FRANCESCA DE TORES Saltblood. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Francesca de Tores’ novel is swashbuckling historical fiction, featuring unconventional women, war, and piracy on the high seas.

Francesca de Tores makes it clear from the start:

Mary Read and Anne Bonny are real historical figures – but I am no historian.

In Saltblood, she follows what is known about them but gives Mary Read a voice of her own, a personality, emotions, friendships, loves, and a story to tell that is as full of change, challenges, excitement and danger as Mary’s life must surely have been.

From the time of her birth, Mary was taught to conceal her gender. Initially, this was a practical ruse by which her mother sought to conceal an illegitimate pregnancy and to ensure that the money provided by her deceased husband’s parents to support their first grandchild, Mark, continued to be paid:

This is me: born in 1685 in a rented room in some stranger’s cottage … But as I was being born, my half-brother Mark was dying. Ma’s sister sent a letter from Plymouth: Mark died from the flux, having lived only a little over a year. Ma always says that I came quick and hard, so when I picture my birth it gets muddled in my head – the blood and sweat and screaming of my coming and of Mark’s going …

To keep the money coming, I had to become Mark.

Mary’s mother habitually treats Mary as Mark, and when she is eleven, she decides that Mary must go into service as Mark, because ‘you’ll bring in more as a boy. It’ll keep you out of trouble … You won’t get boys sniffing around you like dogs.’ She buys her ‘reed stays’ and laces her into them – ‘yank – tighter – yank’, but her breasts do not grow. Then, before she starts work at the big house, Ma gives Mary a present:

‘Put this in your drawers,’ she says. It’s a rag sewn around a bundle of dried beans, the whole of it the size of a small fist, and she had stitched three neat buttonholes with matching buttons inside the man’s drawers that I will wear. …

So I tuck the bag of beans into my drawers, and fiddle ungainly with the buttons until the parcel is fastened into place. It feels strange – a weight where no weight had been. I stand differently too: my legs apart, and when I walk it is with more of a swagger.

The big house is owned by a widowed French lady who lives a quiet, retired life. Mary is answerable to Mr Twiner, who teaches her to be attentive, unobtrusive, and ever at hand to help ‘Madam’. She has a small room to herself, a fine jacket, a stiff white neck-cloth and stockings for when she is working inside, and her wage is given to her mother. When, at fifteen, her ‘monthly courses’ begin, she washes her rags privately and keeps her secret.

Then, in 1701, there is a war with France. So, as Mark, she jumps at the chance to join the navy and get away from ‘the tyranny of trays’ and ‘Ma coming to take my money’. She lies to the officer that she is fourteen, and she is taken on as a powder monkey on a third-rate ship of the line, the Resolve.

Life aboard Resolve is hard and the captain, who sees himself as a man of science, is more interested in collecting sea creatures than with the Spanish or French, but Mary is constantly in fear of committing some misdemeanor and being stripped and flogged. This does not happen, but the storms and the action against the French that she describes are terrible, and she sees the death of a young shipmate:

‘Jesus,’ says Marston, when the bosun yells at us to scatter the sand, ‘You would not believe so small a lad had so much blood in him.’

There are officers’ wives aboard who have servant boys, one of whom, Belling, becomes an enemy when Mary catches him selling trinkets he has stolen. Belling is there, again, when Mary is assigned to a second ship, the Expedition. But after this second assignment, partly to escape the captain, who is constantly angry and will have a man ‘whipped for no reason other than a glance or a stumble’, and to escape Belling’s constant watching and rumour-mongering, she and Marston decide to leave the navy and enlist in the army, which is fighting the French in Flanders.

In the navy, Mary had been distanced from the killing – ‘carrying the powder or manning the rigging’; now, when a Frenchman charges at her ‘bayonet first’, she has no choice but to kill him: ‘if it is not to be their death it will be mine, so I must fight on’. When Marston ‘my only and my truest friend’ is killed and word comes that men are needed for the cavalry, Mary takes her chance. Lying that she knows ‘her way around a horse’, she has trouble controlling her mount but is befriended by a Dutchman in her troop who teaches her how to keep her horse under control.

The Dutchman, Dan Jansenns, becomes a friend and guesses her secret, so they decide to leave the army, marry, and take up the running of a tavern in Breda that Dan’s uncle has handed over to him. So, for a while, Mary becomes a wife, but she dreams of the sea, and when her baby is born prematurely and dies, and Dan, too, dies of a lung disease, she gives up the tavern and heads for the sea again.

As Mary recounts her amazing experiences it is hard remember that Mary Read did experience all these things. This is what it was like for her to live and work, eat, sleep and fight among men in the close confines of an old ship and in a wartime army camp, aware, always, that some small slip, even with a friend, could reveal that she was not what the men thought her to be.

But the adventures go on. Mary heads for Rotterdam and finds work, as a woman, aboard a merchant vessel. The Walcheren is an old East Indiaman, sailing for the Americas with a cargo of tobacco. The captain, Payton, earns a little money on the side by trading with a man who buys from the pirates the goods they have stolen, and who works between Jamaica, Charles Town and Nassau, which is the ‘seat of the pirate empire’.

It is in Nassau that Mary meets young Anne Bonny. She sees that Anne, who frequents the taverns and ale tents with her lovers, is bold and fearless, and she is fascinated by her. As they become friends, she learns that Anne, too, was brought up as a boy by her lawyer father who had sired her with a maidservant. Anne tells her that:

‘Pa wished to keep me close by him, and as all the town knew his bastard was a girl child, he passed me off as a boy. Said I was the child of relatives, come to live with him to be trained up as a law clerk.’

And Mary is thrilled to learn that both of them were bastards – ‘both of us hidden as boys to hide our parents’ shame, and to preserve an allowance’.

Eventually Mary ends up on a pirate ship captained by the notorious ‘Calico Jack’ Rackham, and Anne Bonny (who in Saltblood marries Rackham), accompanies them. Mary still has special feelings for Anne, and eventually the two become lovers.

Jack is not an easy man to deceive – and Anne is not one for hiding …

‘If I care for Mary, it does not follow that I care less for you,’ says Anne, and indeed she kisses him then very fierce.

And she makes it clear that she takes her pleasure where she pleases. Mary, too, takes a young lover. ‘You may think,’ she says, ‘that my tastes no longer run in that direction. But being with Anne is the opening of a door, not the closing of anything.’

Saltblood is a gripping, immersive drama told by a fine storyteller. That it closely follows what is known of Mary’s life is remarkable, and in the end, as she contemplates her fate, Mary is as full of character as she has been throughout the book.

Francesca de Tores Saltblood Bloomsbury 2025 PB 368pp $22.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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Tags: Anne Bonny, Calico Jack, English navy, Francesca | de Tores, historical fiction, Mary Read, piracy