A quick update on our first publishing project here at Treasure Light Press. The annotations for Captain Blood: His Odyssey by Rafael Sabatini are roughly 90% complete. We’re looking at a hardcover edition with approximately 300 illustrations, and annotations and appendices with a word count greater than the novel itself. It’s been a fun project. More news to follow over the next year as the manuscript goes to editing and actual production begins.
I’ve seen myself in comics before — Calvin & Hobbes, Bloom County, Peanuts, Shoe, Hagar the Horrible, Popeye, and even in an imagined sense in Buz Sawyer, Prince Valiant, and The Phantom — but never so closely as in the image above. This is my dream of glory as a child! And likewise many friends and acquaintances of mine, particularly those who’ve lived lives of real or armchair swashbuckling from childhood onward.
The comic was drawn by William Steig, best-known today for Shrek. However, he drew a series of “Dreams of Glory” comics in the 1940s and 50s (I hope I have the dates correct) for various upscale magazines, primarily The New Yorker. Most if not all of the comics were published in a single volume in 1953.
I’ve updated this post due to my examination of the 1953 volume, entitled Dreams of Glory. I discovered that the original comic, shown below, included two figures in the shrouds: a defender stabbing an attacking pirate in the heart. For the life of me I can’t understand why this was removed for publication in a magazine, not when there are already dead pirates everywhere on the deck, clearly dispatched by a child in his daydreams, not in reality.
This is akin to a Disney Pirates of the Caribbean book my kids and I love, a reiteration of the attraction and its song: it shows pirates attacking and plundering and water torturing, guns (cannon!) firing, a Spanish town in flames — but there are no firearms anywhere. They’ve been replaced by slingshots &c.
I understand the de-emphasis on firearms given the horrific rise in school shootings in the US, but I’m not sure that replacing firearms with slingshots, or deleting an actual act of violence while leaving the immediate effects of violence lying all around as in the comic above and below, is anything more than mere window dressing or facade that doesn’t alter the substance at all, much less provide a solution. It’s much easier to alter an illustration than to reasonably limit access to firearms and the evil corners of the Internet, not to mention delve into the development of other possible parts of the solution.
Text copyright Benerson Little 2022. First posted October 12, 2022. Deleted and re-posted October 19, 2022 (unable to reblog, thus…).
A vampire — surely Lugosi himself! — riff on Captain Blood, with a Moby Dick reference no less, by friend and arms historian Jim McDougall. 🙂
Is the ship the Arabella, the Pequod, the Demeter, or the Vesta? 🙂
Comic copyright by Jim McDougall, 2021-2022. Blog copyright Benerson Little 2022. First posted October 17, 2021.
Last year, after a long journey of intellectual curiosity, investigation with a near-gothic atmosphere, and more than one skullduggerous attempt to thwart us, we announced the acquisition of the James Speke of Comerton Collection of papers related to Caribbean piracy in the 1680s. The collection includes the original unpublished set of twenty-odd volumes of journals used by Rafael Sabatini as the factual basis for many of the adventures of his sanguinary hero, Captain Peter Blood.
We are continuing in the various processes of conservation, categorizing, copying, and transcribing the large number of documents ranging in date from 1685 to 1697, and which also include several boxes of books, such as several 17th to 19th century editions of Exquemelin’s Buccaneers of America, and a first edition of Macauley’s famous History. Oddly, the latter is the American edition rather than the expected UK edition.
Also included in the collection — which I hear through the grapevine our acquisition of which has incensed the board members of at least one UK museum and one US university, both having hoped to acquire it for themselves — is a pocket-size mid-17th century volume in quarter-calf of Horace’s Odes, Epodes, Satires, and Epistles in Latin, and a mid-1680s silver-hilted French smallsword with a colichemarde blade.
Based on several medical and nautical notations in pencil, including the style of hand, on the end papers of the volume of Horace, we believe it was once owned by a 17th century sea surgeon, or possibly a physician taking a sea voyage. The sword appears be the same one included with the book on a list of personal possessions. We cannot yet prove who they belonged to, yet we can also not restrain our hopeful imaginings!
For the moment we are continuing to limit access to the papers and journals to ourselves, aided by an experienced conservator (thanks, Shell!) of antiquarian books and papers. Again, per James Speke’s wishes more than a century ago, we intend to publish the collection of journals, the most important of them in hardcover, the remainder digitally.
We’ll keep you advised at least annually on our progress with the collection. We look forward not only to further discoveries in the history of buccaneering, but also to learning how they shaped Sabatini’s famous novel, Captain Blood: His Odyssey.
Copyright Treasure Light Press 2022. First posted April 1, 2022.
It is with great pleasure that Treasure Light Press announces the acquisition of the James Speke Collection of historical documents associated with Caribbean piracy during the 1680s. The collection includes the original unpublished set of twenty-odd volumes of journals used by Rafael Sabatini as the factual basis for many of the adventures of his sanguinary hero, Captain Peter Blood.
Author Benerson Little, co-publisher and annotator at Treasure Light Press, has been searching for the papers, long thought lost, for more than a quarter century. Their rediscovery was the result of a combination of diligent research, serendipity, and thankfully thwarted skullduggery, including attempted forgeries and book-breaking, all of which was an adventure in itself.
The collection, long held by James Speke of Comerton, UK, disappeared after the amateur scholar’s death and passed, often unknowingly, through several hands, eventually ending up in an attic in a house in uptown New Orleans just off St. Charles Avenue, not far from the Columns Hotel.
For the moment we are limiting access to the papers and journals to ourselves, aided by an experienced conservator (thanks, Shell!) of antiquarian books and papers. At some point, however, given their obvious historical value, we may lend or donate the papers to a research institution for access by scholars, Sabatini fans, and the public at large, with emphasis on serious amateur historians who lack university credentials or access. Having been snubbed at times by some academic institutions ourselves, we’re sympathetic to the plight of amateur scholars producing quality research.
More importantly, per James Comerton’s wishes more than a century ago, we intend to publish the collection of journals, the most important of them in hardcover, the remainder digitally.
We’ll keep you advised on our progress with the collection. We look forward not only to further discoveries in the history of buccaneering, but also to learning how they shaped Sabatini’s famous novel, Captain Blood: His Odyssey.
Copyright Treasure Light Press LLC 2021. First posted April 1, 2021.
“But fortunately romance never dies. The spiritual hunger of humanity seeks nourishment in ideals, which it is the business of romance to furnish. Romance is of no particular time or age. If it has usually preferred to lean upon the remote epochs, it is only because the remote is easier to idealise.”
–Rafael Sabatini, “My New Adventures of Captain Blood,” Pearson’s Magazine, December 1929.
“Pish, child! The fellow’s an adventurer.”
Her agreement shocked and dismayed him more than contradiction could have done.
“So I had supposed,” she smiled distractingly. “I love adventurers and the adventurous.”
—Rafael Sabatini, The Black Swan, 1931.
February 23, 2020. A few appropriate words from the famous author:
“Every romanticist must regret the passing of sail, for surely every sailing ship is a romance in itself.”
–Rafael Sabatini, discussing how he came to write Captain Blood: His Odyssey.
Treasure Light Press 