FOR LOVE OF A PIRATE

Romance on the Elizabethan high seas, with its constant pitchings and turnings, can be quite fatiguing. Spirited young Spanish beauty Tamar de la Barca, a notorious flirt, can hardly be expected to find love in the arms of English privateer Six John Barrow, who has ransacked her father's garrison at Havana, and is holding her hostage on his carrack. Especially after she has just been brutally raped by cruel mestizo Don Diego Aguilar (""This could not be happening to her, she told herself over and over. . . . Not to her, a good girl, a Christian girl, the daughter of his Excellency. . .""). Can she ever feel love for another man? You bet, but not for several weeks, weeks punctuated by lots of fighting galleon-to-galleon. Tamar gets to fire a cannon at pursuing Don Diego and blow him to smithereens, while bandaging wounds and making pacifist small talk (""There is always a choice, John Burrow!""). Arms and the man, Armada and the woman--badly in need of Maureen O'Sullivan and Erroll Flynn.