Captain Blood

Still the most rousing of all pirate novels, Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood, a classic swashbuckling tale of piracy, romance and redemption, stands as one the greatest adventure novels of the 20th century.


In this blend of Alexander Dumas-like adventure, moral tale, and romantic love story, a seventeenth-century physician, Dr. Peter Blood, escapes the hangman's noose only to be exiled to the tropical colonies. 


Wrongly convicted of treason, and sold into slavery to a cruel plantation owner, his moral fortitude and medical ability soon earn him the favour of the island's governor and the attentions of Arabella, his master's niece. 


When the town is attacked by a band of marauding Spanish buccaneers, Blood springs to the rescue, escapes from slavery to transform himself into the most feared of all the “brethren of the coast.” And with a motley yet loyal band of shipmates begins a life of piracy and adventure on the Caribbean seas.


RAFAEL SABATINI (1875–1950) was an Italian-English writer best known for his worldwide bestsellers: The Sea Hawk, Scaramouche, Captain Blood, and Bellarion the Fortunate. Remarkably, Sabatini produced some thirty-one novels, eight short story collections, six non-fiction books, and several plays.


"One wonders if there is another storyteller so adroit at filling his pages with intrigue and counter-intrigue, with danger threaded with romance, with a background of lavish color, of silks and velvets, of swords and jewels." 


-London Daily Telegraph


“No writer, not Scott, nor Dumas, nor Stevenson, has brought the past to life more vividly or accurately…"



-George Macdonald Fraser