The direct influence for Captain Blood was Mary Johnston's Prisoners of Hope (1898). Johnston was an American novelist (undeservedly forgotten) who wrote historical novels of her native Virginia. Sabatini was not reticent in declaring his admiration for Mary Johnston. When he achieved fame, he often spoke of his debt to her and how he learned valuable literary lessons from the American novelist. He said, "Her writings read as the chronicling not of things studied, but of things remembered, of things personally witnessed." This eye-witness quality he thought a major attribute of good fiction: "That, I think . . . is the highest quality you may look for in the historical novel."

Sabatini owed a more specific debt to Johnston, as well. Prisoners of Hope, one of Johnston's finest efforts, is the story of a nobleman who is enslaved for treason and sent to the colony of Virginia. There he falls...