|
As I have always been somewhat partial to the fairer sex, it is not surprising that Anne Bonny and Mary Read are among my favorite pirates of the Carolinas. This is particularly so since they rose to fame during an era when Pirate Rules dictated that no one could bring a woman on board ship and that any attempt to smuggle a woman on board in disguise was a crime punishable by death.
Anne Bonny was born out of wedlock in County Cork, Ireland, to William Cormac, a well-to-do local lawyer and his wife’s maid, Mary Brennan. To escape his wife’s ire upon the discovery of his indiscretion, he took Mary and their child to America where they settled in Charleston, South Carolina. Cormac resumed his successful law career, and the family joined the socially prominent St. Paul’s parish, according to surviving Church records from 1809. Eventually William Cormac became a large and wealthy Charleston land owner. Unfortunately, his work was so demanding that he was not able to give sufficient attention to his daughter’s upbringing. After her mother’s death when she was only thirteen, she proceeded to develop into a beautiful but strong-willed young lady with a definite mind of her own and a general disregard for the rules of Charleston society. At the age of sixteen (or nineteen, depending upon which version of her history you believe) she defied her father’s plans to marry her to a respected member of Charleston society and eloped with James Bonny, a sailor she had met on the Charleston docks. The couple soon fled to New Providence, Bahamas, a well-known gathering place for pirates in the Americas.
Once in New Providence, the couple’s ardor began to cool rapidly. William became an informer on suspected pirates for the Governor (much to Anne’s disgust), and she in turn caught the eye and inflamed the passion of a local pirate known as “Calico Jack” Rackham because of his colorful manner of dressing. Eventually, Anne returned Rackham’s feelings, and he became her first true love. Rackham offered a large sum to William Bonny to divorce Anne, but he refused. Instead, he appealed to the Governor to have Anne flogged under Bahamian law for her adultery. The night before her flogging was to be carried out, Calico Jack took Anne and a small, handpicked crew of eight, stole a local ship, and fled to the open seas. To conceal her sex from the rest of the crew, Anne dressed as a man and strapped down her breasts under a rather loose-fitting blouse.
Among their various conquests on the open seas was a Dutch merchant ship. With the exception of a young English sailor, the crew of the merchantman offered little resistance to Rackham’s pirates as they were boarded. The Englishman put up a stiff resistance to being captured until offered a place among Rackham’s men if he agreed to quit fighting. After his acquiescence, Bonny formed an immediate friendship with the Englishman. She spent so much time with him that Rackham became extremely jealous of their closeness. When he threatened to shoot the young English sailor for Anne’s apparent infidelity, she was forced to reveal that the young Englishman was actually another woman named Mary Read.
Disguising herself as a male was nothing new for Mary Read. It is reputed that in her early years her mother dressed and presented her as boy in (unfulfilled) hopes of receiving financial support from a wealthy relative. As a teenager (presumably still disguised as a male) she worked on the docks in Plymouth, England. (What followed next depends on which version of her legend one embraces—I, of course, chose the most colorful one.)
In her usual attire she then enlisted in the British army where she fell in love with another soldier. Once he learned her true identity, he quickly returned her affections. She and her lover were both outstanding soldiers and very popular with the other men in the company. When they confessed the nature of their situation to their captain, he gave them honorable discharges from the service. They immediately married and opened a tavern called the Three Horseshoes in Brabant, Holland. While the tavern generated a good income for the couple during the remainder of Queen Anne’s War, Mary’s husband died suddenly of fever near the end of hostilities. Furthermore, the signing of the peace treaty deprived the Three Horseshoes of many of its best customers, as most of the British officers in the area went back to England. Anne closed the tavern and returned to the sea, eventually becoming a crewmember on the Dutch merchant ship discussed above.
Whether or not there initially was any romantic attraction between Anne and Mary, the latter soon became intimately involved with another young English sailor by the name of Tom Deane. Although Deane seems to have been popular with the crew in general, one brutish (and certainly more skilled in arms) crewman disliked him intently, eventually forcing him into a duel. Mary recognized that her lover, whom she now regarded as her new husband, would be no match for his dueling opponent when they landed the next day. Therefore, she accosted the sailor in question and insulted him so extensively that he was forced to challenge her to a duel before confronting Tom Deane. Once the duel was begun the following day, Mary readily dispatched him, bringing his unfortunate life to an abrupt end. Shortly after this confrontation, the lady pirates revealed their identities to the remainder of the crew, and they were readily accepted on an equal footing with their male companions.
They continued their buccaneering activities for a short period of time, but their pirate careers were drawing to an end. They returned to Jamaica in the early fall, and in November, 1720, their ship was attacked by a military vessel under the command of Captain Jonathan Barnet, who had been commissioned by the Governor to pursue and capture pirates in the area. Rackham and all of his male crewmembers were too drunk to put up a resistance, and fled to the hold of their ship. Anne and Mary alone put up a vigorous but eventually futile defense, and the entire crew was captured, thrown in prison, and put on trial. At the trial the entire crew, both men and women, were found guilty and condemned to death. However, Anne and Mary both pled their bellies (a legal term of the era), i.e., indicated that they were pregnant. So, their sentences were deferred until their pregnancies had run their courses. According to Terrance Zepke (Pirates of the Carolinas), Anne’s final meeting with Calico Jack was less than romantic. Apparently Anne’s last words to Rackham were: “If you had stayed and fought like a man, you need not be hanged like a dog.”
Mary Read contracted fever and died in prison in April, 1721. Anne Bonny’s fate is less certain. There are no prison records indicating that her sentence was ever carried out. Rumor has it that her father had her smuggled out of prison and returned to his plantation in Charleston. ...........end
