled in the use of weapons. Blood’s political apathy, the reader observes, provokes the disapproval of his neighbors in Bridgewater, who think that he should be fighting for the Monmouth cause. Peter Blood is one of those Sabatini protagonists who can see the irony in life when no one else can, and who assumes a satirical posture when confronted by the unreasoning stupidity of others. As Blood observes the Monmouth “war-fevered enthusiasts” march off to battle, the reader is told by the author that, to Blood, “they were fools rushing in wicked frenzy upon their ruin.” A bit later, as Blood objectively endures the sullen looks from the Misses Pitt across the street, “two amiable, sentimental maiden ladies who yielded to none in Bridgewater in their worship of the handsome Monmouth,” he reaffirms in his own mind that he is now “a man of medicine and not of war; a healer, not a slayer,” that he had had his fill of “wandering and adventuring.”
The real tragedy of Blood’s odyssey, when it begins at the end of Chapter I, is that circumstances beyond his control dictated that he be unjustly and cruelly punished for providing
succor to Lord Gildoy, one of the Monmouth rebels. When he is arrested at Oglethorpe’s Farm in Chapter II by the thick-headed Captain Hobart of Colonel Kirke’s dragoons, it is because Blood is engaged in an errand of mercy, but unfortunately for someone on the losing side of a battle. Sabatini thus punctuates the dark irony of this scene by showing that everyone, even the pacifist healer Peter Blood, is a potential victim of war, a notion that is visually underscored by contrasting the idyllic natural setting of the farm (“the fragrant orchards amid which it seemed to drowse in Arcadian peace beside the waters of the Parrett, sparkling in the morning sunlight”) with the horrific aftermath of the battle of Sedgemoor: “On the bridge, as they [Blood and his guide, Jeremiah Pitt] had been riding out of Bridgewater, they had met a vanguard of fugitives from the field of battle, weary, broken men, many of them wounded, all of them terror-stricken, staggering in speedless haste. . . .” Nature is violated by the gross cruelty of man, as Peter Blood’s pacifist beliefs are violated by the gross cruelty of man. Blood’s compassion for the wounded Lord Gildoy is perceived as obvious treason by the likes of Captain Hobart. However, Blood is not without certain mental resources, as he ably demonstrates in his confrontation with the dragoon captain when he temporarily thwarts the obtuse soldier by the use of his keen wit, a trait that will serve him in good stead in his later role as the trickster pirate captain.
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