Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini

Book Details

While attending to some of the rebels wounded at the Battle of Sedgemoor, Dr. Peter Blood is arrested. He is convicted of treason and sentenced to slave labor in the Crown Colony of Barbados.

When a Spanish force attacks and raids the town of Bridgetown, Blood escapes with a number of other convict-slaves, captures the Spaniards’ ship and sails away to become one of the greatest pirates in the Caribbean: Captain Blood!

Woe to those who cross this swashbuckling scourge of the seas.

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
Chapter IX – 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 XXVIII – The Honour 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

Rafael Sabatini (1875–1950) was born in Iesi, Italy. Both of his parents were opera singers who became vocal teachers. As a boy, Sabatini lived part-time in England with his grandfather, attended school in Portugal and later in Switzerland. When he was 17, he returned to England to live permanently. He consciously chose to write in his adopted language, because, he said, “all the best stories are written in English”.

Sabatini first introduced the character Captain Blood in a series of eight short stories in Premier Magazine as Tales of the Brethren of the Main, published from December 1920 to March 1921, and reprinted in Adventure Magazine from January to May 1921. The stories were then woven by Sabatini into a continuous narrative in novel form, published as Captain Blood: His Odyssey in 1922.

The novel was first made into a film with the silent version of Captain Blood in 1924, starring J. Warren Kerrigan. Stills from that movie illustrate this edition of the book.

In 1935, Captain Blood was remade, directed by Michael Curtiz, and starred Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone, and Ross Alexander. This movie launched the careers of both Flynn and de Havilland, and turned them into major stars.

Captain Blood has 14 illustrations.

Files:

1. Sabatini-CaptainBlood.epub

Excerpt: Captain Blood

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 suited him, tended his geraniums and smoked his pipe on that warm July evening as indifferently as if nothing were afoot. 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:

“Quo, quo, scelesti, ruitis?” *

* “Where, o where are you rushing, madmen?”

“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 colours 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.

You see, he knew too much about this fellow Monmouth and the pretty brown slut who had borne him, to be deceived by the legend of legitimacy, on the strength of which this standard of rebellion had been raised. He had read the absurd proclamation posted at the Cross at Bridgewater – as it had been posted also at Taunton and elsewhere – setting forth that “upon the decease of our Sovereign Lord Charles the Second, the right of succession to the Crown of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, with the dominions and territories thereunto belonging, did legally descend and devolve upon the most illustrious and high-born Prince James, Duke of Monmouth, son and heir apparent to the said King Charles the Second.”

It had moved him to laughter, as had the further announcement that “James Duke of York did first cause the said late King to be poysoned, and immediately thereupon did usurp and invade the Crown.”

He knew not which was the greater lie. For Mr. Blood had spent a third of his life in the Netherlands, where this same James Scott – who now proclaimed himself James the Second, by the grace of God, King, et cetera – first saw the light some six-and-thirty years ago, and he was acquainted with the story current there of the fellow’s real paternity. Far from being legitimate – by virtue of a pretended secret marriage between Charles Stuart and Lucy Walter – it was possible that this Monmouth who now proclaimed himself King of England was not even the illegitimate child of the late sovereign. What but ruin and disaster could be the end of this grotesque pretension? How could it be hoped that England would ever swallow such a Perkin? And it was on his behalf, to uphold his fantastic claim, that these West Country clods, led by a few armigerous Whigs, had been seduced into rebellion!

“Quo, quo, scelesti, ruitis?”

He laughed and sighed in one; but the laugh dominated the sigh, for Mr. Blood was unsympathetic, as are most self-sufficient men; and he was very self-sufficient; adversity had taught him so to be. A more tender-hearted man, possessing his vision and his knowledge, might have found cause for tears in the contemplation of these ardent, simple, Nonconformist sheep going forth to the shambles – escorted to the rallying ground on Castle Field by wives and daughters, sweethearts and mothers, sustained by the delusion that they were to take the field in defence of Right, of Liberty, and of Religion. For he knew, as all Bridgewater knew and had known now for some hours, that it was Monmouth’s intention to deliver battle that same night. The Duke was to lead a surprise attack upon the Royalist army under Feversham that was now encamped on Sedgemoor. Mr. Blood assumed that Lord Feversham would be equally well-informed, and if in this assumption he was wrong, at least he was justified of it. He was not to suppose the Royalist commander so indifferently skilled in the trade he followed.

Mr. Blood knocked the ashes from his pipe, and drew back to close his window. As he did so, his glance traveling straight across the street met at last the glance of those hostile eyes that watched him. There were two pairs, and they belonged to the Misses Pitt, two amiable, sentimental maiden ladies who yielded to none in Bridgewater in their worship of the handsome Monmouth.

Mr. Blood smiled and inclined his head, for he was on friendly terms with these ladies, one of whom, indeed, had been for a little while his patient. But there was no response to his greeting. Instead, the eyes gave him back a stare of cold disdain. The smile on his thin lips grew a little broader, a little less pleasant. He understood the reason of that hostility, which had been daily growing in this past week since Monmouth had come to turn the brains of women of all ages. The Misses Pitt, he apprehended, contemned him that he, a young and vigorous man, of a military training which might now be valuable to the Cause, should stand aloof; that he should placidly smoke his pipe and tend his geraniums on this evening of all evenings, when men of spirit were rallying to the Protestant Champion, offering their blood to place him on the throne where he belonged.

If Mr. Blood had condescended to debate the matter with these ladies, he might have urged that having had his fill of wandering and adventuring, he was now embarked upon the career for which he had been originally intended and for which his studies had equipped him; that he was a man of medicine and not of war; a healer, not a slayer. But they would have answered him, he knew, that in such a cause it behoved every man who deemed himself a man to take up arms. They would have pointed out that their own nephew Jeremiah, who was by trade a sailor, the master of a ship – which by an ill-chance for that young man had come to anchor at this season in Bridgewater Bay – had quitted the helm to snatch up a musket in defence of Right. But Mr. Blood was not of those who argue. As I have said, he was a self-sufficient man.

He closed the window, drew the curtains, and turned to the pleasant, candle-lighted room, and the table on which Mrs. Barlow, his housekeeper, was in the very act of spreading supper. To her, however, he spoke aloud his thought.

“It’s out of favour I am with the vinegary virgins over the way.”

Excerpt From: Rafael Sabatini. “Captain Blood: His Odyssey.”