Captain Blood (novel)
Captain Blood is an
adventure novel by
Rafael Sabatini, originally published in
1922. It concerns the sharp-witted Dr. Peter Blood, an Irish physician, who is convicted of treason in the aftermath of the
Monmouth rebellion in 1685, and enslaved on the
Caribbean island of
Barbados. He escapes and becomes a pirate.
While Blood is a fictional character, much of the historical background of the novel is based on fact. The Monmouth rebels were sold into slavery as described in the book; Blood's pirate adventures and subsequent career borrow heavily from those of
Sir Henry Morgan; and the shifting political alliances of the
Glorious Revolution of 1688 are used in the novel as a plot device to allow Blood's return to respectability.
Captain Blood was an enormously popular work, and Sabatini wrote two additional novels featuring Peter Blood:
Captain Blood Returns (1930) and
The Fortunes of Captain Blood (1936). Both of these books are episodic tales of Blood's pirate career rather than true sequels.
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Captain Blood (film), an adaptation of the novel
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Free ebook of Captain Blood at
Project Gutenberg
