Captain Blood

For one reason and another, until just now I had never read the once-popular novel Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini. It is exactly the sort of book I would have liked in my teens and twenties, kin to The Three Musketeers and its ilk. I've also never seen the movie, the one which launched the career of Errol Flynn and gave rise to other movies I've enjoyed such as 1935's The Adventures of Robin Hood. I will review it here, past a jump to avoid spoiling it for anyone who would like to read it.

I say that I had not read this novel. I had, however, read a lot of the source material on which Sabatini was drawing. I'm sorry to say that this greatly diminished my enjoyment of the book because I readily recognized where he was just stealing someone else's story and assigning it to his hero. There are a lot of great stories about the buccaneers and pirates of this era, many of them from around a generation earlier in what is called 'the Golden Age of Buccaneering' (a subset of the larger 'Golden Age of Piracy'). Sabatini references some of them in the book, and even playfully confesses to his theft of the story of the raid on Maracaibo.

I have a suspicion that Esquemeling--though how or where I can make no

surmise--must have obtained access to these records, and that he plucked

from them the brilliant feathers of several exploits to stick them into

the tail of his own hero, Captain Morgan. But that is by the way. I

mention it chiefly as a warning, for when presently I come to relate the

affair of Maracaybo, those of you who have read Esquemeling may be in

danger of supposing that Henry Morgan really performed those things

which here are veraciously attributed to Peter Blood. 

Well, I had read Esquemeling, and "Captain Charles Johnson" (probably Daniel Defoe). Sir Henry Morgan's other adventures and ultimate fate as governor of Jamaica are also pirated by the author, which is I suppose of a piece with the subject of the work. 

So I was not amazed by the stories, which was much of the intended charm of the work. The rest of the charm was meant to come from the love story. This requires a conceit that the hero and heroine are exemplars of the tradition of chivalry, which is not entirely implausible given their position as outer-members of the gentry in the late 17th century. The nobility had by that point passed by the high age of chivalry and courtly love, though in the 19th century the English at least would rediscover it as an art form (and it is of this stream that Sabatini, writing in the early 20th century, is the trailing end). The two are so well behaved in their -- well, one cannot call it a courtship -- that it avoids any confession of feeling until the very last pages of the novel, after which discussions of marriage between two people who have never so much as kissed, nor even embraced in a friendly way, immediately ensue. 

This must have seemed the high ideal of courtly love to Sabatini, drawn on the scornful damsel in the tale of Sir Gareth Beaumains and the distraught unrequited love of the Lily Maid of Astolat. Both stories were well known in his era, and the latter especially received high and tragic treatment by Tennyson (for whom she was 'the Lady of Shallot') and numerous painters and writers of the time. I admit that I did not find it charming or aspirational. Sir Gareth was well-behaved in his courtship, but not unclear about it; the damsel scorned him because she thought he was of low birth and a joke being foisted upon her, but was swayed when she realized she had misjudged him. Lancelot, the Lily Maid's intended lover, was a passionate lover indeed when he returned someone's love. He was never so well-behaved as to have insisted on strict propriety in this way, else there would never have been Galahad nor the affair with Guinevere that drives so much of the action of Malory's tale. 

Chastity is a virtue, but like all Aristotelian virtues you can go wrong by having too little or too much. The quality is only a virtue at the right point of balance. Here their unconfessed love brings them only suffering and alienation, not even hope for a better future, all the way until they stumble into confession at the end. 

Well, many people have liked this novel better than I. Some of you may, as well.