The Sea-Hawk

One of the most rousing of all pirate novels, Rafael Sabatini’s The Sea-Hawk, 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, 

Sir Oliver Tresillian, an Elizabethan gentleman and ex-privateer, is framed for murder by his half-brother, rejected by his fiancée, kidnapped, enslaved by the Spaniards, and rescued by Barbary pirates. 


Maddened by his suffering, he promptly becomes Sakr-el-Bahr, the Hawk of the Seas, “the pride of Islam and a sword-edge to the infidel.” until the hand of fate gives him an opportunity to avenge himself on the brother who betrayed him and the fiancée who abandoned him.



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