Synopses & Reviews
Peter Blood is a physician and an English gentleman who becomes a pirate out of a rankling sense of injustice. Barely escaping the gallows after his arrest for treating wounded rebels who were fighting the oppressive King James, Blood flees England and becomes enslaved on a Barbados plantation of buccaneers. When he escapes, no ship sailing the Spanish Main is safe from Blood and his companions. Abounding with adventure, color, romance, and strong social commentary on the evils of slavery and the dangers of intolerance, this classic adventure is a story about how oppression drives men to desperate actions, how fate plays a hand in everyone's life, and how love is ultimately the greatest power of all.
Edited with an introduction by Gary Hoppenstand.
Review
"Glorious...I never enjoyed a novel more than
Captain Blood." —
Norman Mailer
"One of the great unrecognized novels of the twentieth century, and as close as any modern writer has come to a prose epic." —George MacDonald Fraser
Synopsis
Includes bibliographical references (p. [xxvii]-xxix).
About the Author
Rafael Sabatini was born in Italy, in 1875, to two opera singers, and often joined his parents on their professional tours of Europe. In 1918, he became a British subject and worked for the British Intelligence during World War I. He published his first novel,
The Lovers of Yvonne, at the age of 27, and continued to produce numerous historical novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, and some biographies.
Scaramouche was first published in 1921, followed by
Captain Blood in 1922. Sabatini died in 1950, while vacationing at a Swiss ski resort.
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.
Table of Contents
Introduction vii
Suggestions for Further Reading xxvii
I. The Messenger 1
II. Kirke's Dragons 10
III. The Lord Chief Justice 19
IV. Human Merchandise 33
V. Arabella Bishop 40
VI. Plans of Escape 53
VII. Pirates 69
VIII. Spaniards 80
IX. The Rebels-Convict 87
X. Don Diego 100
XI. Filial Piety 106
XII. Don Pedro Sangre 118
XIII. Tortuga 126
XIV. Levasseur's Heroics 135
XV. The Ransom 145
XVI. The Trap 157
XVII. The Dupes 169
XVIII. The Milagrosa 184
XIX. The Meeting 197
XX. Thief and Pirate 208
XXI. The Service of King James 220
XXII. Hostilities 234
XXIII. Hostages 243
XXIV. War 256
XXV. The Service of King Louis 269
XXVI. M. de Rivarol 279
XXVII. Cartagena 292
XXVIII. The Honor of M. de Rivarol 302
XXIX. The Service of King William 310
XXX. The Last Flight of the Arabella 316
XXXI. His Excellency the Governor 323