Beverly Jenkins's Captured is an adventure romance (pirate romance) set in the Caribbean during the American War of Independence. As the plot takes us from France to tropical seas, Cuba, and Savannah (Georgia), the sense of place varies from zero to so generic as to fit any similar climate - with one exception. The various shipboard settings are atmospheric and feel carefully researched.
1778. Ships remind Clare Sullivan of the horrors of her passage aboard a slaveship from Africa. On a return voyage from Europe in the service of her owner she can hardly wait to reach the port of Savannah. But when the frigate is boarded by pirates whose captain removes Clare onto their own ship she fears the worst part of an already hard life is about to begin.
The disinherited son of a French plantation owner and a freed slave, roguish Dominc LeVeq captains a schooner crewed by men of many races, from a Scottish doctor to a formerly enslaved member of the Cherokee nation, and the mini-universe they have created aboard the ship and on their Cuban island home near Jamaica is one of the novel’s treats. It is not only the hunt for profit that unites the crewmen but also their commitment to disrupt slave trafficking, each man having been directly affected in various ways by its brutality.
Although Dominic bosses Clare around the first day he has been smitten with her from the second he clapped eyes on her. Lust quickly deepens into admiration as he learns more about her, and soon he begins to plan for a solution to her problems. As for Clare, she is at first terrified and suspicious of her new captor, yet the very next day she is enjoying an orgasm in his lap. In fairness, one cannot accuse Clare of the usual TSTL behaviour in this. As an educated slave she has a clear sense of self and a realistic outlook on life. While appreciative of Dominic’s keen attentiveness and the taste of freedom aboard his ship, she knows she must return to to captivity in order to keep an eye on her children, who have been sold to a neighbouring property. The pirate ship offers a temporary respite from shackles, and once she realizes her first impression of Dominic was mistaken, she understandably decides - knowing she has neither the luxury of time for courtship nor the freedom to choose her own lover in the future - to snatch a little pleasure for herself while she can. Still, the extreme turnaround was too easy for me and at this point only my determination not to give up on a promising storyline too early kept me from tossing the book aside.
I'm glad I kept going. Beverly Jenkins writes with a gentle touch and creates a hero and heroine who are thoroughly sympathetic. Without neglecting the painful subject-matter she infuses her story with sweet romanticism: the romance is front and centre and no time is wasted on artificial conflict. While there is one blood-curdling episode toward the end the overall amount of suspense is trifling, which surprised me in view of the plot but did not trouble me as I was absorbed by the fascinating historical aspects instead. The immediacy of the first chapter pulled me into the story straightaway, the heroine’s situation captured my sympathy, and I felt the hero and heroine were beautifully matched for each other.
What did not work for me were some of the other characterizations, or rather the lack of them. While colour and nationality has no bearing on whether a person in this story is found to be good or evil, those who are good are all heroically good, and the antagonists are correspondingly one-dimensional. For example, no background is given for Clare’s owner, Violet, nor any explanation for her actions in regards to Clare. When Clare tells Dominic of how she conceived her children she simply says : “He was a stranger chosen by Violet from amongst her brother’s field slaves” and “A year after Benjamin was born, she chose another man, another stranger”. Why? The reason is not stated, so I can only assume it was done either a) to fetter Clare so tightly to her owners that she would never attempt escape, or b) to produce, without cost, more slaves. Are these actions supposed to illuminate particular callousness or cruelty on Violet’s behalf or are they typical of the slave-owning society she belongs to? Her eyes narrow when she looks at Clare and she says one should not give slaves ideas, but how do these things differentiate Violet from thousands of other slave owners? Violet seems to merely represent a useful type. Likewise, Dominic’s brother Eduard (who would sound more genuinely French if he were named Édouard) hates having a brother of a different race, but that is all we learn about his make-up. A Dutch slave trader is a cardboard villain who throws about phrases like “The next time we meet, LeVeq, plan to die.”
Since I have no knowledge of ships and wanted an idea of what schooners and frigates look like, I went to the web for information. From pictures and from sites like Pirate’s Hold I gathered that schooners were swift but rather small and shallow, and “could carry up to 75 crew and mounted eight cannons and four swivel guns”, whereas frigates were fast and light, “suited to convoy duty and hunting pirates”, “carrying 24-38 guns on a single deck”. With this information in mind, and looking at pictures, I find it hard to imagine “a large four-poster bed”, a desk, a mahogany table, a wardrobe, several chairs, and a screen in Dominic's schooner cabin! Moreover, it appears he must have been an absolutely masterful captain to conquer the larger and better-armed ship where Clare was a passengenger. Yes, I know, he is the hero - but I wanted to learn how he did it, and that was not shown. In the Author’s Note Jenkins provides a bibliography for further research into African-American mariners and revolutionaries, so I don’t doubt that she had sound reasons for the story decisions she made. I simply had hard time picturing these two points.
A question about etiquette. If a servant in a European household of this era were to address her mistress simply by her first name without the title, it would have been deemed presumptuous and grounds for dismissal. Even friends and acquaintances had to be sticklers with titles. Clare addresses her non-friendly mistress to that person’s face simply as ‘Violet’ (p. 265) without this being commented on, and this is also how she refers to her in other company. Was this an historical American practice or a Savannah custom, or is it a contemporary literary device?
Overall, the change that Capture’s plot and subject-matter offer from the common run of historicals is refreshing. For that reason, and for her likeable couple,I am curious about Jenkins’s next novel, Midnight, to be released this autumn.
Excerpt (Avon Books, October 2009, p, 127-8):
“A short while later with cannons booming to signal her arrival, the Marie entered its azure blue home harbor. A flotilla of small boats, canoes, and makeshift rafts came out to meet her, and each vessel was filled with waving and smiling men, women, and children. Most bore the kiss of Mother Africa on their skin, but a few were of other races. Clare, standing beside James, had never seen anything quite like it. One large canoe carried two drummers who were pounding out a syncopated greeting. Infected by the happiness she saw on all the faces, she asked, ‘Who are they?’
‘Family, friends, children, sweethearts.’
Some of the crewmen, spotting loved ones, dove off the side into the water and swam to meet them. Watching the crewmen reach the boats and be hauled up, only to be covered with hugs and kisses, increased her smile. More and more small vessels came alongside, and the crewmen lining the rail waved and shouted greetings in reply. While the celebratory homecoming continued, Clare took in the stately palm trees dotting the edges of the beach and, off in the distance, the verdant mountain standing against the cloudless sky. ‘So this is Cuba?’"
A book of related interest: For an idea of how easily the life of a woman like Clare could have turned out tragically, Claire de Duras’s Ourika (my edition is from The Modern Language Association Of America, 1994) tells of a fictional, highly-educated and intelligent Senegalese woman raised by an aristocratic family in 18th century France. It is a very slim volume, the story itself a mere 47 pages, that was first published anonymously in 1823. But it packs an emotional punch that drives home Ourika’s impossible situation as she comes to realize that her education will never grant her access to the society she has been brought up to identify with. Although written by the (white) Duchesse de Durfort and Duras, “colonists on islands like Duras’s mother’s native Martinique were said to have been outraged by the novel’s publication” (Joan DeJean in her introduction).
