(Set in the late 16th century, this pirate tale follows a ...)
Set in the late 16th century, this pirate tale follows a Cornish sea-faring gentleman, Sir Oliver Tressilian, as he is villainously betrayed by his jealous brother.
(Captain Blood is one of the great pirate stories. First p...)
Captain Blood is one of the great pirate stories. First published in 1922, Rafael Sabatini’s novel has never been out of print. It was the basis for the hit Warner Bros. movie Captain Blood (1935), starring Errol Flynn.
Rafael Sabatini was a bestselling and prolific Italian author. Among Sabatini’s tales of piracy and heroics were Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk and Scaramouche.
Background
Ethnicity:
His father was Italian, while his mother was from Britain. Sabatini regarded himself as British from an early age though he was still legally an Italian citizen.
Rafael Sabatini was born on April 29, 1875, in Jesi, Marche, Italy. Born to Vincenzo and Anna (Trafford) Sabatini, who were both opera singers, Sabatini as a boy accompanied his parents on some of their professional journeys through Europe, including Portugal. He also spent much of his youth in his mother’s parents’ home in Liverpool.
Education
Sabatini attended school in Portugal and, as a teenager, in Zug, Switzerland.
Career
Sabatini's first novel, The Loves of Yvonne (1902), was published when he was twenty-seven. His next novel, The Tavern Knight, was published in 1904; dealing with a British Cavalier’s escape from Puritan pursuers in 1651, it has been reprinted as recently as 1974.
Sabatini soon established a pattern of publishing a novel every year or two, with a hiatus during and shortly after World War I, years of global turmoil during which Sabatini, who became a British subject in 1918, was doing war work for British Intelligence. Beginning in 1921, he launched a remarkably consistent novel-a-year cycle, with Hutchinson as his British publisher and Houghton Mifflin as his American publisher, that lasted almost unbroken until 1940.
Sabatini, whose nonfiction biographies of Cesare Borgia and of the Spanish Inquisitor Torquemada were critically respected, read history avidly and was something of a theoretician of the historical fiction genre. He classified the genre into three subdivisions: novels that were entirely historical in background and characters, novels in which fictional main characters were fully interwoven into their historical background; and novels in which both events and characters were largely invented but still bore a reasonable connection to historical settings. Some historians have accused him of having too little respect for verisimilitude, but Sabatini in turn expressed low esteem for historians: too much of their material, he thought, originated in legend or other questionable sources, and they did not write as well as novelists.
The skill of Sabatini’s writing, within the bounds of popular entertainment, has allowed his work to remain relatively fresh in spite of the “bag of tricks”— stock characters, coincidence, unlikely misunderstandings, and excessively honorable rascal-heroes— that some critics viewed negatively. After vacillating between the novel form and the drama during the pre-World War I years, Sabatini scored a big hit with the 1915 novel The Sea-Hawk, his first bestseller, and it steered him permanently onto the course of novel-writing. In 1921 Sabatini hit the bestseller lists once again with Scaramouche, a novel set in revolutionary France but with a fictitious hero.
Perhaps Sabatini’s most famous novel was Captain Blood, which followed Scaramouche by a year; the story of a pirate, it was based on the real adventures of Henry Pitman, a British surgeon who was sentenced to death for helping rebels and then escaped to the West Indies, and of Henry Morgan, a British pirate who was eventually knighted.
The year 1924 saw the first publication of another Sabatini hit, Mistress Wilding, which was also reissued by Ballantine in 1976.
Sabatini also turned his hand successfully to the production of short fiction. A three-volume series of stories, The Historical Nights’ Entertainment, was published between 1917 and 1938; in addition, story collections published in his lifetime included a selected volume, Stories of Love, Intrigue, and Battle, in 1931, and Turbulent Tales, in 1946.
Quotations:
"An intelligent observation of the facts of human existence will reveal to shallow-minded folk who sneer at the use of coincidence in the arts of fiction and drama that life itself is little more than a series of coincidences."
"Regret of neglected opportunity is the worst hell that a living soul can inhabit."
"I am very poor - for a know nothing, understand nothing. It is not a calamitous condition until it is realized."
Personality
A scholarly and rather inward-looking person, Sabatini did not seek publicity, and his view of the publishing industry was somewhat soured by the relatively long period of professional writing that he went through before achieving fame. For the last decade of his life, Sabatini had lived in Clock Mill, Clifford, near Hereford, England, where the banks of the Wye river provided an attractive place for him to pursue his favorite sport of salmon fishing.
Quotes from others about the person
"[Sabatini] is a terror to the modern biographer, because in comparatively few pages he can tell the story of the person he decides to honour, whereas it takes another and a lesser man a volume or two to do the same thing." - Lewis Melville
"First of all, he writes far better English than most creators of historical romance and high adventure ... Sabatini is lucid and flexible, never monotonous or awkward, always in control of his sentences, no matter how long some of them may be ... A happy combination of the researcher and the imaginative writer, he is as trustworthy as he is entertaining." - Richard J. Voorhees
"Like all supremely popular novelists, Sabatini understood the great heart of the public because it beat in time with his own. He gave us wonderful adventure fiction and no purpose is served by seeking to dress it up as anything else. We don’t read him because of the light he sheds on the human condition. We read him because he is, quite simply, one of the great entertainers of our century." - Barry Unsworth
Connections
Sabatini married Ruth Goad Dixon in 1905, but they divorced thirty years later. Christine Oxon became his second wife. Sabatini had a son from the first marriage.