For Blood's life as a buccaneer, Sabatini used several models, including Henry Morgan and the work of Alexandre Exquemelin, for historical details. Unlike the fictional Blood, Pitman did not join them, and eventually made his way back to England where he wrote a popular account of his ordeal. Sabatini based the first part of the story of Blood on Henry Pitman, a surgeon who tended the wounded Monmouth rebels and was sentenced to death by Judge Jeffreys, but whose sentence was commuted to penal transportation to Barbados where he escaped and was captured by pirates. A group of Monmouth rebels was indeed condemned to ten years' hard labor in Barbados, very similar to chattel slavery and the shifting political alliances of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 are used in the novel as a plot device to allow Blood's return to respectability. Although Blood is a fictional character, much of the historical background of the novel is loosely based on fact. Sabatini was a proponent of basing historical fiction as closely as possible on history. A fragment of the picture for the novel by Raphael Sabatini The Odyssey of Captain Blood-Vladimir Kosov 35 x 57 H.
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