Captain Blood: His Odyssey [Hardcover]

This Penguin Classics edition also includes a highly educational introduction that helps the reader recognize and appreciate the various themes that run through this grand historical novel. While the introduction can be totally ignored and the story enjoyed just for its sea-faring, swashbuckling adventurism, a little understanding of the genre of the historical novel, of Sabatini's sources, and of the type of protagonist exemplified by the character of Peter Blood will add to that enjoyment even further. In fact, not only did I read the introduction before beginning the story itself, but I went back and re-read it after finishing the novel, appreciating its contributions to my understanding even more.

I particularly like Sabatini's own comments that are quoted in the introduction: "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." This reminds me of Coleridge's admonition that the successful reader of poetry must enforce a "willing suspension of disbelief" in order to mentally join with the author in the shared experience of writing and reading. In the case of Captain Blood, suspending disbelief is in no way a challenge. This historical novel, skillfully intermixing the factual and the fanciful, the real and the imagined, the history and the fiction, is a believable yet romantic tale straight from the Golden Age of Piracy on the High Seas.

What is amazing to me is that Captain Blood has, at the moment I write this, only about 20 or so reader reviews posted, while a modern novel I recently read, Ahab's Wife, has some 171 reviews! The pity of it is that Ahab's Wife is a poorly written, shallow, superficial sort of thing that will be hardly remembered 82 years from now, while Captain Blood remains as vigorous, exciting and enthralling a read as when it was first published 82 years ago. Why do we so often overlook the excellent-nay, say rather the outstanding-books that were laid in our laps before we were even born while we waste time with artificial garbage cranked out by modern hack writers?

The beauty of Sabatini's Captain Blood is that it is timeless. It will be as exciting for your grandchildren to read as it will be for you, and it will be there for theirs to read, too. This book is as modern as any can be and deserves your time to read it. I started to say "your effort," but it requires no effort to read. The suspense and action will carry you along as surely as the Caribbean winds filled the Arabella's sails and carried her effortlessly across the expanse of the sea from one glorious adventure to another.

If there is any weakness in this book where the modern reader is concerned, it is that few of us will understand Blood's occasional remarks rendered in flawless Latin. I regret that I am too ignorant to grasp the significance of those remarks, for I am certain that they hold wonderful irony and are quite meaningful in the situations in which Blood finds himself at the moment of their utterance. It would have been thoughtful of today's editor to take into account the fact that we are now largely ignorant of classical languages and to include a footnote or two translating those lines for us. Beyond this, I can levy no criticism against this edition of the novel, and I can assure you that any discerning reader who will suspend his disbelief and embrace the mythical romance of the Caribbean pirate will enjoy his time with this book.