Saltblood
What a juicy subject for a historical novel—an infamous female buccaneer during the Golden Age of Piracy and her infamous shipmates, Anne Bonny and Calico Jack Rackham.
Mary Read’s life begins in hardship. She masquerades as a boy to solicit financial help for her mother from her brother’s paternal grandmother. Making her way through early 1700s society dressed as ‘Mark’ in service as a footman, she is pulled toward that wildest of man’s worlds—the sea.
A woman dressed as a man to become a sailor is a common theme in the misogynistic world of bygone cultures, but this one goes deep into the psychology, as Mary seeks a ‘name that fits her skin’. She marries and puts on a dress, and the couple run a tavern in Flanders. The men all now treat her differently, and Mary struggles to teach her husband that ‘the stuff between her legs is not the end of what she is’.
All the while, the dampness that seeps into their floorboards threatens to reclaim her for the sea. Perhaps a sailor is something else, neither man nor woman, but an identity unto itself. Read’s love of the sea, tinged with fear of its power, shines forth from the pages. The crow that follows Read around—a symbol of death—is an apt metaphor.
This is a great work of literature, historically correct and beautifully written. The characters are richly nuanced—the ‘specimen’-collecting captain and his ‘invisible’ wife, the eloquent Jack, free-spirited Bonny, Mary’s hard-bitten laundress mother. I loved the laundress’s ‘constant battle against colour’, beautiful metaphors like the ‘curved blade’ of a smile, ‘we wait like tubers for spring’, the ‘crabwise patience of shelled things’ and other gorgeous details of humanity, of ‘casual fond brutality’ and ‘gallows fellowship’, and of battle, death and pirates.
