Saltblood by Francesca de Torres

Book Review

I have long been fascinated (as many of us have) with the ways of pirates, in particular the women who took to the seas and pirated along side the likes of Calico Jack, Edward Teach and Charles Vane. Saltblood focusses on one of the most famous female pirates, Mary Read, and weaves her story together with Anne Bonny’s, another formidable female pirate.

Here’s the blurb:

In a rented room outside Plymouth in 1685, a daughter is born as her half-brother is dying. Her mother makes a decision: Mary will become Mark, and Ma will continue to collect his inheritance money.

Mary's dual existence as Mark will lead to a role as a footman in a grand house, serving a French mistress; to the navy, learning who to trust and how to navigate by the stars; and to the army and the battlegrounds of Flanders, finding love among the bloodshed and the mud. But none of this will stop Mary yearning for the sea.

Drawn back to the water, Mary must reinvent herself yet again, for a woman aboard a ship is a dangerous thing. This time Mary will become something more dangerous than a woman.

She will become a pirate.

Breathing life into the Golden Age of Piracy, Saltblood is a wild adventure, a treasure trove, weaving an intoxicating tale of gender and survival, passion and loss, journeys and transformation, through the story of Mary Read, one of history's most remarkable figures.

After watching Debs Newbold’s story of Grace O'Malley’s life, as part of a series of storytelling evenings at The Story Museum in Oxford, I was inspired to find out more about these fearsome women and when I saw Saltblood looked at two of the most famous women in pirating history, this book overtook all others on my to be read list, rocketing to the top and I’m very glad it did.

Part historical novel, part fiction the research that this book entailed must have been as epic as the story itself. De Torres has used court records and ships manifests in the main to sketch out Mary Read’s story and has added fictional elements to fill in the blanks. These elements are sympathetic to the overall feel of Mary’s life making it difficult to tell what is historical ‘fact’ and what is not. As a result De Torres creates true legends from the fragments of these women’s stories.

Bonny appears much later in the book and portrays a very different character to that of Mary’s. De Torres creates a relationship between the two of them to explain certain elements of Read’s life, however this does not feel contrived and Read’s relationships throughout the book, all feel very natural. There is much throughout the book that mirrors Read and Bonny’s lives and the intertwining of these lives in a fictional relationship, makes sense in the context of De Torres’ retelling.

De Torres’ handling of Mary’s gender fluidity and bisexual nature again feels natural and completely possible in the context of Mary’s life. Of course we will never know unless we ask Mary herself, which we cannot do, but nothing in the book feels forced.

All in all I loved this book. It had enough historical content to show where De Torres’ had drawn the story from, with plenty of the storytellers touch to entertain, deftly blurring the lines between fact and fiction in tale of life and love on the high seas.

You can buy Saltblood, in all good bookshops. If you would like to buy a copy online, please consider visiting my page on Bookshop.org where I have gathered some of the books I read and recommend. Here you will find a plethora of myth, legend and folktale.

And don’t forget to support your local library too. See if they have a copy to borrow.