Justice In Captain Blood

Peter Blood had an exciting life over the course of the movie, he went from being a doctor, to being a slave, to being a slave, to being the governor. Throughout the movie the central issues were nature of liberty, justice, national loyalty, personal integrity, and heroism. This paper will focus on the issues of nature of liberty and justice in the cases of Peter Blood and Colonel Bishop because of the conflicting way that each issue affects them. In the movie the nature of liberty is present in Captain Blood’s case because he started off the movie as a doctor who was a free man. When he becomes a slave for aiding a rebel he loses his freedom. Then, Blood and some of the other slaves plan to escape, thus regaining their freedom. When Blood and the other slaves take the pirate ship and become pirates they have become liberated. In the movie when they are making the pirate codes for the ship they call themselves people without a nation. This is the peak of the nature of their liberty because no one is oppressing them and they live by their own rules. This also relates to the issue of national loyalty because the pirates felt that they had no country,which meant they had no national loyalty. When the pirates go back to Port Royal they are offered a pardon and are
able to stay liberated. In the case of Colonel Bishop the nature of liberty for him throughout the movie was very different. He starts out the movie a free man like Captain Blood and throughout most of the movie he has freedom, but at the end of the movie he loses his freedom for treason. Rafael Sabatini perfectly incorporates the aspect of justice into the movie Captain Blood.
The loss of freedom for Colonel Bishop ties into the aspect of justice in the movie. It is ironic how Colonel Bishop was the one who was oppressing people and then at the end of the movie he becomes oppressed because he committed treason when he left Port Royal. In the case of Peter Blood he gets his justice when he becomes the governor of Port Royal and gets to oppress Colonel Bishop. There is a karma type justice in the movie because Colonel Bishop was determined to ruin Peter Blood throughout the entire movie and he was oppressive to Peter when he was a slave and he would whip him and then he ended up in
prison. There was also a sense of justice when Arabella Bishop turns on her uncle and is helping Captain Blood and at the end she tells her uncle that Peter is the governor. The turning of Arabella on her own uncle is justice of all of the things that Colonel Bishop had done to the slaves. In movie there was the theme of the person being oppressed becoming the oppressor and that is the ultimate justice in the movie. Also the turning of the person being oppressed becoming the oppressor is a theme among real pirates. Most pirates were oppressed by governments or ship captains and then became oppressors in a sense when they raided towns and ships.
Captain Blood does a good job of embodying the hatred for authority and a sense of liberty that the real pirates of this era had. The movie also presents pirates in a fairly accurate way, the pirates did not have peg legs or parrots. In conclusion, Captain Blood is able to give an accurate representation of pirates while incorporating the issues of nature of liberty, justice, national loyalty, personal integrity, and heroism.