Buccaneers

Among the treasures at Standard Ebooks I find Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini (1922). This was one of the first books I read in the adult fiction section of the library, having exhausted what seemed interesting in the children's section. I was probably about twelve, maybe younger. The librarian thought I was too young for this book, consulted my father, and wouldn't let me check it out. Whereupon I went to the library every day after school, took the book from the stacks, and read it at a library table. The librarian again consulted Dad. They gave up.

The description of the book at the site:

Peter Blood, with experience as a soldier and sailor, is practicing medicine in Bridgewater, England, when he inadvertently gets caught up in a rebellion being waged by the Duke of Monmouth. After being convicted of treason, Blood and some of the rebels are sentenced to slavery in the Caribbean. The year is 1688.

During the course of Blood’s servitude, he works on the sugar plantation of Colonel Bishop and becomes infatuated with the colonel’s niece, Arabella. When Bishop realizes that Blood is an accomplished physician he “employs” Blood in that capacity.

When the colony is attacked by a Spanish force, Blood and some of the other slaves manage to escape and take over the Spanish ship. Several of the other escapees turn out to be experienced seamen, including as officers in the British Navy. ....

As I've noted before, the eBooks at this site can be downloaded in every format used by e-readers, but I've been reading them online.

From the first chapter of Captain Blood:

Peter Blood, bachelor of medicine and several other things besides, smoked a pipe and tended the geraniums boxed on the sill of his window above Water Lane in the town of Bridgewater.

Sternly disapproving eyes considered him from a window opposite, but went disregarded. Mr. Blood’s attention was divided between his task and the stream of humanity in the narrow street below, pouring for the second time that day in the direction of Castle Field, where earlier in the afternoon Ferguson, the Duke’s chaplain, had preached a sermon that contained more treason than divinity.

These straggling, excited groups were mainly composed of men with green boughs in their hats and the most ludicrous of weapons in their hands. Some, it is true, shouldered fowling pieces, and here and there a sword was brandished; but more of them were armed with clubs, and most of them trailed the mammoth pikes fashioned out of scythes, as formidable to the eye as they were clumsy to the hand. There were weavers, brewers, carpenters, smiths, masons, bricklayers, cobblers, and representatives of every other of the trades of peace among these improvised men of war. Bridgewater, like Taunton, had yielded so generously of its manhood to the service of the bastard Duke that for any to abstain whose age and strength admitted of his bearing arms was to brand himself a coward or a papist.

Yet Peter Blood, who was not only able to bear arms, but trained and skilled in their use, who was certainly no coward, and a papist only when it so suited him, tended his geraniums and smoked his pipe on that warm July evening as indifferently as if nothing were afoot. One other thing he did. He flung after those war-fevered enthusiasts a line of Horace⁠—a poet for whose work he had early conceived an inordinate attachment:

“Quo, quo, scelesti, ruitis?”

And now perhaps you guess why the hot, intrepid blood inherited from the roving sires of his Somersetshire mother remained cool amidst all this frenzied fanatical heat of rebellion, why the turbulent spirit which had forced him once from the sedate academical bonds his father would have imposed upon him, should now remain quiet in the very midst of turbulence. You realize how he regarded these men who were rallying to the banners of liberty⁠—the banners woven by the virgins of Taunton, the girls from the seminaries of Miss Blake and Mrs. Musgrove, who⁠—as the ballad runs⁠—had ripped open their silk petticoats to make colours for King Monmouth’s army. That Latin line, contemptuously flung after them as they clattered down the cobbled street, reveals his mind. To him they were fools rushing in wicked frenzy to their ruin. .... (more)

Rafael Sabatini, Captain Blood (1922), Standard Ebooks