Women Sailors & Sailors' Women (13 page)

If we assume that Johnson's description of the pirates is accurate, it is astonishing that Mary Read and Anne Bonny could have survived in such an alien world.
²⁵
It was a world in which murder, torture, and casual violence were commonplace and where foulmouthed men indulged in drunken orgies that lasted for days on end. When pirates attacked a ship, they did not simply rob the passengers and crew of their money and valuables. They ransacked the ship, hurled unwanted goods and gear overboard, killed or mutilated anyone who offered opposition, and frequently finished the operation by setting fire to the vessel and marooning any survivors on some deserted, mosquito-infested island. In today's terms, they were the maritime equivalent of the paramilitary gangs who have been responsible for massacres, rapes, and burnings in war-torn parts of Africa, the Balkans, and elsewhere. They were beyond the law and the normal decencies of human behavior, and among their number were men who took an active pleasure in killing.

As far as the pirates were concerned, women were for recreation and pleasure and were not welcome on board their ships. Among the written articles that many pirates agreed to before a voyage was a rule that made the position clear: The crew of Bartholomew Roberts, one of the most formidable pirates, agreed: “No boy or woman to be allowed amongst them. If any man were to be found seducing any of the latter sex, and carried her to sea, disguised, he was to suffer death.” This makes the adventures of Mary Read and Anne Bonny all the more remarkable.

According to Captain Johnson's account, Mary Read was born in England. Her mother had married a sailor and had a son, but the sailor disappeared, leaving her on her own. She was young and careless and found herself pregnant again. To conceal her shame, she left her husband's relations and went to stay with friends in the country, where she gave birth to Mary Read. Soon after this, the son died and Mary decided to pass her daughter off as her son and to ask her wealthy mother-in-law for financial assistance. Mary was dressed as a boy, and the mother-in-law agreed to provide a crown a week toward the child's maintenance. When the old woman died, Mary was thirteen and was sent out to work as a footboy for a French lady. However, Mary tired of this menial life and “growing bold and strong, and having also a roving mind” she went to Flanders and joined a foot regiment as a cadet. She fought in several engagements and then fell in love with a handsome young Flemish soldier in her regiment. They were sharing a tent, and in due course “she found a way of letting him discover her sex.” He was surprised and delighted at this revelation, but she refused to allow him to take further liberties unless he agreed to marry her. When the campaign was over they were duly married, obtained their discharge from the army, and set themselves up as proprietors of an eating house near Breda under the sign of the Three Horse Shoes.

Unhappily, her husband soon died, and Mary decided to assume men's clothing again and seek her fortune elsewhere. After a brief spell in another foot regiment, she boarded a ship and sailed to the West Indies. Her ship was captured by English pirates, and she was persuaded to join their crew. She later said that “the life of the pirate was what she always abhorred, and went into it only upon compulsion,” but evidence given by witnesses at her trial suggested she was as fierce and resolute as any of her fellow pirates. In September 1717, a proclamation was issued in the name of King George I declaring that any pirates who surrendered themselves by a certain date “should have his most gracious pardon.”
²⁶
This was part of a concerted move by the British authorities to put an end to piracy in the West Indies. The crew of Mary Read's ship decided to take advantage of the pardon and made their way to Nassau in the Bahamas. It was from this notorious pirate haven that Mary Read was to set out on her last voyage in the company of Anne Bonny.

Anne Bonny was born near Cork, Ireland, and was the illegitimate daughter of a lawyer and his maidservant. As a result of a complex saga involving the theft of some silver spoons, the lawyer sleeping with his wife when he thought he was sleeping with the maid, and the maid being sent to prison, the lawyer and his wife had a quarrel and separated. The lawyer became so fond of his illegitimate daughter that he arranged for her to come to live with him. To prevent his wife and the townsfolk from suspecting anything, he dressed her in breeches as a boy and pretended that he was training her to be his clerk. His wife eventually found out, and the resulting scandal so affected the lawyer's practice that he decided to go abroad. Taking Anne and the maid with him, he sailed to Carolina, where he became a successful merchant and purchased a plantation.

Anne grew up to be a bold and headstrong young woman, and in 1718 she married a penniless sailor named James Bonny. This so upset her father that he threw her out of the house. Anne and her sailor husband made their way to the island of New Providence in the Bahamas, where they hoped to find employment. There Anne was courted by the pirate John Rackam, a somewhat reckless character whose colorful clothes had earned him the nickname of Calico Jack. Rackam, like the crew of Mary Read's ship, had arrived in the Bahamas in 1719 in order to take advantage of the royal pardon extended to pirates. He persuaded Anne to leave her husband and go to sea with him. When she became pregnant, he took her to some friends in Cuba where she had their child. As soon as she had recovered, he sent for her and she rejoined his crew, dressed as usual in men's clothes.

It was around this time that the two women met on Rackam's ship. They were both dressed as men, and Anne Bonny took such a liking to the handsome Mary Read that she let her know she was a woman. According to Johnson she was greatly disappointed when Mary let her know that she was a woman also. It has been suggested—and is perhaps true—that the two women subsequently enjoyed a lesbian affair. But the most surprising aspect of the matter was that their paths could have crossed at all. It is generally reckoned that there were between 2,000 and 3,000 pirates operating in the western Atlantic and among the hundreds of Caribbean islands around 1720. Mary Read and Anne Bonny are the only women who are known to have entered this male world disguised as men, and yet they both ended up on a small pirate ship with a crew of less than a dozen. We might be tempted to think that Captain Johnson was using some artistic license in his story, but his description of their time with Rackam is borne out by other contemporary documents. On September 5, 1720, for instance, Captain Woodes Rogers, the governor of the Bahamas, issued the following proclamation, which subsequently appeared in the
Boston Gazette
and elsewhere:

Whereas John Rackum, George Featherstone, John Davis, Andrew Gibson, John Howell, Noah Patrick &c, and two Women, by name Ann Fulford alias Bonny, & Mary Read, did on the 22nd of August last combine together to enter on board, take, steal and run away with out of this Road of Providence, a Certain Sloop call'd the William, Burthen about 12 tons, mounted with 4 great Guns and 2 swivel ones, also Ammunition, Sails, Rigging, Anchor, Cables, and a Canoe owned and belonging to Capt. John Ham, and with the said Sloop did proceed to commit Robbery and Piracy . . . the said John Rackum and his said Company are hereby proclaimed Pirates and Enemies to the Crown of Great Britain, and are to be so treated and Deem'd by all his Majesty's Subjects.
²⁷

In October 1720,
The Boston Gazette
reported that several pirates were operating on the coast of the Bahamas, including Rackam, who had with him twelve men and two women. The paper went on to say that the governor of the Bahamas had sent a sloop with a crew of forty-five men after them. The sloop failed to find Rackam and his crew, but thanks to details that came to light during the subsequent trial of the pirates, we are able to follow their movements in some detail from the time they stole the sloop
William
on August 22. On that day they sailed out of the sheltered anchorage at Nassau and headed northwest until they came to the snaking length of the low-lying island of Eleuthera. They failed to find any suitable victims along its sandy shores, but on September 1 they sighted the tiny settlement of wooden houses on Harbour Island. There they plundered seven local fishing boats of their fish and gear before heading south to escape any search parties sent out by Governor Woodes Rogers. They threaded their way through the dozens of islands and cays of the Bahamas toward the great island of Hispaniola. It took them a month of sailing with the tropical sun beating down on the hot deck of their sloop before they sighted its thickly wooded mountains. On October 1 they came across two British ships a mile or so offshore. The pirates fired their guns, and the two small merchant vessels heaved to and surrendered. We learn that the crew of the ships were put in fear of their lives and that the pirates proceeded to “steal, take, and carry away the two said merchant sloops, and the apparel and tackle of the same sloops to the value of one thousand pounds of current money of Jamaica.”
²⁸

From Hispaniola the pirates sailed through the Windward Passage and on to the north coast of Jamaica. There, on October 19, they came across a schooner lying in the beautiful bay of Port Maria. Thomas Spenlow, the owner of the vessel, and two other seamen later swore that they saw the two female pirates wearing men's clothes and handing gunpowder to the men at the guns as they attacked his vessel. The pirates plundered the ship of fifty rolls of tobacco and nine bags of pimiento, kept Spenlow a prisoner for forty-eight hours, and then released him and his vessel. They then proceeded westward along the Jamaican coast until they came to Dry Harbor, where the sloop
Mary and Sarah
was lying at anchor. Rackam fired a gun at her, which prompted her captain, Thomas Dillon, and his men to pile into the ship's boat and head for shore to get help. One of Rackam's crew shouted that they were English pirates and they had nothing to fear from them, whereupon Dillon and his men decided to return to their ship. Dillon noted that Anne Bonny had a gun in her hand and later recalled that the women “were both very profligate, cursing and swearing much, and very ready and willing to do anything on board.”
²⁹
Once again the pirates ransacked the ship and moved on.

The last recorded attack made by Rackam and his crew was on a large, provision-loaded dugout canoe, in which there was a local woman named Dorothy Spenlow. She later said that Mary Read and Anne Bonny were wearing men's jackets and long trousers and had handkerchiefs tied around their heads. Each of them had a pistol and a cutlass in her hands and swore at the men that they must murder her. She said that she knew they were women because of the size of their breasts. Rackam's men did not kill the woman but took all her provisions and sailed away.

At Negril Bay, on the extreme western end of the island, the pirates' raiding expedition came to an end. Word of their attacks had reached the governor, who dispatched two armed merchant sloops under the command of Captain Jonathan Barnet and Captain Bonnevie. Barnet was a tough, experienced seaman with a commission from the governor of Jamaica to capture pirates.
³⁰
The two vessels reached Negril Point late in the afternoon and saw a heavily built sloop lying at anchor in a small cove ahead of them. Barnet suspected that this was the pirate ship they were looking for, as there was no good reason for a vessel to be anchored off this part of the island. The coast beyond the four-mile stretch of sandy beach was mostly swamp and a breeding ground for mosquitoes.

The light was fading fast, but Barnet decided to investigate. As he changed course and headed inshore, the sloop weighed anchor and set sail. Barnet maintained a steady course and slowly closed the gap between them, but it was ten o'clock at night before he was close enough to hail the sloop. Across the water came the reply, “John Rackam from Cuba.”

Barnet ordered him to strike immediately to the flag of the King of England. Rackam shouted back that he would strike no strikes and ordered his crew to fire a swivel gun at the approaching merchant ship. Barnet promptly gave the order to his men to fire a broadside from the carriage guns on his deck and followed this up with a volley of musket shot. The broadside carried away the boom of the pirate vessel and effectively disabled her. Several of the pirates called for quarter, indicating that they wanted to surrender. Barnet swung his vessel alongside and boarded the sloop. Mary Read and Anne Bonny were the only two members of the pirate crew to remain on deck and put up any resistance.

The next day Barnet put in to a cove farther along the coast and delivered the pirates into the charge of Major Richard James, a local militia officer. The pirates were taken to Spanish Town jail to await trial. On November 17, 1720, an Admiralty Court, presided over by Sir Nicholas Lawes, the governor of Jamaica, condemned Calico Jack and the ten men in his crew to death. Anne Bonny was permitted to see Rackam on the day of his execution and is reputed to have told him that if he had fought like a man he would not have been hanged like a dog. The day after the death sentence had been passed, the men were hanged at Gallows Point, a windswept promontory on the narrow spit of land that leads out to Port Royal. The body of Calico Jack was bound in chains and suspended from a wooden gibbet on a small island at the entrance of Kingston Harbor as a warning to seafarers who might be tempted to take up piracy. Today the island is called Rackam Cay.

The trial of the two women pirates took place on November 28. Exactly why they should have been tried separately is not made clear, because the charges they faced were exactly the same as the men's. They were accused of piratically and feloniously attacking and plundering seven fishing boats at Harbor Island, of shooting at and taking two merchant ships off Hispaniola, and of attacking the sloops of Thomas Spenlow and Thomas Dillon and assaulting their crews. When the charges had been read, the women were asked whether they were guilty of the piracies, robberies, and felonies, and they both pleaded not guilty. Some of the people whose vessels had been attacked by Rackam and his crew were then called as prosecution witnesses, and they all swore that Mary Read and Anne Bonny had been active and willing participants in the piracies. The women could produce no witnesses in their defense, nor did they have any questions to ask, and so the verdict was inevitable. Sir Nicholas consulted the twelve commissioners who were sitting in judgment with him and then informed the women that the court had unanimously found them both guilty. He asked them whether there was any reason why the sentence of death should not be passed upon them, but neither of the women had anything to say. He therefore declared that they would be taken to the place of execution and hanged by the neck until they were dead.