Lead Review (Saltblood)
- Book: Saltblood
- Location: Caribbean, Netherlands, Plymouth
- Author: Francesca De Tores
Winner of the 2024 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize (Best Published Novel)
“..the only way to love the sea is recklessly..”
Young Mary is born towards the end of the 17th Century. Her half sibling and older brother has died and their mother feels that Mary would benefit in life from being regarded as male, and thus Mary becomes Mark, named after the boy who died.
At first she serves in a grand household but then the call of the navy beckons as war with the French and Spanish ignites. She serves on board The Resolve as a “powder monkey’“, the lowliest of the low, scrubbing the decks and polishing the brass, and learning the proverbial ropes. All the while she is mindful of not giving away her sex. The “furtiveness and havoc of war..” enable her to duck and dive and avoid discovery. She works on a boat from the Netherlands and falls in love – her fellow sailor has understood that she is not all she seems to be, but after his death and the traumatic stillbirth of their child, she is free to once again set sail. And this time she chooses to board ship as a woman, with a small crow in tow, who has adopted her – an invention by the author and a nice touch.
The ship arrives in the Caribbean, where the trade in spices, rice and wood is lucrative, and in Nassau a friendship forms between Mary and Anne. Anne Bonny is a free-spirited young woman and the two are a formidable pair. They are drawn to the very masculine world of the piracy and enlist on ships that will raid other vessels for profit. It is a hard world but at some level an excitingly addictive one, riven with danger and disease, and the author beautifully depicts the time and sense of place. Below deck things are smelly and putrid and one of the captains, under whom she serves, likes to collect marine specimens, which he keeps bobbing around in tanks in his cabin. As a woman she is not only confronted by hard work but by sexism and lewd advances, which she soon learns to neutralise. She also does not fear killing another human being.
The author sets the story against historical events for authenticity, as wars and governments come and go and trade deals are made and piracy is outlawed. Based on a real person, there is, in fact, a scant trajectory of Mary Read’s life in the history books but the author has done a really credible job of bringing her story to colourful life. I found the novel engrossing.
Highly recommended.
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