Rafael Sabatini - Captain Blood

Captain Blood is an adventure novel by Rafael Sabatini, originally published in 1922. It concerns the sharp-witted Dr. Peter Blood, an Irish physician, who is convicted of treason in the aftermath of the Monmouth rebellion in 1685, and enslaved on the Caribbean island of Barbados. He escapes and becomes a pirate. [wikipedia]

Captain Blood was the basis for the Academy Award-nominated swashbuckling film that rocketed Errol Flynn and Olivia de Haviland to stardom in Hollywood. The fast-paced historical fiction of Rafael Sabatini is often compared with that of Robert Louis Stevenson and Alexandre Dumas. [DSayers]