If you' like me, you plague yourself with these sorts of questions all the time:

“What now? What remains? Loyal service with the English was made impossible for me. Loyal service with France has led to this; and that is equally impossible hereafter. What remains, then? Piracy? I have done with it. Egad, if I am to live clean, I believe the only thing is to go and offer my sword to the King of Spain.”

But in this case I am quoting directly from Rafael Sabatini's classic swashbuckler Captain Blood. It is the dashing, witty Captain himself who gives voice to this anguish—and for Blood, service to the King of Spain is no real alternative because for him, a former prisoner of Spain, “Spanish” is a byword for cruelty and rapacity.

Perhaps his anguish, his desire “to live clean” among the pirates of the Caribbean, is a case of “Catholic guilt,” for even though “a papist only when it suited him,” Captain Blood is an Irishman, and a baptized Catholic is marked for life.

Blood is a physician by training and a soldier of fortune by experience. Yet, as the book opens, he hopes to settle in the English West Country, leave his adventurous days behind and establish a medical practice.

That, however, proves impossible, because although he dismisses the rebellion of the duke of Monmouth against King James II—a rebellion taking shape directly outside his garden window—as the inane passion of non-conformist Protestant yokels, he finds himself convicted of treason.

His crime? Coming to the medical assistance of a wounded rebellious nobleman.

He is sentenced to death, with that sentence commuted to slavery in the Caribbean. “I'thinking it's more pleasant in the sight of heaven to kill men than to heal them. Sure it must be,” he muses.

Standing on the slaver's dock in Barbados, Blood learns that blacks are worth twice as much as whites, because the latter become debilitated and die so quickly from the tropical climate and diseases, and so are given harder work and harsher treatment. His only salvation from slavery is his medical knowledge and his ability to relieve the medical distresses of the governor and his lady, which gives him a bit more freedom—freedom he expands by escaping and becoming a pirate.

Blood, like a good baptized Catholic, is both realist and idealist; a man, as another character remarks of him, “chivalrous to the point of idiocy,” while understanding full well the evil that lurks in most men's hearts.

Twice in the book he kills a man—in both instances to save a woman's honor from brutal physical attack. All around him, power is abused, patriotism is betrayed for self-aggrandizement and enrichment, religion invoked merely as a guise for hatred. It is only the religiously unobservant Blood in whom true religion seems to have bit, in which it operates in action.

“It is not human to be wise,” he says. “It is much more human to err, though perhaps exceptional to err on the side of mercy. We' be exceptional.” And his desire “to live clean” is given a devotional flame by the love of a good but apparently unobtainable woman.

Be forewarned. Captain Blood is not a “Catholic” book. But then again, this column devotes itself to books that touch on Catholic themes, not “Catholic” books per se. It has scenes of violence and salty language—though of a kind that was acceptable to readers who made it a best seller in 1922. (It was also the hit film that launched Errol Flynn as a star in 1935.)

So it is recommended with a modest degree of caution.

But if you have a daughter in college or in high school or dating—and who suffers from that Quixotic complex common to young women about reforming “bad boys”—then Captain Blood might be just what the psychologist ordered. It might help remind such daughters that there are evil men—there are plenty of these in the book—and then there are, well, misunderstood pirates who are “chivalrous to the point of idiocy” and who yearn “to live clean.”

Attempts at romantic reform should be reserved for the latter.

And when conducted with the bravura that is displayed in Captain Blood, the result is, in the words of the Dutch admiral van der Kuylen, “fery boedigal” (‘very poetical,” for those of you not familiar with the Dutch).

And Captain Blood reminds us of something else. Catholicism is not insular. Like Captain Blood, Catholics know that there is no elect, no utopia, no cleaving to the Bible alone and condemning the world.

Catholics seek not to shun the world but to be the physician who tends the wounded, to be the pirate who defends a woman's chastity with a sword, to be the comrade of ruffians but to insist on chivalry (and also, in Blood's case, to drop classical allusions).

Thus even an occasional papist, but a papist in his conscience, like Captain Blood, can be our guide and tutor.

So if ye be of brave disposition, set sail, my friends, and unfurl the flag of St. George.

H. W. Crocker III is author most recently of Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church, A 2,000-Year History. His comic novel, The Old Limey, and his book Robert E. Lee on Leadership