Book review: Saltblood by Francesca De Tores

(courtesy Bloomsbury Publishing)

The art of reinvention is one many of us practice throughout our lives but it is likely that few have undertaken quite so radical and life transformative a change as that of Mary Read, a real 17th century women who began life raised as a boy after her brother, Mark, died.

Quite why her survival-at-all-costs mother chose to switch her gender like this is explained in poetic yet highly informative fashion in Saltblood by Francesca De Tores which quite successfully seeks to take Mary from someone of historical detail only and turn her a vivaciously-realised person with motivations, needs and desires not unlike our own.

De Totes, the historical fiction nom de plume of novelist Francesca Haig, does a sublimely good job of pulling Mary from the sometimes scant pages of history, where facts do little more than tick a series of chronological boxes, and turning her into someone who leaps off the pages a real life, literally swashbuckling, human being.

What is remarkable about this adventure-filled story of survival, hope and quest for self-fulfilment – while many of her decisions were fuelled by a need to simply survive, as was the case for many of her economically deprived fellow citizens, Mary is also imbued with a passion for life and a need to redefine herself away from the necessarily, harshly pragmatic decision-making of her mother in small town England.

She has to survive, of course, but would some living not also be good into the bergain?

‘Wherever we’re headed,’ I [Mary] say, ‘ it won’t be home. And that’s something.’

Martson meets my grin with his own. ‘That’s something indeed.’

Indeed it would, for who of us, historical or modern, has not longed for something beyond a basic need to survive, to place ourselves in such a position that some manner of choice can be ours?

It’s especially the case for Mary, in an age where real choice really only sat with the rich, who is, fascinatingly, raised as a boy after her brother dies, his death imperilling a stream of financial support from a relative who would not take kindly to the idea that Mary’s mum had given birth to another child out of wedlock to a man who is not that relative’s kin.

Using subterfuge to an almost pathological degree, aimed simply at making sure they weren’t another victim of British society’s many privations, Mary becomes Mark, and while many might see this as a violation and identity-wiping travesty of the lowest order, Mary becomes accustomed to life as a member of the opposite gender, becoming the footman to a grand French lady marooned by her husband’s death in England in a time when France was often as enemy, a sailor and a soldier and finally, a pirate.

It’s a dramatic transformation that is told with vivacity but also arresting humanity by De Tores who has fashioned in Mary someone who often had choice taken from it but who seized it back in ways big and small in a life that might have been impelled by the need to put foot on the table and one foot, non-fatally, in front of the other, but which is evidence of the power of agency in an age when women had little to any of it.

(courtesy official author site)

While De Tores admits in an historical note at the back of Saltblood that the facts of Mary’s life are “scant and often contradictory”, she also acknowledges that “the true story of their lives is no less extraordinary than the myth”.

Mary, and her friend and possibly lover, Anna Bonney, were the only documented women pirates of the Golden Age of these scourges of empire, British, Spanish, French and Dutch, spending much of their life outwitting those in positions of power who pursued them to justice, not so much because they were breaking the law, though they manifestly were, but because they threatened a trade that brought great riches to corrupt and often morally flexible men, and by extension, imperial power structures.

It simply the economic oppression of Mary’s earlier life by another name, and in De Tores’s brilliantly talented and empathetically evocative hands, Mary refuses to cower before these unweighted societal and power dynamics, choosing instead to make decisions that benefited her, power and influence be damned.

What is so clever and enriching about Saltblood is that rather than taking Mary from one kind of mythos to another more heroic kind, De Tores instead grounds her as someone who, yes, was not going to be imprisoned by the attitudes and expectations of the day – this mindset no doubt was given a huge early boost by her starkly unconventional upbringing – but who did much of what she did to fashion a life borne solely of her own hands.

He shrugs. ‘He’s not even a Catholic, as most Jacobites are.’ He looks gravely at Jack, still holding forth to the rest of the crew, and speaks low to me. ‘ I suspect the Jacobite cause itself matters little to him. But it suits him, to set himself against the king, and all he stands for.’

Indeed — I [Mary] begin to suspect that Jack is a man who finds against a very diverting place to be.

She took agency and choice where none was usually to be had, and in so doing, not only stands as a remarkable historical figure, alongside Bonney, but also as an everywoman who defied in many ways a world where the roles of women were rigorously defined and where the ability to set your own path was almost unheard of.

De Tores bring Read vigorously and wondrously alive, powered by writing which is factually rich and highly informative but not at the expense of telling a complex story imbued with a compelling amount of humanity, which lifts someone often the pages of history and gives her form, vigour and quite relatable motivation.

Mary is a wonder to behold, but while her tale is enthralling and her exploits immersively fascinating to a neverending degree, she is also a person, albeit it a wholly remarkable woman, who takes what little she is given and makes something quite extraordinary out of it.

Power by a need to survive but also to passionately know and explore the world on her unique terms, Mary Read is the beating heart and soul of Saltblood, a fulsomely-realised, and gorgeously written piece of work which takes this most amazing of women, and not only pays homage to the factual events of her life, but which also brings her alive in such a way that you can well understand why someone with the capacity for so much life would not be content to simply sit by and let others define that experience for her.

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