Buchan and Sabatini (and Freeman)

Something that piqued my interest while reading Salute to Adventurers but that I couldn’t work into my John Buchan June review, which I posted yesterday:

Early in Salute to Adventurers, which begins in Scotland in 1685, the narrator encounters a heretical preacher with revolutionary burn-it-all-down politics named John Gib. Gib is arrested and deported as penal slave labor “to the plantations” in the colonies, specifically Virginia. This punishment, taking place in this period, and the later involvement of pirates in the plot reminded me of Rafael Sabatini’s great swashbuckler Captain Blood, which I read once many years ago. At the beginning of that novel, Dr Peter Blood is unjustly arrested and transported to the colonies in penal servitude, in this case to Barbados. I looked Captain Blood up to refresh myself on the details and this also takes place in 1685, during the Monmouth Rebellion.

I read Captain Blood about the same time as The Curse of Capistrano (1919) and The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) and associated it with those, so I had only a vague sense of when Sabatini lived, but it turns out that he and Buchan were exact contemporaries, born just four months apart in 1875. Both started publishing fiction around the turn of the century, though Buchan found success much earlier, Sabatini’s career in fiction only really taking off with the back-to-back successes of Scaramouche and Captain Blood in 1921 and 22. Sabatini outlived Buchan by almost exactly a decade, dying in February 1950—two days after the tenth anniversary of Buchan’s death.

There’s an interesting comparison of the two men’s lives and careers waiting to be made here, but unfortunately I have only read Captain Blood. I remember enjoying it. I’ll have to make time for more Sabatini down the road.

Salute to Adventurers’ Virginia setting also reminded me of Buchan’s broader interest in Virginia history. I’ve briefly mentioned this story here before, but in the 1920s Buchan made a trip to Virginia during which he made a fascinating literary acquaintance. Here’s Ursula Buchan’s account in Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps:

It was a thrilling ten days for [Buchan], especially as he had long had in mind writing a biography of General Robert E. Lee, the Confederate leader for whose generalship he had the greatest admiration. But when at Richmond, he met the journalist and historian Douglas Southall Freeman, who guided them over the country of the so-called ‘Seven Days Battles’, from the [Chickahominy] River to Malvern Hill, he backed off, because Freeman had already begun his magisterial four-volume study of Lee.

Andrew Lownie, in his biography, quotes Buchan as saying that he “would rather write that life than do any other piece of literary work I can think of.” Lownie goes further, writing that it was Buchan who first suggested the Lee project to Freeman, but Freeman had already been approached about it by a publisher long before the two met.

One imagines Buchan and Freeman would have gotten along well, both being devout, high-minded patriots with a keen historical sense and a frankly unbelievable work ethic. (Here’s a summary of Freeman’s daily routine.) Freeman’s four-volume RE Lee is a classic, but I would certainly have appreciated Buchan’s perspective in a shorter life of Lee.