Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Captain Blood
    Captain Blood
    Captain Blood
    Audiobook12 hours

    Captain Blood

    Written by Raphael Sabatini

    Narrated by B. J. Harrison

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Doctor. Scholar. Soldier. Peter Blood has been all these. But when he is exiled and sold unjustly into slavery, he finds there is another title he must own - Pirate. Now a man without a country, he wreaks his revenge upon the Spanish Main as a buccaneer. The only thing that saves him from absolute dissolution is the love he still harbors for Miss Arabella Bishop. Now, he is forced to balance the dictates of his conscience with his natural genius for piracy.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherB.J. Harrison
    Release dateJan 1, 2009
    ISBN9781937091231
    Captain Blood
    Author

    Raphael Sabatini

    Rafael Sabatini, creator of some of the world’s best-loved heroes, was born in Italy in 1875 to an English mother and Italian father, both well-known opera singers. He was educated in Portugal and Switzerland, but at seventeen moved to England, where, after a brief stint in the business world, he started to write. Fluent in a total of five languages, he nonetheless chose to write in English, claiming that ‘all the best stories are written in [that language]’. His writing career was launched with a collection of short stories, followed by several novels. Fame, however, came with ‘Scaramouche’, the much-loved story of the French Revolution, which became an international bestseller. ‘Captain Blood’ followed soon after, which resulted in a renewed enthusiasm for his earlier work which were rushed into reprint. For many years a prolific writer, he was forced to abandon writing in the 1940’s through illness and eventually died in 1950. Sabatini is best remembered for his heroic characters and high-spirited novels, many of which have been adapted into classic films, including Scaramouche, Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk. They appeal to both a male and female audience with drama, romance and action, all placed in historical settings. It was once stated in the ‘Daily Telegraph’ that ‘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 colour, of silks and velvets, of swords and jewels.’

    More audiobooks from Raphael Sabatini

    Related to Captain Blood

    Related audiobooks

    Classics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Taken By Surprise

      Oct 16, 2018

      Taken By Surprise
      5 min read

    • Article

      Cooking with Patrick O’Brian

      Feb 15, 2019

      Cooking with Patrick O’Brian
      11 min read

    • Article

      Great And Small

      Apr 28, 2023

      If we love animals, why do we treat them so badly? This paradox runs like a thematic double helix through Keggie Carew’s fantastic, heartfelt history of human-animal relations. It goes back to cave paintings of animals in prehistoric Spain, whose une

      2 min read

    • Article

      Book Club

      May 21, 2020

      Book Club
      4 min read

    • Article

      Pirates, Ghosts And Gangsters

      Feb 16, 2020

      Pirates, Ghosts And Gangsters
      2 min read

    • Article

      Great Read

      May 17, 2023

      Great Read
      8 min read

    • Article

      Hot Right Now!

      Oct 29, 2020

      For years, rumors of the ‘Marsh Girl’ have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not

      2 min read

    • Article

      Putting Down Roots

      Aug 20, 2021

      Putting Down Roots
      3 min read

    • Article

      5 New Fantasy Novels Invigorate Old Tropes

      May 18, 2023

      Spell books, dragons, mermaids, fairies and a magic circus all take on new life in the pages of these five enchanting tales hitting shelves in May and June.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Book Club

      Feb 2, 2022

      Book Club
      5 min read

    • Article

      Book Club

      Oct 27, 2021

      Nineteen-year-old Casey’s name was splashed across the headlines after the US family she was nannying for were found brutally murdered. Years later, back in England and living as ‘Rachel’, Casey’s life is the centre of a police investigation for a se

      1 min read

    • Article

      Great Read

      Jul 14, 2021

      Great Read
      4 min read

    • Article

      Great Read

      Jul 14, 2021

      Great Read
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Witches Of Literature

      May 30, 2023

      Tor Books T. KINGFISHER challenges the idea of the “wicked witch” through the gravewitch in her subversive fairy tale Nettle & Bone. The nameless dust-wife—part witch, part gravedigger—is all too willing to help the novel’s heroine on her quest to ki

      2 min read

    • Article

      What To Read?

      May 26, 2023

      BY ELEANOR CATTON GRANTA Described by one critic as “a Kiwi Jonathan Franzen”, this fantastic novel explores what happens when a hippie collective clashes with a ruthless billionaire. Mira and Shelley run Birnam Wood, a guerrilla gardening group tha

      3 min read

    • Article

      Riders On The Storm

      Feb 28, 2021

      To achieve great things, it’s generally held that the recipe should include brains, talent, charisma or luck, preferably all four – not forgetting a more recent theory that it also takes 10,000 hours of practice. But what if an alternative route was

      10 min read

    • Article

      The William Trevor Reader: “Death in Jerusalem”

      Sep 20, 2022

      It stops short of a moral lesson, as good stories always should, but it is nonetheless instructive in its way. The post The William Trevor Reader: “Death in Jerusalem” appeared first on The Millions.

      3 min read

    • Article

      SUMMER Reading SPECIAL

      Dec 28, 2022

      In last year’s Booker Prize shortlisted Oh William! we found narrator Lucy Barton reconnecting with her first husband, William, following the death of her second husband. In this sequel COVID has hit New York and William takes control. As a scientist

      10 min read

    • Article

      Book CLUB

      Feb 22, 2022

      Book CLUB
      1 min read

    • Article

      Book Club

      May 15, 2019

      Book Club
      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Captain Blood

    4/5

    443 ratings32 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      I loved Sabatini's swashbuckling, good guy, bad situation epic. Captain Blood is a fictional compilation of several well known pirates a provides a nice escape to Caribbean.
    • 5/5
      Amazingly narrated!! I laughed so hard! God he was good!
    • 5/5
      Love me some pirates.
    • 5/5
      Great read. Written in a perfect representation of the time. It brings to light how things were done in the time period as well as have a very adventurous story to tell.
    • 5/5
      This review is for this audiobook edition only; see my paperback edition for my thoughts on the novel itself.4.5*Robert Whitfield (aka Simon Vance) is one of my favorite narrators, particularly for classics. He doesn't disappoint in this historical fiction about 1760s England & Caribbean. However, perhaps because I first encountered this story via the Errol Flynn/Olivia de Havilland film, I found that I preferred my experience reading this to that of listening to it. Whitfield's various voices for the characters were well done (Peter Blood's Irish accent was specially good) but they weren't the voices I was used to and several times I found that I had lost the thread of the story. So in this case, the audiobook loses a ½ star instead of gaining one...
    • 4/5
      When I was growing up, my companions were Karl May, Mayne Reid and Emilio Salgari. Their tales of adventure made me a reader in a lot of ways. Rafael Sabatini should have been in that list but the Bulgarian edition was in 4 hardcover volumes, with white covers (so not books you want to carry in a backpack) and they looked a bit more like the books I was not ready for yet (that changed one summer when I decided to investigate and discovered Captain Blood but I never read any of them more than once as I was doing with the other 3 authors. Add another year and I discovered Science Fiction and the rest as they say is history). What I did not appreciate back then is how much closer Sabatini was keeping to the actual history compared to the other 3. I did not care really - I was reading them for the adventures and it took me awhile to start looking at novels for their historical background. The story starts in 1685 in England during the last acts of the Monmouth Rebellion. Peter Blood, an ex-soldier and current doctor, decides to behave like a human being (and a doctor) and helps an wounded man. Unfortunately for him, the man is a rebel and the current laws make Blood a rebel as well so he is arrested and eventually shipped to Barbados as a slave (which may or may not have been an improvement - as he tells the reader, had he been tried a day earlier, he would have been executed). As it is, he ends up in the hands of one of the English governors who believe everyone else to be under them. Peter Blood finds his way - he may be a slave but he is also a doctor and he even falls in love. Then the Spanish show up, things get a bit complicated and he ends up a captain of a pirate ship and his adventures continue at sea before ending up back on Barbados for the end of the novel - although not in a way anyone expects. And I am happy that Sabatini did not decide to give our captain a fairy tale ending - it would not have fit the narrative. He did leave it open enough though. The novel works both as an adventure novel and as a historical one (if you don't have issues with reading about the battles). It ties together the story of England between the Monmouth Rebellion and the Glorious Revolution 3 years later and the story of the Caribbean islands exploitation and the pirates that spawned at the time. Most of the characters are invented by some are the real people who lived and even most of the invented ones are based on actual people - changed, merged, split or otherwise manipulated but the read like 17th century people. I read a non-fiction book about the Caribbean pirates a few years ago (Buccaneers of the Caribbean: How Piracy Forged an Empire by Jon Latimer) so I had a bit of a background which helped but Sabatini's story covered the same ground in a lot better way in places despite being fiction. Which does not happen often. Sabatini never continued the story - what is considered a continuation by some is actually a set of stories set during the pirate years of Peter Blood. That leaves the whole Peter Blood story spanning a bit over 3 years (although we hear a lot about the years before that as well). And despite the somewhat open (or unhappy if you want to call it that) ending, I think that was the right choice.
    • 3/5
      "Captain Blood paced the poop of his ship alone in the tepid dusk, and the growing golden radiance of the great poop lantern in which a seaman had just lighted the three lamps"Tell me you didn't snicker a little bit reading that sentence.So, right off the bat, there are some pretty glaring things one needs to overlook as an anarchist reading this book: The protagonist is assumed to be a better pirate for his professional-class upbringing: he is without the trappings of a more proletarian pirate who might be swayed by animal urges of barbarism. He keeps his class signifiers by shaving and wearing the finest silks and etc. Furthermore, Peter Blood is consistently praised for his absolute control over the more proletarian elements of his fleet with a lot of talk about their utter submission to his will. Peter Blood then parlays his pirating gig into the governorship of an important colony to the English crown. So Peter Blood merely dabbles in brigandage, and returns after only a couple of years to his position of privilege.The only woman mentioned in the book is the love interest, who, though described as tomboyish and irreverent to female expectation, swoons and pouts and acts almost exclusively in the proscribed literary feminine role. In contrast to the main character and many others throughout the book, Arabelle is one-dimensional.There are mentions of black people throughout the book, but they are referred to exclusively as slaves, and often with wince-worthy blood quota language: "her octaroon" for example. The chattel slaves are never given more than a passing mention, despite sometimes playing important roles in battles (I'm thinking here of the de Riverarol raid on Cartagena). They often announce the presence of other characters, rather than have a presence themselves. This is disappointing, too.If you ignore the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy of the book, however (ha ha), this was a great swashbuckling pirate tale, a good escape book. The scenes of battle are riveting if sometimes confusing to a landlubber. The best parts are Peter Blood's quick tongue and knack for putting those in power out of it, and never compromising. Pretty much every tin-pot governor and admiral is given a choice to go against his will and die a horrible death, or be allowed to live by Peter Blood's generosity. It makes for fantastic reading.
    • 4/5
      Pirates of the Caribbean!
    • 4/5
      I hadn't heard of Sabatini until quite recently, when I saw him credited as one of Arturo Perez-Reverte's major influences - along with Alexandre Dumas. That was enough to make me seek out a book!
      This 1922 novel is the story that the movie starring Errol Flynn was based on - and it is indeed, as one might expect, a swashbuckling pirate adventure.
      Peter Blood, an educated doctor with a military background, runs afoul of the law for giving medical aid to a political rebel against King James Stuart.
      Condemned as a traitor, he's shipped off to the Caribbean and sold as a slave - where, of course, he chastely falls in love with his owner's daughter, Arabella.
      His medical training gives him opportunities other slaves do not have - and when the chance comes, he makes an escape, seizes a ship, and turns pirate -
      leaving his true love behind.
      Many piratical adventures ensue, giving the book somewhat of the feeling of a serial - but enough of a plot runs through all Blood's escapades to tie it all together.
      A fun, quick read, regardless of the novel's age - it's definitely withstood the test of time.
    • 5/5
      Peter Blood, forced into piracy, never abandons his sense of honor. Pining for the unattainable and beautiful Arabella, he names his ship after her and paints it red. With an amazing gift for strategy, he leads his buccaneers to victory despite overwhelmingly poor odds. Every chapter was a delight in this high seas adventure.
    • 5/5
      Peter Blood is a doctor who does not want to be involved in the politics. This is seventeenth century England and monarchies are ever changing. Peter Blood is accused of treason when he treats on of his patients who happens to be a rebel. He is convicted and is sold into slavery to a plantation in West Indies. He escapes and gets into buccaneering ways. He has many adventures and this is a excellent narration of them.This book is fast paced and very entertaining. The language is Dickensonian. It has adventure and a little bit of romance. A 4/5 read.
    • 5/5
      Growing up, this was my favourite book. It continues to hold this position today. A cracking adventure with a beautiful use of language. I do love the work of Rafael Sabatini - and this is his writing at its best.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this swashbuckler and am glad I came off my high horse to do so!

      Sabatini is a wonderful writer and was very famous in early Hollywood days. I had thought he was "earlier" than that.
    • 4/5
      Another classic bites the dust!This week my intent was to read "Captain Blood", considered a classic, and a book that's been sitting on my shelves/e-reader for far too long.I enjoyed "Captain Blood", partly for the story, and partly for the verbal fencing. I loved how the title character was able to handle those who were under the impression that they were "somebody". Even the uncle of the love interest, Arabella, can't match wits or swords with Peter Blood.The arrogance of the aristocracy of the time period is well portrayed, and the passages describing the battle tactics and life on the ship were interesting. None of the descriptions were distracting from the plot, which sailed right along. I was surprised to discover that this book was over 300 pages...it read much like a substantially shorter story.Recommended.
    • 4/5
      McBooks Press began some years ago issuing a new “Classics of Nautical Fiction” series (pant! pant!) No doubt related to the success of the O’Brian books. Sabatini wrote several swashbuckling tales during the early twentieth century. Captain Blood was one turned into a famous movie starring Errol Flynn. Typical of many books written before the enlightened days of political correctness, it suffers from racism and sexism. The romance is a bit mushy, but what the heck, it’s a rousing good story. Peter Blood is a doctor in England who makes the mistake of aiding a rebel fighting King James. He is charged with treason, comes within an inch of hanging, is sent to Jamaica as a slave, then sold to the treacherous and meanspirited Colonel Bishop. The colonel’s niece Arabella — ravishingly beautiful, of course — takes a special interest in Blood, who manages to escape bondage with numerous of his fellow slaves when Spaniards ransack the town. Blood takes a Spanish ship by force and becomes a pirate, preying only on the wicked Spanish, mind you; after all, he’s still a noble Englishman at heart, and he names his new ship. . . well, you guess. In the end he . . . well, you guess. It’s all in rousing good fun and is saved from being completely trivial by Blood’s character, who has some wicked ripostes and dialogue. Faced with an obnoxious French admiral who demands that Peter’s captains be more obsequious, Blood responds: “I am happy to assure you that the reminder is unnecessary. I am by way of accounting myself a gentleman, little though I may look like one at present; and I should not account myself that were I capable of anything but deference to those whom nature or fortune may have placed above me, or to those being placed beneath me in rank may labour under a disability to resent my lack of it.” Beats television any day. No commercials either. Try it instead of the Super Bowl, no wait, I guess that’s already over or is it?
    • 5/5
      For some reason what I remnember from reading this is the opening when the hero is conmviced by Judge Jeffeys for giving medical care to one of Monmouth's rebels and in turn tells Jeffreys that he is doomed to a horrible death. Beyond that, I enjoyed both the book and the movie based on it.
    • 5/5
      At the beginning of great popular historical novels, there are often excellent historical plots. The book starts at the end of the attempt by James Scott first duke of Monmouth - an illegitimate son of Charles II - to dethrone and replace England's Catholic King James II. When his mostly popular "Whig" forces are defeated at the Battle of Sedgemoor on 6 July 1685, Peter Blood has to reluctantly leave his geraniums tended so carefully in his British garden, in the town of Bridgewater. Monmouth was executed for treason on 15 July, 1685. Peter Blood, a former soldier retrained as a Doctor rides close to the battlefield as remnants of the beaten army flee the repression of the victorious soldiers. For having showed compassion for an injured nobleman of the defeated faction, Peter Blood is summarily arrested without protection of Habeas Corpus to become one of the victims of the "Bloody Assizes" of Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys - 25 August 1685. In this parody of justice, instead of releasing the innocent doctor from unlawful detention, the angry judge personally sentences him to slavery - along with 800 of the 1500 judged by Jeffreys- and to unpaid plantation work to the West Indies for life. Sabatini reminds in a very comic manner that this Judge Jeffreys is to die from a bladder stone as he in fact did, after the Glorious Revolution, in the Tower of London in 1689. The elegant prose of Mr. Sabatini crafts delicately the fate of his hero who is to rise again in the face of adversity and Royal absolutism. Fortunately for us, the reader, and regrettably for Peter Blood, in 1685 the Glorious Revolution was still three years in the making giving ample time to transform himself from plantation slave - though spared hard labor and beatings because he tends to the Island's Governor's gout - into a pirate.
    • 2/5
      Gr...I wanted to like this more than I did. Pirates! Rafael Sabatini, who wrote Scaramouche, one of my favorite books! But no. On top of being rambling, ranting, and overly episodic and without much point other than "I did it all for the respect of a woman," it was hypocritical! Captain Blood is MADE A SLAVE in the West Indies and the big deal was escaping slavery from the planter, then from various governments...Well, Blood then completely looks aside from slavery throughout the book. Negroes this and that, come here, do this, then disappear. It's not enough to assign menial tasks to nobodies, no, they specifically have to be Negroes. GAH. Published in 1922, so he should have figured it out by then. You know what? It wasn't realistic then, either. I just could not get over the hypocrisy of it. Could not.
    • 5/5
      Written in 1922, Captain Blood is truly a classic adventure story. We meet Dr. Peter Blood as he is tending to his garden on the very morning of the Battle of Sedgemoor. Wanting no part in the rebellion taking place, he nonetheless tends to the wounded, and is promptly arrested. During his trial, h is convicted of treason on the grounds that "if any person be in actual rebellion against the King, and another person—who really and actually was not in rebellion—does knowingly receive, harbour, comfort, or succour him, such a person is as much a traitor as he who indeed bore arms."However, instead of being hanged to death, he, along with other convicts is sent to Caribbean to be sold into slavery. Upon his arrival in Barbados, he is bought by Colonel Bishop, who initially hires him to work in the plantation, but 'promotes' him as his personal physician, seeing the complete incompetence of the local doctors. Bishop immediately becomes Blood's enemy, and remains as such throughout the book. Complicating matters is the presence of Bishop's niece, Arabella. Given their respective social status, and the changing situations they find themselves in, their mutual attraction never really goes further than that.Blood and a few others eventually find freedom, but at a price. Since they are slaves, they have no other choice but to adopt the pirate life, which is by no means easy. And that's when the real adventure starts.The book really is a fun swashbuckling adventure, fast-paced swashbuckling with a hint of romance without being too cheesy. Some events may fly by too quickly, and some more might be qualified as fortuitous coincidences, but as a whole Sabitini succeeds in writing a good story. Blood himself is a chivalrous man, true to himself, even when he does become an outlaw in the middle of the Caribbean. He draws his own line between right and wrong, and remains a true gentleman throughout the whole novel. While some characters could have been more fleshed out and some scenes could have been written in more detail, the fun factor alone is enough to compensate for the few shortcomings in this novel. Besides, I devoured the thing in a matter of days.4.5/5
    • 5/5
      this story, along with Treasure Island sets the standard for Caribbean pirate stories... establishes the role-types for the swashbuckling handsome pirate captain, and the villainous stupid governor/admiral/general who always has a beautiful daughter who falls for the pirate captain... loads of fun and an easy read!
    • 5/5
      Chronicling the adventures in life and love of a gentleman pirate, Rafael Sabatini not only documents the Monmouth Rebellion in this piece of historical fiction, he also tackles issues of feminism, disillusionment with politics and religion, issues between nations, questioning corrupt officials, the spirit of piracy and other social outcasts--it has everything. Sabatini was a master of historical fiction, creating works such as Scaramouche and Black Swan, yet he was overlooked by every literary scholar since the publishing of his novels, and remains underrated to this day. Captain Blood IS the best piece of historical fiction I've read, and it can even be seen as a product of it's time, as it was published in post-WWI England. 5 stars for Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood!
    • 5/5
      Some books provide pure pleasure from beginning to end, and this is one of them. Sabatini is a brilliant storyteller, and this is surely the ultimate pirate tale. Except that Peter Blood is no pirate. Rather, he is a man unjustly made a slave, who, despite the continuing injustices done him by the English, Spanish, and French, remains true to an inner code of honor that even extends itself to alter the natures of the predominately motley crew who serve under him After reading this, the surface joys of watching Johnny Depp as a pirate seem absurd. While Sabatini's characters fit mostly into neat stereotypes, he fleshes them out through brilliantly rendered action scenes and superb, delicious dialogue so that the whole story takes on a real life and provides a whole world for the reader to revel in. There are no dull moments, just a series of cascading pleasures as the story draws to an immensely satisfying conclusion.
    • 3/5
      Captain BloodRafael SabatiniAugust 25, 2010The true and original tale, exactly the same plot as the movie with Errol Flynn, with the character of the physician and pirate Peter Blood. He is wrongly sold into bondage in a sugar plantation after a rebellion in England, daringly seizes a Spanish ship come to attack the colony, then proceeds on his career as a pirate, before changes of fortune make him again a respectable man. It is a classic of romance with the planter’s daughter, mistaken motivations, sea battles, treachery and sword fights. Read in a Kindle edition in about 2 evenings, an escape.
    • 5/5
      Loved this book. Nice, involved plot, with a great swashbuckling hero.
    • 2/5
      This one's a re-read... Just as gripping as I remembered it. Gross racial politics, but that's a product of the time it was written in. And it sort of rollicks along right until the end. I might not give this to a kid - too many racist bits - but if you're an adult, and can recognize them, it brings you right back to the days when you could get thoroughly engrossed in an old fashioned adventure.
    • 3/5
      An enjoyable pirate romp. I don't think it's Sabatini's best, despite being the most famous due to Errol Flynn's portrayal in the film. The characters are a bit over-the-top and some of the naval battles aren't that probable...but it's still fun and we're not reading this as a treatise on naval warfare, are we?
    • 3/5
      The best pirate book I've ever read. Historical, a little romance, adventure. A nice break from scholarly reading- not serious at all. I certainly didn't know what to expect. enough variety in the fights that it was not boring even though there was the same type of thing several times.
    • 3/5
      The movie with Errol Flynn was based on this book.(very loosely).Sabatini was the premier adventure writer of his day. His books were the Star Wars and Star Trek of his day, and should be read with that in mind. Writing styles and stories would be concidered cliche today but still fun to read.
    • 4/5
      well, no suprise this is a classic, its suprisingly exciting: peter blood is an educated doctor who is forced into piracy after being cruelly enslaved for a crime he did not commit, the rest is all super exciting=romance, adventure, intrigue, all on the high seas
    • 2/5
      I didn't enjoy this book. It was TOO swashbuckling and over-the-top for my taste. I guess I should have known by the title--I mean, it's hard for me to even buy the main character's name, much less all his adventures. I quit after about 75 pages.