Captain Blood Did Not Save the Whales

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Captain Blood Did Not Save the Whales

Captain Blood, the 1922 Rafael Sabatini novel on which the terrific Olivia DeHavilland film is based, is insensitive on many levels, and not appropriate for the delicate tastes of our progressive times.

The crime of Captain Blood is that it is a pirate yarn with no redeeming value, no politics, no didactic meaning. Instead of preaching global warming or whales or green something at the reader the novel presents murder, comradeship, treachery, fortress assaults, swordfights, sea-fights, and a rather turgid romance, but no sex.

In its relative political innocence Captain Blood is not unlike other pre-1968 adventure stories in books and films: Tarzan, The Lone Ranger, Prince Valiant, Robin Hood, Kim, Sherlock Holmes, and lesser fictional boy-book heroes long-since filed away down the Orwellian memory hole. Totalitarians have always purged disagreeable individuals and disagreeable books, but now such anti-democratic behaviors are called inclusion.

The plot of Captain Blood is almost fatalistic, based as it is on the hero’s reactions to events which he seems unable to control: 30-ish Irishman Peter Blood, a veteran of Dutch and French wars, settles down to practice medicine in the west of England in the late 17th century. While treating a survivor of the Battle of Sedgemoor (Monmouth’s wonderfully stupid attempt to usurp the Throne), Dr. Blood is accused of being one of the rebels, not unlike America’s historic Dr. Samuel Mudd. After months of imprisonment and maltreatment, Dr. Blood and others are brought before the infamous Bloody Assizes of Judge Jefferies, and sentenced to slavery in the colonies.

In Jamaica, Dr. Blood’s skills as a physician brings him to the attention of the governor, and this provides Blood some protection from the perverse brutality of his owner, Colonel Bishop, and brings him to the notice of Colonel Bishop’s beautiful daughter, Arabella.

Dr. Blood and his pals stage a violent and confused escape, and our hero, now styling himself Captain Blood, forms a pirate crew, re-names his captured ship the Arabella, and merrily robs French, English, and Spanish ships. In Sabatini’s world the English are hypocrites, the French are foppish hypocrites, and the Spanish are (prepare ye now for a catalogue of 1922 stereotypes): cowardly, brutal, sneaky, treacherous, lascivious, sniveling, posturing, pompous, ignorant, superstitious hypocrites. Whew.

Surprisingly, the middle part of the book is when the action drags. Captain Blood, the Scourge of the Spanish Main and manly leader of men, begins perpetually whining about Miss Arabella Bishop and the rude things she said to him. In this Facebook-y emo-ing he seems more like an 8th-grade schoolgirl (with apologies to 8th-grade schoolgirls) than a pirate, and takes to his cabin, the bottle, and passivity. Through the secret service of England (this was when England was England, not vapid, inclusive Britain) he takes a commission in the Royal Navy, and then gives that up. Then through the secret service of France he takes a commission in the French Navy, and lets that go too because the French are Not Nice. Whew again.

In a climatic battle with the Spanish, Captain Blood saves Port Royal, is reconciled with the new English government under William of Orange (who was Dutch), and is made governor of the colony while Colonel Bishop, who had lately been made governor, has left the colony unguarded while chasing Captain Blood.

Captain Blood’s reconciliation with Arabella is abrupt and incomplete, and as the book ends the humiliated Colonel Bishop, now a prisoner himself, is marched into Governor Blood’s office.

The 1935 film adaptation with beautiful Olivia deHavilland and that fellow from Tasmaina serves the story better by eliminating a great deal of the extraneous muddle in the middle, and tidying up the finish much more satisfactorily.

Many a boy came away from the Saturday matinee of this film, made a sword of a convenient stick, and refought pirate battles with his friends until dusk.

And that is good. Captain Blood is not history; it is a yarn, a story, two hours of happy anaesthesia, just like the Robin Hood stories.

One fears a serious, grim, grainy, ill-lit re-make of Captain Blood with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in the leads, and with a George Bush double as Colonel Bishop.

Errol Flynn, the fellow from Tasmania, was a great Captain Blood, also made a great Robin Hood, as did his good friend, Richard Green. Their Robin Hood is, at heart, a ten-year-old boy stalking imaginary deer and the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham with a homemade bow strung with twine from feed sacks and with arrows made from weed stems.

Alas for civilization that, beginning in the 1970s, sour, humorless, Miz Grundy filmmakers decided that Robin Hood should no longer be a joyful man defending the good and having a merry time while do so, but rather a sour, humorless, Facebook-ist moping sulkily around a Sherwood Forest that is more Miss Havisham’s decaying wedding breakfast than anything else.

A ten-year-old boy now who displayed an interest in cap pistols, bows and arrows, and stick-swords would probably be identified as a menace to vegetarians and referred for political re-education. For his own safety he’d better stick to electronic games in which he can destroy whole planets instead of the Sheriff of Nottingham.

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