Captain Blood

Captain Blood: His Odyssey is an adventure novel by the Italian-English writer Rafael Sabatini, first published in 1922. Set in the late seventeenth century, it follows Peter Blood, an Irish-born physician and former soldier of fortune living quietly in England, who is arrested and convicted of treason merely for having treated a wounded rebel after the failed Monmouth Rebellion of 1685, and is transported to Barbados and sold into slavery on the plantation of the sadistic Colonel Bishop. After a Spanish raid on the island, Blood and a group of fellow convicts seize a ship and escape to become pirates in the Caribbean, and under Blood's shrewd leadership their small fleet grows into a formidable and famously humane pirate power, more disciplined and less bloodthirsty than its rivals, while Blood himself remains torn by his continuing love for Arabella Bishop, the colonel's niece, who despises piracy even as she comes to recognize Blood's essential decency. The novel's climax turns on the War of the League of Augsburg, in the course of which Blood's fleet intervenes to save a French-besieged Jamaica from the same English colonial authorities who had once condemned him, earning Blood a royal pardon and his eventual appointment as governor of Jamaica. Drawing on the historical career of buccaneers like Henry Morgan, the novel became one of the best-selling adventure novels of its era and established the modern popular image of the swashbuckling, gentlemanly pirate hero, cemented further by its celebrated 1935 film adaptation.