The Sea Hawk

Sir Oliver Tressilian is a Cornish gentleman and former privateer who has put away his sword to live quietly and court the woman he loves, Rosamund Godolphin. He is proud, generous, and far too loyal to his weak younger half-brother, Lionel. When Rosamund's brother is found dead in the snow, Oliver knows the truth — and keeps silent to shield Lionel, letting the suspicion fall on himself. Lionel repays that loyalty with the blackest treachery: rather than risk exposure, he has his brother kidnapped and sold to the sea.

Chained to the oar of a Spanish galley, Oliver endures the living death of the rowing-bench until Barbary corsairs take the ship and carry him captive to Algiers. There he makes a desperate choice — to renounce his faith and country, take the turban, and offer his seamanship to the Basha Asad-ed-Din. He rises with terrifying speed to become Sakr-el-Bahr, the Hawk of the Sea, the most feared corsair on the African coast. And when at last he turns his galleys north, it is to sail home to Cornwall — to seize the brother who betrayed him and the woman who believed the lie, and to carry them both back across the sea to answer for it.

Written in 1915, six years before Scaramouche and Captain Blood made him world-famous, The Sea Hawk is many readers' choice as Rafael Sabatini's finest novel. It moves between Elizabethan Cornwall and the sun-blasted, polyglot world of the Barbary corsairs with complete command, and beneath its galley-fights and abductions it asks hard questions about vengeance, honour, and what a man becomes when he remakes himself to survive — and whether mercy, at the last, is the stronger act than revenge.

This edition presents the complete novel in clean, modern typesetting, with an editor's foreword on Sabatini and the historical swashbuckler, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.