Posted on Nov 28, 2018
Anne Bonny and Mary Read: Female Pirates and Maritime Women
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On November 28, 1720, Anne Bonny and Mary Read are tried, found guilty of pirating, and sentenced to death in Spanish Town, Jamaica, although their discovered pregnancies won them stays of execution.
"ANNE BONNY AND MARY READ: FEMALE PIRATES AND MARITIME WOMEN
"In 1720, the pirate John Rackham rallied together a group of twelve men and two pregnant women, named Anne Bonny and Mary Read, and stole a small sloop in Nassau. This fledgling cruise took several fishing vessels and a handful of merchant sloops over the course of two months before their capture and trial in Jamaica. The court condemned and hanged the male members of the crew. They also found the two women guilty of piracy, but the revelation of their pregnancies resulted in the postponement of their executions, at which point both women disappear from the historical record.
According to period evidence, the paragraph above presents an accurate and concise description of the brief careers of Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Most other accounts of these two, be they fiction or non-fiction, tend to include romantic and sensational stories in their histories of these female pirates. When addressing the issue of women and pirates during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, most discussions center on the history of Bonny and Read. Many participants at modern pirate festivals and “Renaissance Faires” use these two women to justify wearing bust boosting corsets and thrilling headgear. Since many people enamored themselves in the romantic mythos of Bonny and Read for three centuries, the broader topic of women and pirates also suffered from the mixing of fact and fiction.
In recent years, primarily after the year 2000, a small number of historians and researchers began to reject the typical romantic and sensational narratives about Bonny, Read, and general female involvement with pirates. Through new dissections of the evidence, the more recent generation of scholars revealed that the work of past historians featured glaring errors and flawed conclusions. For Anne Bonny and Mary Read, this new scholarship helped strip back the fiction and unverified facts in their histories and helped bring more consideration to the complex relationships between women and pirates during the Golden Age of Piracy. While the following concentrates on reestablishing the historical foundation for the history of Bonny and Read, it will also address the other pirate women during this period, the manner in which females interacted with pirates, and establish context for the roles of women in the maritime world.
The Bare Bones of Anne Bonny and Mary Read’s History
The historical record, already a sparse collection of documents for this short-lived pirate crew, features one questionable, though possibly accurate, account for the origins of Anne Bonny up to August of 1720.[1] The account in question is a section of A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, written by an author using the pseudonym Charles Johnson, published between 1724 and 1728. In the second volume, Johnson wrote an appendix for the content of his work’s first volume, claiming he received new information from “Relations,” since the printing of his first volume.[2] Based on specific details included in this text, some historians concluded that Woodes Rogers, the governor of the Bahamas from 1718 to 1721, provided information for this brief account, though the few known documents about these pirates verifies little of this particular text.[3]
Johnson stated that before May 1719, Anne wanted to travel to the Bahamas from the Carolinas. The, “very young,” unmarried female could not gain passage on any outbound vessels, because a lone single woman rarely went onboard an eighteenth-century ship without a guardian or an escort.[4] Anne enlisted the help of an Anne Fulworth to act as her mother, and thus supplied the young woman the guardian needed to gain her passage to the Bahamas. In Nassau, a young Anne, whose maiden name is possibly Fulford, kept in contact with her faux mother and married a pirate named James Bonny. This, “young Fellow,” received the Kings pardon offered to pirates sometime in 1718, resulting in James adopting of a quieter and more sober lifestyle than he had as a pirate. This change presumably led Anne Bonny to lose interest in James and to pursue her, “Libertine,” desires elsewhere with other men. Considering her circumstances, it would not be surprising if Anne engaged in prostitution while she resided in Nassau. James eventually stumbled upon Anne sleeping with another man. Even though James found her being unfaithful to him, he did not legally divorce Anne.[5]
Not long after James’ discovery of her adulterous actions, Anne met another former pirate, John Rackham. Like James, John also took a pardon for his pirate crimes, once in early 1718 and again in May of 1719 through a direct appeal to Governor Rogers. John plied the plunder he gained from his previous pirate cruises on Anne. John soon expended all his money, forcing him to join a privateering expedition against the Spanish, Britain having joined the War of the Quadruple Alliance officially in December of 1718. His profits from this venture renewed his funds and allowed him to resume his visits with Anne. Anne and John wanted to pay James to divorce Anne so she could live with John. The couple tried to arrange a witness, Richard Turnley, a local pilot and turtler, for the signing of legal papers for this divorce. Turnley refused and allegedly went and told Governor Rogers of this affair.[6]
The Governor could not allow Anne Bonny’s infidelity to continue in his colony. Rogers summoned Anne Bonny and Anne Fulworth to appear before him. Both women confessed to Anne Bonny’s debaucheries in Nassau. Rogers presumably held the same concerns other colonial leaders had about the marital activities of West Indian colonists. At that time, British subjects in Caribbean colonies held reputations for regularly having children outside of sanctioned marriages, for engaging in polygamy, and for women becoming more promiscuous after extended exposure to the Caribbean’s tropical climate.[7] After hearing these confessions, Rogers demanded she stop engaging in her depravities or he would throw both women in jail and force John Rackham to whip them in a public punishment. Sometime in August, Anne Bonny and Rackham conceived a child. Considering the potential consequences both of them faced if they stayed in Nassau, the piratical tendencies of Rackham, and the desires of both Bonny and Rackham to stay together, the couple decided to leave the Bahamas and to become pirates.[8]
The shared voyage of John Rackham, Anne Bonny, and Mary Read began on August 22, 1720 with the theft of John Ham’s sloop, the William, out of Nassau’s harbor. Governor Rogers’ proclamation against these pirates on September 5 described the William as a small sloop of about 12 tons, probably her registered tonnage, and carrying four carriage guns and two swivel guns.[9] A sloop of this size, with a measured tonnage of around 18 tons, would probably have a main deck length of between 35 and 40 feet, a beam width between 9.5 and 10 feet, and a draught of between 4 and 5 feet. Two of her carriage guns of a small caliber would have sat in the vessel’s quarterdeck area. The other two would have sat near the bow to allow for a better trim while sailing. The William also had oars for rowing.[10] In the appendix account, Johnson said the sloop was between 30 and 40 tons and described it as, “one of the swiftest Sailers that ever was built of that Kind.”[11] He then goes on to name the owner as John Haman, instead of Ham, and briefly describes Ham’s life in the Bahamas and his frequent successful raids on the Spanish off the coasts of Cuba and Hispaniola.[12] Considering the small size of Rackham’s gang and the regular use of smaller vessels by Bahama residents at the time, the proclamation’s description appears more likely than the larger version mentioned in Johnson’s account.
Cannon C-19 from the QAR Project, as seen in the N.C. Maritime Museum at Beaufort exhibit for the QAR. C-19 is a Swedish gun from 1713, made of cast iron, fired a 1-pound 1.81-inch diameter solid shot, and measured 4 feet in length. Her size is similar to those that would have appeared on the sloop William.
Rackham gathered a small crew of twelve men, Anne Bonny, and another woman named Mary Read to take the William. Johnson’s appendix account described the taking of the sloop as a thoroughly planned operation, involving Bonny visiting the William and asking various questions about the activities of John Ham and his crew. They quietly boarded the sloop at midnight, when it was dark and rainy, surprised the two crewmembers onboard, and bluffed their way past the harbor’s guard ship and fort with an excuse concerning a broken anchor cable.[13] Neither Johnson’s appendix nor any other period accounts suggest when, where, or why Rackham and Bonny met Mary Read or any of the other pirates they recruited for this venture, only that they united at and sailed from Nassau.
For the next two weeks, Rackham and his crew attacked several vessels in the Bahamas. Rogers’ proclamation said the pirates first sailed for the southern side of New Providence Island once they left Nassau and robbed a James Gohier in his boat. Immediately after the taking of the William, the Governor sent a sloop with 45 men to pursue the pirates.[14] Johnson does not mention Gohier or the pursuit vessel, but claims Rackham and Bonny went to revenge themselves on Richard Turley for telling the Governor about Bonny’s desire to leave her husband. They supposedly sailed to an island where Turnley regularly caught turtles, but Turnley and his son were ashore salting a hog they recently killed. The two managed to hide themselves in the woods when Rackham’s gang arrived. The pirates failed to find Turnley and instead robbed and sunk his sloop. They also took Richard Conner (or Corner), John Davis, and John Howell, who Johnson claimed to be three of Turley’s four crewmen on the sloop, to be part of Rackham’s gang. This part of Johnson’s account conflicts with the reports from the Boston Gazette and the trial account, which stated these three men started with Rackham at the initial formation of the pirate crew.[15] Both Johnson and the proclamation agree that the crew then proceeded to the Berry Islands and took a sloop sailing from South Carolina to New Providence.[16] On September 2, Rogers deployed another sloop of 12 guns and 54 men under Dr. Rowan along with Captain Roach from Barbadoes.[17] Before leaving the Bahamas, on September 3, the pirates captured seven fishing boats two leagues from Harbour Island. They robbed the fishermen of their catch and their fishing tackle, valued at £10 in Jamaica money.[18] Two days later, Rogers issued his proclamation, which declared John Rackham and crew as pirates and stated that they, “Swear Destruction to all those who belong to the Island [of New Providence].”[19] After leaving Harbour Island, for nearly four weeks, Rackham and his gang sailed the small William south against the winds and currents that carried vessels north through the Windward Passage to the Bahamas.[20]
Sometime in late September, the William arrived on the French coast of western Hispaniola. On October 1, the pirates encountered and captured two British merchant sloops. One of these sloops’ crews included a mariner from Philadelphia named James Dobbin. [21] At some point between this event and October 19, the pirates either forced or recruited James Dobbin to join their crew.[22] During their cruise off Hispaniola, the pirates discovered two Frenchmen, Peter Cornelian and John Besneck, hunting wild hogs. Rackham forced the two men to sail with the pirates.[23] Beyond the taking of these two Frenchmen and the October 1 attacks, there is no further information on whether the pirates encountered or attacked any other vessels between September 3 and October 19. Between their departure from the Bahamas and their arrival off Jamaica, Rackham’s crew lost five men, since they started with twelve and ended up with only seven of the original pirates by October 19. It is unknown if battle, disease, desertion, or other causes led to the loss of these men.[24] It may be why the pirates added Dobbin to their crew and forced the two Frenchmen onto their sloop. There are also no mentions of what Bonny and Read did during this period. There is no evidence of either of them possessing maritime skills. One possibility is that they did what other women on ships did in the Age of Sail, repairing garments and laundry.[25] After cruising south and west along Hispaniola, Rackham and his crew decided to sail for Jamaica’s northern coast.
On the coast of Jamaica, the pirates took two vessels, their most well documented prizes during their brief cruise. On October 19, Rackham, Bonny, Read, the eight other English pirates, and the two forced Frenchmen made their first encounter five leagues from Porto Maria Bay. The pirates fired their muskets and pistols at a small British schooner, called the Neptune, commanded by Thomas Spenlow of Port Royal. The small arms fire convinced Spenlow to surrender his vessel. The pirates took fifty rolls of tobacco, nine bags of allspice, and other items from the Neptune. Rackham then forced Spenlow and his schooner to follow the pirates.[26] The next day, Rackham’s gang sailed west along the coast and encountered the sloop Mary and Sarah one league from Dry Harbour Bay. When the Mary and Sarah’s master, Thomas Dillon, saw the unfamiliar sloop come into the bay and fire a gun at his vessel, he led his crew ashore to better defend themselves. The pirates continued to fire at Dillon and his men. Dillon then hailed the pirates. George Featherstone, the pirate sloop’s master, declared that, “they were English Pirates, and that they need not be afraid,” and that they wanted Dillon to come aboard the pirate sloop.[27] Dillon and his men agreed to submit to the pirates, who decided to take the Mary and Sarah, valued at £300 in Jamaica money.[28] Sometime on or between October 19 and October 22, the pirates also encountered the canoe of Dorothy Thomas, which they robbed and released, even though Bonny and Read demanded they kill Thomas since she could testify against the pirates in court.[29] The pirates, possessing only a small crew, soon realized they could not manage the William and two prize vessels at the same time. They allowed Spenlow and his crew to leave in the schooner Neptune on October 21; about 48 hours after the pirates originally captured them.[30]
During their engagements on the coast of Jamaica, witnesses took notice of Bonny and Read. In times of combat, both women prepared for the conditions of battle by wearing sailors’ clothing. They donned jackets, trousers, and handkerchiefs wrapped around their heads. Outside of combat, the two wore women’s attire. Even though they wore maritime clothes in combat, their sailor’s jackets did not hide their sex from onlookers who could still recognized them as women, especially by, “the largeness of their Breasts.”[31] While Bonny and Read did wield pistols and machetes during at least some of these encounters, no witnesses ever mentioned their participation in discharging the ship’s guns, firing small arms, or engaging in close combat. Bonny reportedly brought gunpowder to her fellow pirates during engagements, probably referring to charges of powder for the ship’s guns. Other women at sea also fulfilled this role, a position often referred to as powder monkeys, during the Age of Sail.[32] At no point did the two women act like captives, but instead swore and cursed like their fellow male pirates, acted upon their own free will, and consented to being pirates.[33]
The pirate career of Rackham, Bonny, and Read ended on the night of October 22. That day, about one league off Negril Point, the westernmost point of Jamaica, Rackham’s crew and the William discovered a periauger, a type of boat, and nine mariners from Port Royal who supposedly purchased the boat to go turtling. The nine men anchored their periauger and landed ashore right before the pirate sloop arrived, which flew a white pennant, and potentially fired a gun to gain the turtlers’ attention. The men armed themselves and hid in the bushes nearby. Eventually, one of the Port Royal mariners hailed the sloop. The pirates responded by saying, “They were Englishmen, and desired them all to come on Board, and drink a Bowl of Punch.”[34] Rackham then sent over a canoe to bring the nine men over to the William. After some persuasion, the mariners agreed to come onboard the pirate sloop, still carrying their firearms and cutlasses. Onboard, the nine men and the pirates drank together. Soon after the drinking bout between the Port Royal men and the pirates began, another sloop came into sight, the vessel that ended the pirate careers of everyone onboard the William.[35]
The sloop approaching the pirates belonged to Captain Jonathan Barnet. On that day, Barnet and another sloop commanded by a Captain Bonnevie happened to be sailing on their trading voyage to the South-Keys of Cuba. Bonnevie’s sloop, sailing ahead of Barnet’s vessel, sighted the William near the shore and thought he saw the sloop fire a gun. He waited for Barnet to come up so he could tell him of this discovery.[36] Five years before to this event, Barnet received a six-month commission to hunt for pirates and to fish the Spanish Treasure Fleet wrecks off the Florida coast. It is unclear if Barnet ever renewed his privateer commission after May of 1716. Regardless, Barnet, being a, “brisk fellow,” according to Jamaica Governor Nicholas Lawes, and carrying a large crew onboard his sloop, decided to investigate what he deemed a suspicious vessel in the fading light of the evening.[37]
When the pirates saw Barnet’s sloop approach, they ran from the vessel that could pose a potential threat to the William. Rackham ordered the crew to weigh anchor and tried to get the Port Royal men to help. Though they refused at first, Rackham soon coerced them to assist in weigh anchor through violence, or at least through violent threats. Later, witnesses also noted some of these mariners helped the pirates row the sloop in their efforts to escape. Some of the pirates and other mariners stayed on deck during the chase while others stayed below and continued drinking. Barnet fired a shot at the sloop from a distance and raised British colors, but the pirates continued to run. At 10 o’clock that night, Barnet sailed close enough to hail the pirates. Barnet heard the pirates respond, “John Rackam, from Cuba.” Barnet demanded Rackham strike to British colors, which received the response of, “they would strike no Strikes.”[38] After this refusal, one or several people onboard the William fired a swivel gun, a carriage gun, small arms, or some combination of the three at Barnet’s sloop. Barnet responded in kind with a full broadside and volley of small arms fire, which caused all the Port Royal men on the pirate sloop to flee below decks. The gunfire carried away the boom on the William’s main mast, making any further attempts at escape impossible and caused some of the people onboard the pirate sloop to call for quarter. Barnet’s sloop sailed alongside to capture the pirates on the William. After securing everyone on the pirate sloop and their former prize vessel, the Mary and Sarah,[39] Barnet sailed to Davis’s Cove, where he landed twenty-six men and two women. He turned the pirates and the former prisoners of the pirates over to militia officer Major Richard James and a guard detail he recruited to escort the pirates to imprisonment and trial in Spanish Town.[40]
Over the course of three trials held between November 16, 1720 and January 24, 1721, the court found most of the men involved with Rackham’s pirate activities guilty and hanged them in public executions. Only the two Frenchmen, John Besneck and Peter Cornelian, who testified against the pirates, escaped any charges of piracy. Sir Nicholas Lawes’s Court of Admiralty used loose evidence to convict the pirates and the Port Royal mariners who happened to be onboard that day. The court considered the presence of the pirates and Port Royal men onboard a pirate vessel as enough evidence to convict defendants of being a willing participants in piracy.[41] This resulted in the court ignoring the pleas of innocence from both Rackham’s pirate crew and the nine Port Royal mariners. On November 18, Jamaican authorities hanged John Rackham, George Featherstone, Richard Corner, John Davies, and John Howell at Gallows Point in Port Royal. They took the bodies of Rackham, Featherstone, and Corner and gibbeted them in chains at Plumb Point, Bush Key, and Gun Key as warnings to pirates and others thinking of becoming pirates. On November 19, authorities hanged Noah Harwood, James Dobbin, Patrick Carty, and Thomas Earl in Kingston, Jamaica. The court executed some of the Port Royal mariners on February 17 and 18, 1721.[42]
While the court found Anne Bonny and Mary Read guilty of piracy on November 28, both of them avoided immediate execution since their pregnancies, both in their second trimesters, allowed them to “plead their bellies,” since the court could not hang the innocent unborn.[43] The court never hanged either of the women pirates. A record of burials in St. Catherine, Jamaica, notes the death and burial of a Mary Read on April 28, 1721. It is highly probable that this Read is the female pirate of the same name. The date of the death came close to the time when Read’s child was due to be born. It is possible that she died of complications from childbirth.[44] No documents shows if Anne Bonny died in prison or if authorities released her. The historical record only shows a lack of documents demonstrating that Governor Lawes carried out Bonny’s execution.
The Fictions and Mythology of Anne Bonny and Mary Read
John Rackham image from a 1725 publication which reprinted, with a few alterations, Charles Johnson’s “General History of the Most Notorious Pyrates.”
Thanks to the work of writers and some historians, fiction and unfounded information marred the history of these two famous female pirates for the three centuries after their trial. Thanks to the mythos surrounding the two women, some readers of the previous section may have concerns about what they perceive to be missing parts of Bonny and Read’s history. While Johnson appears to have had access to some of the period accounts of these pirates, he also mixed in a significant share of fiction to make his publication more appealing to early eighteenth-century audiences. If Johnson had not added full life biographies of Bonny and Read, something he did for no other pirate in his two-volume work, he would have had no choice but to offer a chapter of only a few pages to his readers for these women pirates. Since other writers and historians did not make significant challenges to the accuracy of Johnson’s account well into the twentieth century, the line between fiction and the historical record blurred until recent years.
While few people are familiar with the trial and newspaper accounts, many more remember the colorful stories that do not appear in the historical record. Common aspects of this mythos include:
The two women dressed in men’s clothes to hide their sex.
Both discovered each other’s female identities after they met at sea.
There was almost an intimate romantic interaction between the two women because of mistaken identities.
Mary Read found a new lover from the ranks of the pirate crew, who she fought a duel to protect.
Well before their final cruise began, Rackham took Bonny to an unnamed hideout in Cuba where Anne gave birth to a child.
Bonny and Read were courageous and skilled fighters.
In the last battle with Captain Barnet, only the two women stayed on deck and offered to fight in close combat when Barnet’s crew boarded their sloop.
The women reprimanded and ridiculed their fellow male pirate crewmembers, including Rackham, for cowardice during their voyage and after their capture.
None of these things appear in the historical record regarding Bonny and Read. Of particular note, the historical record demonstrates that Bonny and Read operated together from the beginning of their careers and that their identity as females was a secret to practically no one. These pieces of the Bonny and Read mythos all originated in the pages of Johnson’s first volume of A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, specifically the sections of chapter seven that covered the lives of Bonny and Read.
Chapter seven of the General History begins as a history of John Rackham, also known as Calico Jack according to Johnson’s appendix account. The nickname, from Rackham’s alleged habit of wearing jackets and drawers made of calico material, is also another potential invention of Johnson.[45] In the portion of the chapter describing his final cruise, there are no mentions of the two female pirates until the last paragraph. There is a mention of Rackham had a family in Cuba, which is likely a reference to Johnson’s claim that Anne bore Rackham a son before setting out on his final voyage.[46] Most of Johnson’s details in the Rackham part of the chapter mirror those published trial account . He also comments on the court’s decisions and use of evidence.[47] If Johnson did not have a copy of Rackham’s trial account while writing this section, he must have communicated with someone who did own a copy, or he interviewed someone who saw the trial in person. After Rackham’s history, the chapter features sections describing the histories of the two women pirates.[48] None of the content in these histories, at least not content already adopted by Johnson in his Rackham section, have a known basis in the historical record.
The portrayal of Bonny and Read by Johnson falls in line with the literary traditions of the early eighteenth century and presents a significant amount of insight into some of the era’s perceptions of sex and gender. This story of two disguised female pirates intersects well with the period’s literary traditions of tales concerning warrior women, biographies of female criminals, and long stories about cross-dressing ladies. Johnson’s account repeatedly used the bodies of these women, particular their breasts, in a significant and symbolic manner for his narrative. Female breasts held a strong position as symbols of womanhood, domesticity, and maternity during the eighteenth century. The fictional versions of these women used attire to disguise and challenge the standard boundaries of their gender adhered to during that period. However, these boundaries return immediately when the two women revealed their sex through their bodies. Johnson uses their bodies to both excite the audience and to prevent them from completely overcoming their traditional role in society.[49] As Sally O’Driscoll, one of several scholars of literature and sexuality in the early eighteenth century, stated, “female pirates, as convicted criminals, have bodies that are available to be publicly interrogated and eroticized; readers cannot fail to be concerned with their bodies and what they might signify.”[50] Johnson took two real female pirates and used them as an opportunity to create a story that delved into a growing literary tradition of the era, and played upon women’s position in society.
While Johnson is responsible for originating many of the stories about the two female pirates through his tantalizing fiction, a few other pieces of the mythos did not arise until more recently. When popular publications about piracy display the flags pirates supposedly used, they often depict a flag with a skull and crossed swords as belonging to John Rackham, which would mean Bonny and Read sailed under this flag as well. No documentation for this flag has yet surfaced, with the earliest known publication to depict it being a 1978 publication on pirates from the Time-Life book series Seafarers.[51] A popular quote attributed to Rackham, concerning the way he courted women, states that his, “methods of courting a woman or taking a ship were similar – no time wasted, straight up alongside, every gun brought to play and the prize boarded.” The quote appears to be an invention of historian Philip Gosse, printed in one of his publications from 1934.[52] While Johnson’s work might have presented imagery that could excite ideas of a lesbian relationship, he never came close to showing or stating that Bonny and Read actually engaged in same sex relations. In an unauthorized reprinting of Johnson’s work from 1725, the publisher added a poorly written and vague passage where Read testified she had entered into piracy because she was a “lover” of Anne when they first meet and allegedly thought Anne was still a man.[53] The first known publication to directly claim the two engaged in a lesbian relationship appeared to come from an article entitled, “Anne Bonny & Mary Read: They Killed Pricks,” published in 1974 and written by feminist Susan Baker.[54] Jo Stanley claimed in 1995 that the court in Jamaica used the insinuation of lesbianism to worsen the two’s reputations and improve the likeliness of a conviction at their trial.[55] While historians, feminists, and writers all made various claims, accusations, and conjectures about the type of relationship Bonny and Read had, the historical record does not support anything regarding these two pirates and lesbianism.
Of all the contributions made by the twentieth century to the mythos behind this pair of women, one claim invented by a 1960s fiction writer stands out since several late twentieth-century historians caused a fictional passage from this author to become an assumed fact. In 1964, John Carlova wrote a fictional account of Bonny and Read, entitled, Mistress of the Seas. Carlova claimed in his book’s introduction that he conducted thorough research into pirate history and listed a dozen different important sounding archives and libraries to bolster his claim. Besides inspiring several other works of fiction, some historians took Carlova’s claim of authenticity at face value, including Linda Grant De Pauw, who published Seafaring Women in 1982, and the writers of the publication Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger in 1997.[56] One of Carlova’s creations from the 1960s included the invention of names for Anne Bonny’s Irish parents, William Cormac and Peg Brennan, and the establishment of a birth date, March 8, 1700.[57] Linda Grant De Pauw is one of the historians who included the names of the parents for Anne, along with other outright fictional accounts of women at sea, as fact.[58]
In 2000, Tamara Eastman and Constance Bond produced a small publication that stated Anne Bonny’s parents were William Cormac and Mary Brennan from Kinsale, County Cork, Ireland, and that she was born in the year of 1698.[59] There are no references to documents in this section regarding where Eastman, the main researcher into Anne’s origins for the publication, found the reference to William Cormac. There is only a reference to one record of a twenty-year-old woman named Mary Brennan from Kinsale charged with theft and threatening her employers. The courts sentenced her to transportation to the American colonies with her unnamed young daughter. Eastman admits that there is no evidence to link this Mary Brennan with William Cormac or that her daughter was a young Anne Bonny.[60] It is also noteworthy that the bibliographies for this book include the previously mentioned works that used Carlova’s Mistress of the Seas for facts.[61] Considering the evidence Eastman presented and the flawed secondary sources she used, it appears that when she found the transportation document, she likely assumed the claims in the secondary sources she read were correct, but had minor mistakes regarding Anne’s birth. She then adjusted the mother’s name, place of birth, and Bonny’s birth date to fit the transport document’s data.
Carlova also became the first nonfiction publication to suggest that Anne Bonny made it away from Jamaica, remarried, and settled with a gentleman in Virginia. In Mistress of the Seas, Governor Lawes released Bonny because a Dr. Michael Radcliffe convinced the governor to release her on the promise that they would both leave the West Indies together and that Anne would cease her evil ways of living.[62] In Eastman’s work, “some documents and personal papers belonging to William Cormac and his descendants,” supposedly show that Anne married a Virginia gentleman in December of 1721.[63] The descendants of William Cormac have yet to release these sources, or transcripts of them, to the public.
Historian David Cordingly also encountered this concept of Anne Bonny being a Cormac and included it in his own work. In the 2001 book he wrote concerning maritime women, later retitled to Seafaring Women: Adventures of Pirate Queens, Female Stowaways, and Sailors’ Wives, Cordingly states that William Cormac, Anne’s father, managed to obtain her release. After her returned to Charleston, she married a Joseph Burleigh. The two eventually established a family with eight children. They also managed to locate and bring back a boy Bonny had with Rackham in Cuba, who they named John. This Anne died in 1782 at the age of 84.[64] Cordingly references the, “Family papers in the collection of descendants,” as his source.[65] Eastman also mention that William Cormac secured the release of Anne Bonny in her 2000 publication.[66] In 2004, when Cordingly wrote the entry for Anne Bonny in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, he included the birth information that is also in Eastman’s work. He also used the previously mentioned story about Anne leaving Jamaica and marrying Burleigh in Charleston for this dictionary entry.[67]
Untwisting the complex web of logic and sources regarding Anne Bonny’s life before and after her pirate career is difficult, but it is clear that the foundation for these claims are built mostly upon fictional information. In all these publications concerning the origins and conclusion of Bonny’s life, there are no substantial pieces of evidence to support them. Most of the evidence comes from a series of assumptions and conjectures. A Burleigh family probably did live in Virginia and one of them probably married an Anne Bonny or an Anne Cormac. However, there is still no period evidence showing a William Cormac or a woman named Brennan gave birth to Anne Bonny, no evidence that Bonny ever left Jamaica after her trial, and no evidence that anyone in the Carolinas or Virginia married a woman who was also a former pirate. Eastman admitted in her 2000 publication, “it has not been proven, yet, that the woman in these documents [the papers of Cormac’s descendants] is the same as the woman from pirate fame,” and that Eastman was still conducting research to find more evidence to verify the Cormac family claims.[68] Sixteen years have passed since the publication of her book. In that time, Eastman did not find the additional documents needed to verify the claims concerning Bonny’s birth or her life after piracy.[69] Until someone unveils primary sources that support these assertions, and make them available to the public for scrutiny, there is no reason to assume they are fact.
OTHER WOMEN PIRATES AND FEMALE INTERACTIONS WITH PIRATES
For the period of 1680 to 1740, Anne Bonny and Mary Read are almost the only examples of women who went onboard pirate ships and actively participated in piracy. The exception to the famous pair is a woman named Mary Critchett. In May of 1729, a group of six convicts, transported from England and sold in Virginia, ran away from their masters and banded together to steal a vessel. The crew managed to hijack a sloop, the John and Elizabeth, in the middle of the night of May 12, without any weapons. The group sailed the vessel out of the Piankatank River and into the Chesapeake Bay for several days, and eventually let the master of the sloop and his servant leave in a flat boat. There are no details of when or who caught the five men and Critchett. Since their trial showed the convicts had limited maritime skills, and the charges in court all concerned the John and Elizabeth, it appears someone caught them in the Chesapeake Bay before they could go to sea and attack other vessels. During this briefest of pirate careers, Critchett’s most significant actions as a pirate included sitting on a hatch to prevent their two prisoners from escaping and arguing against allowing the prisoners to leave since they would tell the authorities. The court found her guilty of piracy along with the rest of the crew. There are currently no known documents showing authorities carried out this execution. While Critchett’s piracy consisted of two minor acts on her part, and lasted a shorter amount of time than the already brief careers of Bonny and Read, it is the only other example of a woman pirate for this period.[1]
While Bonny, Read, and Critchett are the only known women to have committed piracy, there is one other woman of this period that a British court charged with piracy, named Martha Farley.[2] In May of 1727, four men, mostly locals of the Carolinas struggling to make a living, gathered together and took the schooner Anne and Francis off Ocracoke Island. Over the next few days, they captured one sloop and raided another that wrecked on Ocracoke Inlet. The short career of these pirates ended when three prisoners subdued the pirate’s leader, John Vidal, in a boat while returning from a trip on shore. The other pirates and their prisoners then left the schooner and went ashore, where an informant told local authorities of the pirates’ presence. Residents of the area captured the remaining pirates, except for Thomas Farley, Martha Farley’s husband. During their cruise, Martha did not take part in any acts of piracy, according to the testimony of the court’s witnesses. She likely spent much of her time tending to her two children that accompanied her during the voyage. While on the schooner, she eavesdropped on conversations and told her husband of anything she overheard. She did benefit from the piracies of her husband on at least one occasion. Thomas Farley stole a pair of women’s shoes from one of the sloop’s masters and gave them to Martha. At the trial, Martha testified she followed her husband from South Carolina after her children begged her to, even though she had no idea what her husband’s plans were. Having no significant evidence of her committing piracy, and with the future of two children to consider, the court dismissed the charges of piracy against Martha Farley.[3]
While there are no other examples of pirate women for this era, there is evidence that some women stayed with pirates onboard their ships voluntarily. In the late 1680s, Captain John Bear, a Jamaican privateer, who became a pirate and then served under the Spanish, carried a woman with him whom he disguised in men’s clothes. Later in his career, Bear tried to pass his lover, the daughter of a, “rum-punch woman of Port Royal,” off as a noblewoman in Cuba, where they were both married.[4] In 1716, Captain Evans of the Greyhound noted in his letter to Charles Johnson the presence of two women, passengers from another vessel, onboard the pirate ship of Captain Kennedy. Evans stated that he knew not, “how they pass’ed their Time,” and thought, “they had formerly made a Trip or two to the Bay, there was no Rape committed.”[5] The “Bay” refers to the Bay of Campeche, where a community of logwood cutters, which included many former mariners and some pirates, lived and cut the precious wood used by Europeans to make dyes. The reference to Campeche, along with the rape comment, is Evan’s manner of suggesting the women had voluntarily sexual encounters with the pirates.[6] On another occasion, a group of about thirty female felons, sentenced to transportation, happened to be on the convict ship captured by pirates commanded by Richard Worley, off the Virginia Capes in October of 1718. Many of the women wanted to escape to a remote part of the Bahamas where they could build a new home away from government authorities. As a result, the women began to form sexual relationships with the pirates; many hoping such acts would consummate a marriage they could use to satisfy their ambitions, or at least some kind of security from the other pirates onboard. Unfortunately, these women’s dreams ended when the pirates were defeated in a battle off South Carolina, resulting in the end of their lives at the gallows in Charleston, along with their pirate “husbands.”[7]
While Martha Farley followed her pirate husband to the waters of North Carolina, and the female convicts captured by Worley’s men made husbands of some pirates at sea, many other wives to pirates remained on land. In the past decade, scholars of pirate history emphasized that many pirates left wives behind when they went pirating or found wives after returning from a cruise. This is especially true for men who sailed from British colonies to raid the Indian Ocean in the late seventeenth century. In the 1690s, many colonies allowed the pirates to return to their ports since they brought hard currency and precious commodities which colonists found difficult to obtain.[8] Evidence of the loving relationship held between pirates in Madagascar and their wives back in the colonies survive through a handful of letters sent to and from the pirates at their base on St. Mary’s Island.[9] Down in the Bay of Campeche, when said logwood cutters chose a leader from among themselves, who they called their King, said leader’s “consort” gained the title of Queen.[10] Considering the presence of this consort, along with Captain Evan’s comment regarding two women on a pirate ship having come from the Bay of Campeche, it appears that some of the logwood men had wives or lovers while working in their logging camps. While most British colonies no longer allowed pirates to enter their ports in the 1710s and 1720s, several of the early pirates who used the Bahama Islands as a base after the War of Spanish Succession were also local inhabitants with wives and children.[11] When they needed to force men to join their crews, particularly in the late 1710s and early 1720s, other pirates saw wives and families as a hazard, since they could tempt a pirate to abandon their crew and return to their homes. This resulted in several pirate crews preferring not to press married men.[12] While the number of pirate wives appeared to decline somewhat once ports began to no longer welcome pirates, these sea raiders proved to be no exception to the same desires that many men of the era had in regards to marriage.
Pirates fraternized with both European and African women during their various travels in the Atlantic World and Indian Ocean. When pirates sailed around Africa during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, they often visited the African coast and interacted with local African women. Captain William Snelgrave, a prisoner to three pirate crews in 1719 off the coast of Sierra Leone, described how the three pirate captains took his coats he intended to use in trade with the Africans. The pirates hoped that the colors and trimming of the coats would thrill the African women.[13] The white men that lived at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River, “did not scruple to lend their black Wives to the Pirates, purely on account of the great Rewards they gave.”[14] On Madagascar, pirates and the resident traders who provided supplies to these pirates married local Malagasy women, sometimes to multiple women. They did so not only to satisfy their desires, but also to integrate themselves into local tribes who fought against each other on a regular basis. Tribal wars resulted in capturing slaves that they could sell to merchants from the American colonies.[15] For black women in the western hemisphere, a pirate’s desire did not differ from those of any other Europeans, who frequently had relations with the mostly enslaved black women and produced many mixed race children.[16] Plenty of these black women did not submit to the pirates’ desires willing, only going to them because their masters or husbands made them, though Snelgrave claimed a small number of these women were, “very fond of their Company, for the sake of the great Presents they [the pirates] gave them.”[17] Even if some of these women liked the company of the pirates, many other black women saw themselves as victims and not as their willing partners.
Due to the romanticization of pirates over the past three hundred years, there is often negligence of the horrible reality that pirates victimized some of the women they encountered. Some historians also ignored these crimes in their studies of pirates. One historian, named B.R. Burg, went so far as to claim the pirates had an, “almost childish reverence for captured females.”[18] A survey of the historical record demonstrates the opposite of Burg’s claim. While the strong majority of ships consisted of only male crews, occasionally pirates encountered women as passengers on ships or during their occasional raids on land. In 1708, the French pirate Martel attacked the Bahama Islands and took sloop of Edward Holmes off Harbour Island, in the Bahamas. The pirates wanted to force Holmes’ into telling them where he hid his wealth and used the threat of throwing Holmes’ wife overboard, whom they also stripped and searched while they pointed a pistol at her breast.[19] Martel’s men also beat the belly of a pregnant mother with a cutlass to the point of causing her to miscarry. They also burned another female alive in her own house.[20] Women were not completely exempt as targets of violence, and thus suffered from some of the same physical violence men did at the hands of the more hostile pirates.
The most common type of violence pirates inflicted on women was sexual assault, specifically rape. Considering the criminal characteristics of piracy, the highly masculine environment on ships, and the cases of some crews staying out at sea for extended periods, it is not surprising that rape against female captives sometimes occurred. When Henry Every’s crew took the Ganj-i-Sawai in 1695 during his raid into the Indian Ocean, the crew tortured and ravaged the prisoners onboard, including the female passengers.[21] One Indian historian reported that the pirates, “busied themselves for a week searching for plunder, stripping the men, and dishonouring the women, both old and young…Several honourable women, when they found an opportunity, threw themselves into the sea, to preserve their chastity, and some others killed themselves with knives and daggers.”[22] In 1721, a pirate sloop under Thomas Anstis took the Irish ship Irwin off Martinique. Twenty of the pirates onboard took a female passenger and then gang raped her, “one after another, and afterwards broke her Back, and slung her into the Sea.”[23] On another occasion, two female prisoners remained onboard Charles Vane’s ship for an extended period, “for their own Entertainment, contrary to the usual Practice of Pyrates, who generally sent them away, least they should occasion Contention.”[24] In Bartholomew Roberts’ crew, a William Mead forced the hooped petticoat off a female passenger named Elizabeth Trengove, but another pirate saved her from further harassment by having her hide in the gunner’s room.[25] Captain Martel’s French pirates, while raiding the Bahamas in 1708, raped the daughters of Samuel Knowles.[26] In 1709, Jamaica privateers raided and ravished the American Indian women on the island of Dominica.[27] This collection of examples from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century demonstrates, according to historian John Appleby, “a growing victimization of women,” during that period.[28] Even though several pirate crews, specifically Howell Davis, John Taylor, Bartholomew Roberts, and Thomas Anstis, had rules in their crew’s articles of agreement about the treatment of women onboard their ships, these rules did not stop the pirates from occasionally committing these horrible acts against the women they encountered.[29]
From the Merry Wives of Wapping, c.1670s.
From the Merry Wives of Wapping, c.1670s.
WOMEN IN THE ATLANTIC MARITIME WORLD
To understand the women who interacted with pirates, it is important to have context for the experiences of women during this period, specifically women in the greater Atlantic maritime world. For the period of 1680-1740, particularly in the 1710s and early 1720s, most pirates worked as mariners before entering into their illegal sea raiding careers.[30] The experience of a pirate often mirrored that of a sailor for most of his life. Both sailors and pirates encountered many of the same types of women in their lifetimes. Understanding women in the maritime world, and where they would have interacted with mariners, also helps bring context to encounters between women and pirates."
COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen F. SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen TSgt David L. SPC Woody Bullard Lt Col Charlie Brown SGT David A. 'Cowboy' Groth [~93421
"ANNE BONNY AND MARY READ: FEMALE PIRATES AND MARITIME WOMEN
"In 1720, the pirate John Rackham rallied together a group of twelve men and two pregnant women, named Anne Bonny and Mary Read, and stole a small sloop in Nassau. This fledgling cruise took several fishing vessels and a handful of merchant sloops over the course of two months before their capture and trial in Jamaica. The court condemned and hanged the male members of the crew. They also found the two women guilty of piracy, but the revelation of their pregnancies resulted in the postponement of their executions, at which point both women disappear from the historical record.
According to period evidence, the paragraph above presents an accurate and concise description of the brief careers of Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Most other accounts of these two, be they fiction or non-fiction, tend to include romantic and sensational stories in their histories of these female pirates. When addressing the issue of women and pirates during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, most discussions center on the history of Bonny and Read. Many participants at modern pirate festivals and “Renaissance Faires” use these two women to justify wearing bust boosting corsets and thrilling headgear. Since many people enamored themselves in the romantic mythos of Bonny and Read for three centuries, the broader topic of women and pirates also suffered from the mixing of fact and fiction.
In recent years, primarily after the year 2000, a small number of historians and researchers began to reject the typical romantic and sensational narratives about Bonny, Read, and general female involvement with pirates. Through new dissections of the evidence, the more recent generation of scholars revealed that the work of past historians featured glaring errors and flawed conclusions. For Anne Bonny and Mary Read, this new scholarship helped strip back the fiction and unverified facts in their histories and helped bring more consideration to the complex relationships between women and pirates during the Golden Age of Piracy. While the following concentrates on reestablishing the historical foundation for the history of Bonny and Read, it will also address the other pirate women during this period, the manner in which females interacted with pirates, and establish context for the roles of women in the maritime world.
The Bare Bones of Anne Bonny and Mary Read’s History
The historical record, already a sparse collection of documents for this short-lived pirate crew, features one questionable, though possibly accurate, account for the origins of Anne Bonny up to August of 1720.[1] The account in question is a section of A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, written by an author using the pseudonym Charles Johnson, published between 1724 and 1728. In the second volume, Johnson wrote an appendix for the content of his work’s first volume, claiming he received new information from “Relations,” since the printing of his first volume.[2] Based on specific details included in this text, some historians concluded that Woodes Rogers, the governor of the Bahamas from 1718 to 1721, provided information for this brief account, though the few known documents about these pirates verifies little of this particular text.[3]
Johnson stated that before May 1719, Anne wanted to travel to the Bahamas from the Carolinas. The, “very young,” unmarried female could not gain passage on any outbound vessels, because a lone single woman rarely went onboard an eighteenth-century ship without a guardian or an escort.[4] Anne enlisted the help of an Anne Fulworth to act as her mother, and thus supplied the young woman the guardian needed to gain her passage to the Bahamas. In Nassau, a young Anne, whose maiden name is possibly Fulford, kept in contact with her faux mother and married a pirate named James Bonny. This, “young Fellow,” received the Kings pardon offered to pirates sometime in 1718, resulting in James adopting of a quieter and more sober lifestyle than he had as a pirate. This change presumably led Anne Bonny to lose interest in James and to pursue her, “Libertine,” desires elsewhere with other men. Considering her circumstances, it would not be surprising if Anne engaged in prostitution while she resided in Nassau. James eventually stumbled upon Anne sleeping with another man. Even though James found her being unfaithful to him, he did not legally divorce Anne.[5]
Not long after James’ discovery of her adulterous actions, Anne met another former pirate, John Rackham. Like James, John also took a pardon for his pirate crimes, once in early 1718 and again in May of 1719 through a direct appeal to Governor Rogers. John plied the plunder he gained from his previous pirate cruises on Anne. John soon expended all his money, forcing him to join a privateering expedition against the Spanish, Britain having joined the War of the Quadruple Alliance officially in December of 1718. His profits from this venture renewed his funds and allowed him to resume his visits with Anne. Anne and John wanted to pay James to divorce Anne so she could live with John. The couple tried to arrange a witness, Richard Turnley, a local pilot and turtler, for the signing of legal papers for this divorce. Turnley refused and allegedly went and told Governor Rogers of this affair.[6]
The Governor could not allow Anne Bonny’s infidelity to continue in his colony. Rogers summoned Anne Bonny and Anne Fulworth to appear before him. Both women confessed to Anne Bonny’s debaucheries in Nassau. Rogers presumably held the same concerns other colonial leaders had about the marital activities of West Indian colonists. At that time, British subjects in Caribbean colonies held reputations for regularly having children outside of sanctioned marriages, for engaging in polygamy, and for women becoming more promiscuous after extended exposure to the Caribbean’s tropical climate.[7] After hearing these confessions, Rogers demanded she stop engaging in her depravities or he would throw both women in jail and force John Rackham to whip them in a public punishment. Sometime in August, Anne Bonny and Rackham conceived a child. Considering the potential consequences both of them faced if they stayed in Nassau, the piratical tendencies of Rackham, and the desires of both Bonny and Rackham to stay together, the couple decided to leave the Bahamas and to become pirates.[8]
The shared voyage of John Rackham, Anne Bonny, and Mary Read began on August 22, 1720 with the theft of John Ham’s sloop, the William, out of Nassau’s harbor. Governor Rogers’ proclamation against these pirates on September 5 described the William as a small sloop of about 12 tons, probably her registered tonnage, and carrying four carriage guns and two swivel guns.[9] A sloop of this size, with a measured tonnage of around 18 tons, would probably have a main deck length of between 35 and 40 feet, a beam width between 9.5 and 10 feet, and a draught of between 4 and 5 feet. Two of her carriage guns of a small caliber would have sat in the vessel’s quarterdeck area. The other two would have sat near the bow to allow for a better trim while sailing. The William also had oars for rowing.[10] In the appendix account, Johnson said the sloop was between 30 and 40 tons and described it as, “one of the swiftest Sailers that ever was built of that Kind.”[11] He then goes on to name the owner as John Haman, instead of Ham, and briefly describes Ham’s life in the Bahamas and his frequent successful raids on the Spanish off the coasts of Cuba and Hispaniola.[12] Considering the small size of Rackham’s gang and the regular use of smaller vessels by Bahama residents at the time, the proclamation’s description appears more likely than the larger version mentioned in Johnson’s account.
Cannon C-19 from the QAR Project, as seen in the N.C. Maritime Museum at Beaufort exhibit for the QAR. C-19 is a Swedish gun from 1713, made of cast iron, fired a 1-pound 1.81-inch diameter solid shot, and measured 4 feet in length. Her size is similar to those that would have appeared on the sloop William.
Rackham gathered a small crew of twelve men, Anne Bonny, and another woman named Mary Read to take the William. Johnson’s appendix account described the taking of the sloop as a thoroughly planned operation, involving Bonny visiting the William and asking various questions about the activities of John Ham and his crew. They quietly boarded the sloop at midnight, when it was dark and rainy, surprised the two crewmembers onboard, and bluffed their way past the harbor’s guard ship and fort with an excuse concerning a broken anchor cable.[13] Neither Johnson’s appendix nor any other period accounts suggest when, where, or why Rackham and Bonny met Mary Read or any of the other pirates they recruited for this venture, only that they united at and sailed from Nassau.
For the next two weeks, Rackham and his crew attacked several vessels in the Bahamas. Rogers’ proclamation said the pirates first sailed for the southern side of New Providence Island once they left Nassau and robbed a James Gohier in his boat. Immediately after the taking of the William, the Governor sent a sloop with 45 men to pursue the pirates.[14] Johnson does not mention Gohier or the pursuit vessel, but claims Rackham and Bonny went to revenge themselves on Richard Turley for telling the Governor about Bonny’s desire to leave her husband. They supposedly sailed to an island where Turnley regularly caught turtles, but Turnley and his son were ashore salting a hog they recently killed. The two managed to hide themselves in the woods when Rackham’s gang arrived. The pirates failed to find Turnley and instead robbed and sunk his sloop. They also took Richard Conner (or Corner), John Davis, and John Howell, who Johnson claimed to be three of Turley’s four crewmen on the sloop, to be part of Rackham’s gang. This part of Johnson’s account conflicts with the reports from the Boston Gazette and the trial account, which stated these three men started with Rackham at the initial formation of the pirate crew.[15] Both Johnson and the proclamation agree that the crew then proceeded to the Berry Islands and took a sloop sailing from South Carolina to New Providence.[16] On September 2, Rogers deployed another sloop of 12 guns and 54 men under Dr. Rowan along with Captain Roach from Barbadoes.[17] Before leaving the Bahamas, on September 3, the pirates captured seven fishing boats two leagues from Harbour Island. They robbed the fishermen of their catch and their fishing tackle, valued at £10 in Jamaica money.[18] Two days later, Rogers issued his proclamation, which declared John Rackham and crew as pirates and stated that they, “Swear Destruction to all those who belong to the Island [of New Providence].”[19] After leaving Harbour Island, for nearly four weeks, Rackham and his gang sailed the small William south against the winds and currents that carried vessels north through the Windward Passage to the Bahamas.[20]
Sometime in late September, the William arrived on the French coast of western Hispaniola. On October 1, the pirates encountered and captured two British merchant sloops. One of these sloops’ crews included a mariner from Philadelphia named James Dobbin. [21] At some point between this event and October 19, the pirates either forced or recruited James Dobbin to join their crew.[22] During their cruise off Hispaniola, the pirates discovered two Frenchmen, Peter Cornelian and John Besneck, hunting wild hogs. Rackham forced the two men to sail with the pirates.[23] Beyond the taking of these two Frenchmen and the October 1 attacks, there is no further information on whether the pirates encountered or attacked any other vessels between September 3 and October 19. Between their departure from the Bahamas and their arrival off Jamaica, Rackham’s crew lost five men, since they started with twelve and ended up with only seven of the original pirates by October 19. It is unknown if battle, disease, desertion, or other causes led to the loss of these men.[24] It may be why the pirates added Dobbin to their crew and forced the two Frenchmen onto their sloop. There are also no mentions of what Bonny and Read did during this period. There is no evidence of either of them possessing maritime skills. One possibility is that they did what other women on ships did in the Age of Sail, repairing garments and laundry.[25] After cruising south and west along Hispaniola, Rackham and his crew decided to sail for Jamaica’s northern coast.
On the coast of Jamaica, the pirates took two vessels, their most well documented prizes during their brief cruise. On October 19, Rackham, Bonny, Read, the eight other English pirates, and the two forced Frenchmen made their first encounter five leagues from Porto Maria Bay. The pirates fired their muskets and pistols at a small British schooner, called the Neptune, commanded by Thomas Spenlow of Port Royal. The small arms fire convinced Spenlow to surrender his vessel. The pirates took fifty rolls of tobacco, nine bags of allspice, and other items from the Neptune. Rackham then forced Spenlow and his schooner to follow the pirates.[26] The next day, Rackham’s gang sailed west along the coast and encountered the sloop Mary and Sarah one league from Dry Harbour Bay. When the Mary and Sarah’s master, Thomas Dillon, saw the unfamiliar sloop come into the bay and fire a gun at his vessel, he led his crew ashore to better defend themselves. The pirates continued to fire at Dillon and his men. Dillon then hailed the pirates. George Featherstone, the pirate sloop’s master, declared that, “they were English Pirates, and that they need not be afraid,” and that they wanted Dillon to come aboard the pirate sloop.[27] Dillon and his men agreed to submit to the pirates, who decided to take the Mary and Sarah, valued at £300 in Jamaica money.[28] Sometime on or between October 19 and October 22, the pirates also encountered the canoe of Dorothy Thomas, which they robbed and released, even though Bonny and Read demanded they kill Thomas since she could testify against the pirates in court.[29] The pirates, possessing only a small crew, soon realized they could not manage the William and two prize vessels at the same time. They allowed Spenlow and his crew to leave in the schooner Neptune on October 21; about 48 hours after the pirates originally captured them.[30]
During their engagements on the coast of Jamaica, witnesses took notice of Bonny and Read. In times of combat, both women prepared for the conditions of battle by wearing sailors’ clothing. They donned jackets, trousers, and handkerchiefs wrapped around their heads. Outside of combat, the two wore women’s attire. Even though they wore maritime clothes in combat, their sailor’s jackets did not hide their sex from onlookers who could still recognized them as women, especially by, “the largeness of their Breasts.”[31] While Bonny and Read did wield pistols and machetes during at least some of these encounters, no witnesses ever mentioned their participation in discharging the ship’s guns, firing small arms, or engaging in close combat. Bonny reportedly brought gunpowder to her fellow pirates during engagements, probably referring to charges of powder for the ship’s guns. Other women at sea also fulfilled this role, a position often referred to as powder monkeys, during the Age of Sail.[32] At no point did the two women act like captives, but instead swore and cursed like their fellow male pirates, acted upon their own free will, and consented to being pirates.[33]
The pirate career of Rackham, Bonny, and Read ended on the night of October 22. That day, about one league off Negril Point, the westernmost point of Jamaica, Rackham’s crew and the William discovered a periauger, a type of boat, and nine mariners from Port Royal who supposedly purchased the boat to go turtling. The nine men anchored their periauger and landed ashore right before the pirate sloop arrived, which flew a white pennant, and potentially fired a gun to gain the turtlers’ attention. The men armed themselves and hid in the bushes nearby. Eventually, one of the Port Royal mariners hailed the sloop. The pirates responded by saying, “They were Englishmen, and desired them all to come on Board, and drink a Bowl of Punch.”[34] Rackham then sent over a canoe to bring the nine men over to the William. After some persuasion, the mariners agreed to come onboard the pirate sloop, still carrying their firearms and cutlasses. Onboard, the nine men and the pirates drank together. Soon after the drinking bout between the Port Royal men and the pirates began, another sloop came into sight, the vessel that ended the pirate careers of everyone onboard the William.[35]
The sloop approaching the pirates belonged to Captain Jonathan Barnet. On that day, Barnet and another sloop commanded by a Captain Bonnevie happened to be sailing on their trading voyage to the South-Keys of Cuba. Bonnevie’s sloop, sailing ahead of Barnet’s vessel, sighted the William near the shore and thought he saw the sloop fire a gun. He waited for Barnet to come up so he could tell him of this discovery.[36] Five years before to this event, Barnet received a six-month commission to hunt for pirates and to fish the Spanish Treasure Fleet wrecks off the Florida coast. It is unclear if Barnet ever renewed his privateer commission after May of 1716. Regardless, Barnet, being a, “brisk fellow,” according to Jamaica Governor Nicholas Lawes, and carrying a large crew onboard his sloop, decided to investigate what he deemed a suspicious vessel in the fading light of the evening.[37]
When the pirates saw Barnet’s sloop approach, they ran from the vessel that could pose a potential threat to the William. Rackham ordered the crew to weigh anchor and tried to get the Port Royal men to help. Though they refused at first, Rackham soon coerced them to assist in weigh anchor through violence, or at least through violent threats. Later, witnesses also noted some of these mariners helped the pirates row the sloop in their efforts to escape. Some of the pirates and other mariners stayed on deck during the chase while others stayed below and continued drinking. Barnet fired a shot at the sloop from a distance and raised British colors, but the pirates continued to run. At 10 o’clock that night, Barnet sailed close enough to hail the pirates. Barnet heard the pirates respond, “John Rackam, from Cuba.” Barnet demanded Rackham strike to British colors, which received the response of, “they would strike no Strikes.”[38] After this refusal, one or several people onboard the William fired a swivel gun, a carriage gun, small arms, or some combination of the three at Barnet’s sloop. Barnet responded in kind with a full broadside and volley of small arms fire, which caused all the Port Royal men on the pirate sloop to flee below decks. The gunfire carried away the boom on the William’s main mast, making any further attempts at escape impossible and caused some of the people onboard the pirate sloop to call for quarter. Barnet’s sloop sailed alongside to capture the pirates on the William. After securing everyone on the pirate sloop and their former prize vessel, the Mary and Sarah,[39] Barnet sailed to Davis’s Cove, where he landed twenty-six men and two women. He turned the pirates and the former prisoners of the pirates over to militia officer Major Richard James and a guard detail he recruited to escort the pirates to imprisonment and trial in Spanish Town.[40]
Over the course of three trials held between November 16, 1720 and January 24, 1721, the court found most of the men involved with Rackham’s pirate activities guilty and hanged them in public executions. Only the two Frenchmen, John Besneck and Peter Cornelian, who testified against the pirates, escaped any charges of piracy. Sir Nicholas Lawes’s Court of Admiralty used loose evidence to convict the pirates and the Port Royal mariners who happened to be onboard that day. The court considered the presence of the pirates and Port Royal men onboard a pirate vessel as enough evidence to convict defendants of being a willing participants in piracy.[41] This resulted in the court ignoring the pleas of innocence from both Rackham’s pirate crew and the nine Port Royal mariners. On November 18, Jamaican authorities hanged John Rackham, George Featherstone, Richard Corner, John Davies, and John Howell at Gallows Point in Port Royal. They took the bodies of Rackham, Featherstone, and Corner and gibbeted them in chains at Plumb Point, Bush Key, and Gun Key as warnings to pirates and others thinking of becoming pirates. On November 19, authorities hanged Noah Harwood, James Dobbin, Patrick Carty, and Thomas Earl in Kingston, Jamaica. The court executed some of the Port Royal mariners on February 17 and 18, 1721.[42]
While the court found Anne Bonny and Mary Read guilty of piracy on November 28, both of them avoided immediate execution since their pregnancies, both in their second trimesters, allowed them to “plead their bellies,” since the court could not hang the innocent unborn.[43] The court never hanged either of the women pirates. A record of burials in St. Catherine, Jamaica, notes the death and burial of a Mary Read on April 28, 1721. It is highly probable that this Read is the female pirate of the same name. The date of the death came close to the time when Read’s child was due to be born. It is possible that she died of complications from childbirth.[44] No documents shows if Anne Bonny died in prison or if authorities released her. The historical record only shows a lack of documents demonstrating that Governor Lawes carried out Bonny’s execution.
The Fictions and Mythology of Anne Bonny and Mary Read
John Rackham image from a 1725 publication which reprinted, with a few alterations, Charles Johnson’s “General History of the Most Notorious Pyrates.”
Thanks to the work of writers and some historians, fiction and unfounded information marred the history of these two famous female pirates for the three centuries after their trial. Thanks to the mythos surrounding the two women, some readers of the previous section may have concerns about what they perceive to be missing parts of Bonny and Read’s history. While Johnson appears to have had access to some of the period accounts of these pirates, he also mixed in a significant share of fiction to make his publication more appealing to early eighteenth-century audiences. If Johnson had not added full life biographies of Bonny and Read, something he did for no other pirate in his two-volume work, he would have had no choice but to offer a chapter of only a few pages to his readers for these women pirates. Since other writers and historians did not make significant challenges to the accuracy of Johnson’s account well into the twentieth century, the line between fiction and the historical record blurred until recent years.
While few people are familiar with the trial and newspaper accounts, many more remember the colorful stories that do not appear in the historical record. Common aspects of this mythos include:
The two women dressed in men’s clothes to hide their sex.
Both discovered each other’s female identities after they met at sea.
There was almost an intimate romantic interaction between the two women because of mistaken identities.
Mary Read found a new lover from the ranks of the pirate crew, who she fought a duel to protect.
Well before their final cruise began, Rackham took Bonny to an unnamed hideout in Cuba where Anne gave birth to a child.
Bonny and Read were courageous and skilled fighters.
In the last battle with Captain Barnet, only the two women stayed on deck and offered to fight in close combat when Barnet’s crew boarded their sloop.
The women reprimanded and ridiculed their fellow male pirate crewmembers, including Rackham, for cowardice during their voyage and after their capture.
None of these things appear in the historical record regarding Bonny and Read. Of particular note, the historical record demonstrates that Bonny and Read operated together from the beginning of their careers and that their identity as females was a secret to practically no one. These pieces of the Bonny and Read mythos all originated in the pages of Johnson’s first volume of A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, specifically the sections of chapter seven that covered the lives of Bonny and Read.
Chapter seven of the General History begins as a history of John Rackham, also known as Calico Jack according to Johnson’s appendix account. The nickname, from Rackham’s alleged habit of wearing jackets and drawers made of calico material, is also another potential invention of Johnson.[45] In the portion of the chapter describing his final cruise, there are no mentions of the two female pirates until the last paragraph. There is a mention of Rackham had a family in Cuba, which is likely a reference to Johnson’s claim that Anne bore Rackham a son before setting out on his final voyage.[46] Most of Johnson’s details in the Rackham part of the chapter mirror those published trial account . He also comments on the court’s decisions and use of evidence.[47] If Johnson did not have a copy of Rackham’s trial account while writing this section, he must have communicated with someone who did own a copy, or he interviewed someone who saw the trial in person. After Rackham’s history, the chapter features sections describing the histories of the two women pirates.[48] None of the content in these histories, at least not content already adopted by Johnson in his Rackham section, have a known basis in the historical record.
The portrayal of Bonny and Read by Johnson falls in line with the literary traditions of the early eighteenth century and presents a significant amount of insight into some of the era’s perceptions of sex and gender. This story of two disguised female pirates intersects well with the period’s literary traditions of tales concerning warrior women, biographies of female criminals, and long stories about cross-dressing ladies. Johnson’s account repeatedly used the bodies of these women, particular their breasts, in a significant and symbolic manner for his narrative. Female breasts held a strong position as symbols of womanhood, domesticity, and maternity during the eighteenth century. The fictional versions of these women used attire to disguise and challenge the standard boundaries of their gender adhered to during that period. However, these boundaries return immediately when the two women revealed their sex through their bodies. Johnson uses their bodies to both excite the audience and to prevent them from completely overcoming their traditional role in society.[49] As Sally O’Driscoll, one of several scholars of literature and sexuality in the early eighteenth century, stated, “female pirates, as convicted criminals, have bodies that are available to be publicly interrogated and eroticized; readers cannot fail to be concerned with their bodies and what they might signify.”[50] Johnson took two real female pirates and used them as an opportunity to create a story that delved into a growing literary tradition of the era, and played upon women’s position in society.
While Johnson is responsible for originating many of the stories about the two female pirates through his tantalizing fiction, a few other pieces of the mythos did not arise until more recently. When popular publications about piracy display the flags pirates supposedly used, they often depict a flag with a skull and crossed swords as belonging to John Rackham, which would mean Bonny and Read sailed under this flag as well. No documentation for this flag has yet surfaced, with the earliest known publication to depict it being a 1978 publication on pirates from the Time-Life book series Seafarers.[51] A popular quote attributed to Rackham, concerning the way he courted women, states that his, “methods of courting a woman or taking a ship were similar – no time wasted, straight up alongside, every gun brought to play and the prize boarded.” The quote appears to be an invention of historian Philip Gosse, printed in one of his publications from 1934.[52] While Johnson’s work might have presented imagery that could excite ideas of a lesbian relationship, he never came close to showing or stating that Bonny and Read actually engaged in same sex relations. In an unauthorized reprinting of Johnson’s work from 1725, the publisher added a poorly written and vague passage where Read testified she had entered into piracy because she was a “lover” of Anne when they first meet and allegedly thought Anne was still a man.[53] The first known publication to directly claim the two engaged in a lesbian relationship appeared to come from an article entitled, “Anne Bonny & Mary Read: They Killed Pricks,” published in 1974 and written by feminist Susan Baker.[54] Jo Stanley claimed in 1995 that the court in Jamaica used the insinuation of lesbianism to worsen the two’s reputations and improve the likeliness of a conviction at their trial.[55] While historians, feminists, and writers all made various claims, accusations, and conjectures about the type of relationship Bonny and Read had, the historical record does not support anything regarding these two pirates and lesbianism.
Of all the contributions made by the twentieth century to the mythos behind this pair of women, one claim invented by a 1960s fiction writer stands out since several late twentieth-century historians caused a fictional passage from this author to become an assumed fact. In 1964, John Carlova wrote a fictional account of Bonny and Read, entitled, Mistress of the Seas. Carlova claimed in his book’s introduction that he conducted thorough research into pirate history and listed a dozen different important sounding archives and libraries to bolster his claim. Besides inspiring several other works of fiction, some historians took Carlova’s claim of authenticity at face value, including Linda Grant De Pauw, who published Seafaring Women in 1982, and the writers of the publication Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger in 1997.[56] One of Carlova’s creations from the 1960s included the invention of names for Anne Bonny’s Irish parents, William Cormac and Peg Brennan, and the establishment of a birth date, March 8, 1700.[57] Linda Grant De Pauw is one of the historians who included the names of the parents for Anne, along with other outright fictional accounts of women at sea, as fact.[58]
In 2000, Tamara Eastman and Constance Bond produced a small publication that stated Anne Bonny’s parents were William Cormac and Mary Brennan from Kinsale, County Cork, Ireland, and that she was born in the year of 1698.[59] There are no references to documents in this section regarding where Eastman, the main researcher into Anne’s origins for the publication, found the reference to William Cormac. There is only a reference to one record of a twenty-year-old woman named Mary Brennan from Kinsale charged with theft and threatening her employers. The courts sentenced her to transportation to the American colonies with her unnamed young daughter. Eastman admits that there is no evidence to link this Mary Brennan with William Cormac or that her daughter was a young Anne Bonny.[60] It is also noteworthy that the bibliographies for this book include the previously mentioned works that used Carlova’s Mistress of the Seas for facts.[61] Considering the evidence Eastman presented and the flawed secondary sources she used, it appears that when she found the transportation document, she likely assumed the claims in the secondary sources she read were correct, but had minor mistakes regarding Anne’s birth. She then adjusted the mother’s name, place of birth, and Bonny’s birth date to fit the transport document’s data.
Carlova also became the first nonfiction publication to suggest that Anne Bonny made it away from Jamaica, remarried, and settled with a gentleman in Virginia. In Mistress of the Seas, Governor Lawes released Bonny because a Dr. Michael Radcliffe convinced the governor to release her on the promise that they would both leave the West Indies together and that Anne would cease her evil ways of living.[62] In Eastman’s work, “some documents and personal papers belonging to William Cormac and his descendants,” supposedly show that Anne married a Virginia gentleman in December of 1721.[63] The descendants of William Cormac have yet to release these sources, or transcripts of them, to the public.
Historian David Cordingly also encountered this concept of Anne Bonny being a Cormac and included it in his own work. In the 2001 book he wrote concerning maritime women, later retitled to Seafaring Women: Adventures of Pirate Queens, Female Stowaways, and Sailors’ Wives, Cordingly states that William Cormac, Anne’s father, managed to obtain her release. After her returned to Charleston, she married a Joseph Burleigh. The two eventually established a family with eight children. They also managed to locate and bring back a boy Bonny had with Rackham in Cuba, who they named John. This Anne died in 1782 at the age of 84.[64] Cordingly references the, “Family papers in the collection of descendants,” as his source.[65] Eastman also mention that William Cormac secured the release of Anne Bonny in her 2000 publication.[66] In 2004, when Cordingly wrote the entry for Anne Bonny in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, he included the birth information that is also in Eastman’s work. He also used the previously mentioned story about Anne leaving Jamaica and marrying Burleigh in Charleston for this dictionary entry.[67]
Untwisting the complex web of logic and sources regarding Anne Bonny’s life before and after her pirate career is difficult, but it is clear that the foundation for these claims are built mostly upon fictional information. In all these publications concerning the origins and conclusion of Bonny’s life, there are no substantial pieces of evidence to support them. Most of the evidence comes from a series of assumptions and conjectures. A Burleigh family probably did live in Virginia and one of them probably married an Anne Bonny or an Anne Cormac. However, there is still no period evidence showing a William Cormac or a woman named Brennan gave birth to Anne Bonny, no evidence that Bonny ever left Jamaica after her trial, and no evidence that anyone in the Carolinas or Virginia married a woman who was also a former pirate. Eastman admitted in her 2000 publication, “it has not been proven, yet, that the woman in these documents [the papers of Cormac’s descendants] is the same as the woman from pirate fame,” and that Eastman was still conducting research to find more evidence to verify the Cormac family claims.[68] Sixteen years have passed since the publication of her book. In that time, Eastman did not find the additional documents needed to verify the claims concerning Bonny’s birth or her life after piracy.[69] Until someone unveils primary sources that support these assertions, and make them available to the public for scrutiny, there is no reason to assume they are fact.
OTHER WOMEN PIRATES AND FEMALE INTERACTIONS WITH PIRATES
For the period of 1680 to 1740, Anne Bonny and Mary Read are almost the only examples of women who went onboard pirate ships and actively participated in piracy. The exception to the famous pair is a woman named Mary Critchett. In May of 1729, a group of six convicts, transported from England and sold in Virginia, ran away from their masters and banded together to steal a vessel. The crew managed to hijack a sloop, the John and Elizabeth, in the middle of the night of May 12, without any weapons. The group sailed the vessel out of the Piankatank River and into the Chesapeake Bay for several days, and eventually let the master of the sloop and his servant leave in a flat boat. There are no details of when or who caught the five men and Critchett. Since their trial showed the convicts had limited maritime skills, and the charges in court all concerned the John and Elizabeth, it appears someone caught them in the Chesapeake Bay before they could go to sea and attack other vessels. During this briefest of pirate careers, Critchett’s most significant actions as a pirate included sitting on a hatch to prevent their two prisoners from escaping and arguing against allowing the prisoners to leave since they would tell the authorities. The court found her guilty of piracy along with the rest of the crew. There are currently no known documents showing authorities carried out this execution. While Critchett’s piracy consisted of two minor acts on her part, and lasted a shorter amount of time than the already brief careers of Bonny and Read, it is the only other example of a woman pirate for this period.[1]
While Bonny, Read, and Critchett are the only known women to have committed piracy, there is one other woman of this period that a British court charged with piracy, named Martha Farley.[2] In May of 1727, four men, mostly locals of the Carolinas struggling to make a living, gathered together and took the schooner Anne and Francis off Ocracoke Island. Over the next few days, they captured one sloop and raided another that wrecked on Ocracoke Inlet. The short career of these pirates ended when three prisoners subdued the pirate’s leader, John Vidal, in a boat while returning from a trip on shore. The other pirates and their prisoners then left the schooner and went ashore, where an informant told local authorities of the pirates’ presence. Residents of the area captured the remaining pirates, except for Thomas Farley, Martha Farley’s husband. During their cruise, Martha did not take part in any acts of piracy, according to the testimony of the court’s witnesses. She likely spent much of her time tending to her two children that accompanied her during the voyage. While on the schooner, she eavesdropped on conversations and told her husband of anything she overheard. She did benefit from the piracies of her husband on at least one occasion. Thomas Farley stole a pair of women’s shoes from one of the sloop’s masters and gave them to Martha. At the trial, Martha testified she followed her husband from South Carolina after her children begged her to, even though she had no idea what her husband’s plans were. Having no significant evidence of her committing piracy, and with the future of two children to consider, the court dismissed the charges of piracy against Martha Farley.[3]
While there are no other examples of pirate women for this era, there is evidence that some women stayed with pirates onboard their ships voluntarily. In the late 1680s, Captain John Bear, a Jamaican privateer, who became a pirate and then served under the Spanish, carried a woman with him whom he disguised in men’s clothes. Later in his career, Bear tried to pass his lover, the daughter of a, “rum-punch woman of Port Royal,” off as a noblewoman in Cuba, where they were both married.[4] In 1716, Captain Evans of the Greyhound noted in his letter to Charles Johnson the presence of two women, passengers from another vessel, onboard the pirate ship of Captain Kennedy. Evans stated that he knew not, “how they pass’ed their Time,” and thought, “they had formerly made a Trip or two to the Bay, there was no Rape committed.”[5] The “Bay” refers to the Bay of Campeche, where a community of logwood cutters, which included many former mariners and some pirates, lived and cut the precious wood used by Europeans to make dyes. The reference to Campeche, along with the rape comment, is Evan’s manner of suggesting the women had voluntarily sexual encounters with the pirates.[6] On another occasion, a group of about thirty female felons, sentenced to transportation, happened to be on the convict ship captured by pirates commanded by Richard Worley, off the Virginia Capes in October of 1718. Many of the women wanted to escape to a remote part of the Bahamas where they could build a new home away from government authorities. As a result, the women began to form sexual relationships with the pirates; many hoping such acts would consummate a marriage they could use to satisfy their ambitions, or at least some kind of security from the other pirates onboard. Unfortunately, these women’s dreams ended when the pirates were defeated in a battle off South Carolina, resulting in the end of their lives at the gallows in Charleston, along with their pirate “husbands.”[7]
While Martha Farley followed her pirate husband to the waters of North Carolina, and the female convicts captured by Worley’s men made husbands of some pirates at sea, many other wives to pirates remained on land. In the past decade, scholars of pirate history emphasized that many pirates left wives behind when they went pirating or found wives after returning from a cruise. This is especially true for men who sailed from British colonies to raid the Indian Ocean in the late seventeenth century. In the 1690s, many colonies allowed the pirates to return to their ports since they brought hard currency and precious commodities which colonists found difficult to obtain.[8] Evidence of the loving relationship held between pirates in Madagascar and their wives back in the colonies survive through a handful of letters sent to and from the pirates at their base on St. Mary’s Island.[9] Down in the Bay of Campeche, when said logwood cutters chose a leader from among themselves, who they called their King, said leader’s “consort” gained the title of Queen.[10] Considering the presence of this consort, along with Captain Evan’s comment regarding two women on a pirate ship having come from the Bay of Campeche, it appears that some of the logwood men had wives or lovers while working in their logging camps. While most British colonies no longer allowed pirates to enter their ports in the 1710s and 1720s, several of the early pirates who used the Bahama Islands as a base after the War of Spanish Succession were also local inhabitants with wives and children.[11] When they needed to force men to join their crews, particularly in the late 1710s and early 1720s, other pirates saw wives and families as a hazard, since they could tempt a pirate to abandon their crew and return to their homes. This resulted in several pirate crews preferring not to press married men.[12] While the number of pirate wives appeared to decline somewhat once ports began to no longer welcome pirates, these sea raiders proved to be no exception to the same desires that many men of the era had in regards to marriage.
Pirates fraternized with both European and African women during their various travels in the Atlantic World and Indian Ocean. When pirates sailed around Africa during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, they often visited the African coast and interacted with local African women. Captain William Snelgrave, a prisoner to three pirate crews in 1719 off the coast of Sierra Leone, described how the three pirate captains took his coats he intended to use in trade with the Africans. The pirates hoped that the colors and trimming of the coats would thrill the African women.[13] The white men that lived at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River, “did not scruple to lend their black Wives to the Pirates, purely on account of the great Rewards they gave.”[14] On Madagascar, pirates and the resident traders who provided supplies to these pirates married local Malagasy women, sometimes to multiple women. They did so not only to satisfy their desires, but also to integrate themselves into local tribes who fought against each other on a regular basis. Tribal wars resulted in capturing slaves that they could sell to merchants from the American colonies.[15] For black women in the western hemisphere, a pirate’s desire did not differ from those of any other Europeans, who frequently had relations with the mostly enslaved black women and produced many mixed race children.[16] Plenty of these black women did not submit to the pirates’ desires willing, only going to them because their masters or husbands made them, though Snelgrave claimed a small number of these women were, “very fond of their Company, for the sake of the great Presents they [the pirates] gave them.”[17] Even if some of these women liked the company of the pirates, many other black women saw themselves as victims and not as their willing partners.
Due to the romanticization of pirates over the past three hundred years, there is often negligence of the horrible reality that pirates victimized some of the women they encountered. Some historians also ignored these crimes in their studies of pirates. One historian, named B.R. Burg, went so far as to claim the pirates had an, “almost childish reverence for captured females.”[18] A survey of the historical record demonstrates the opposite of Burg’s claim. While the strong majority of ships consisted of only male crews, occasionally pirates encountered women as passengers on ships or during their occasional raids on land. In 1708, the French pirate Martel attacked the Bahama Islands and took sloop of Edward Holmes off Harbour Island, in the Bahamas. The pirates wanted to force Holmes’ into telling them where he hid his wealth and used the threat of throwing Holmes’ wife overboard, whom they also stripped and searched while they pointed a pistol at her breast.[19] Martel’s men also beat the belly of a pregnant mother with a cutlass to the point of causing her to miscarry. They also burned another female alive in her own house.[20] Women were not completely exempt as targets of violence, and thus suffered from some of the same physical violence men did at the hands of the more hostile pirates.
The most common type of violence pirates inflicted on women was sexual assault, specifically rape. Considering the criminal characteristics of piracy, the highly masculine environment on ships, and the cases of some crews staying out at sea for extended periods, it is not surprising that rape against female captives sometimes occurred. When Henry Every’s crew took the Ganj-i-Sawai in 1695 during his raid into the Indian Ocean, the crew tortured and ravaged the prisoners onboard, including the female passengers.[21] One Indian historian reported that the pirates, “busied themselves for a week searching for plunder, stripping the men, and dishonouring the women, both old and young…Several honourable women, when they found an opportunity, threw themselves into the sea, to preserve their chastity, and some others killed themselves with knives and daggers.”[22] In 1721, a pirate sloop under Thomas Anstis took the Irish ship Irwin off Martinique. Twenty of the pirates onboard took a female passenger and then gang raped her, “one after another, and afterwards broke her Back, and slung her into the Sea.”[23] On another occasion, two female prisoners remained onboard Charles Vane’s ship for an extended period, “for their own Entertainment, contrary to the usual Practice of Pyrates, who generally sent them away, least they should occasion Contention.”[24] In Bartholomew Roberts’ crew, a William Mead forced the hooped petticoat off a female passenger named Elizabeth Trengove, but another pirate saved her from further harassment by having her hide in the gunner’s room.[25] Captain Martel’s French pirates, while raiding the Bahamas in 1708, raped the daughters of Samuel Knowles.[26] In 1709, Jamaica privateers raided and ravished the American Indian women on the island of Dominica.[27] This collection of examples from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century demonstrates, according to historian John Appleby, “a growing victimization of women,” during that period.[28] Even though several pirate crews, specifically Howell Davis, John Taylor, Bartholomew Roberts, and Thomas Anstis, had rules in their crew’s articles of agreement about the treatment of women onboard their ships, these rules did not stop the pirates from occasionally committing these horrible acts against the women they encountered.[29]
From the Merry Wives of Wapping, c.1670s.
From the Merry Wives of Wapping, c.1670s.
WOMEN IN THE ATLANTIC MARITIME WORLD
To understand the women who interacted with pirates, it is important to have context for the experiences of women during this period, specifically women in the greater Atlantic maritime world. For the period of 1680-1740, particularly in the 1710s and early 1720s, most pirates worked as mariners before entering into their illegal sea raiding careers.[30] The experience of a pirate often mirrored that of a sailor for most of his life. Both sailors and pirates encountered many of the same types of women in their lifetimes. Understanding women in the maritime world, and where they would have interacted with mariners, also helps bring context to encounters between women and pirates."
COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen F. SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen TSgt David L. SPC Woody Bullard Lt Col Charlie Brown SGT David A. 'Cowboy' Groth [~93421
Anne Bonny and Mary Read: Female Pirates and Maritime Women
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World History
Crime
Murder
Sailing
Posted >1 y ago
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