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When I was a little girl I loved pirate stories, especially tales of Ann Bonny and Mary Read. The idea of women pirates who fought their way across the Carribean for booty and plunder fascinated me, just as these tales fascinated English readers in 1724 who bought Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Robberies & Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates. Sales were no doubt assisted by the book’s woodcuts of Ann and Mary as bosom baring babes in breeches.
So when it came time to research my own novels, I was thrilled to find that Bonny and Read were not alone. There have always been women who went to sea to make new lives for themselves, as pirates, sailors, warriors, and in the navy. In her comprehensive study Bold in Her Breeches, Jo Stanley calls these women “transgressive rovers”, women who operate outside society’s rules.
When “Calico Jack” Rackham’s black hulled sloop was attacked off of Jamaica in 1720, the two pirates who put up the fiercest resistance with cutlass, pistol and raw language were Ann Bonny and Mary Read, fighting at each other’s backs even as their male shipmates ran away.
In She Captains, Joan Druett says that Ann Bonny had joined “Calico Jack” as his lover, but became part of the crew. She never pretended not to be a woman. Mary Read, on the other hand, was a transvestite who dressed as a man and went to sea, first as a British seaman, later as a pirate with Calico Jack’s crew.
The story goes that Ann took a liking to the handsome “lad”, Jack got jealous, and Mary revealed her sex to avoid problems. A friendship formed between the women that lasted until they were brought to trial in Jamaica. While Ann was Jack’s lover, Mary took an unnamed young pirate as her paramour.
Both women “pled their bellies” during their trial, claiming they couldn’t be hanged because they were pregnant.
Mary refused to testify against her lover, but Ann was angry with Jack’s poor performance when they were captured, according to the court records: “She was sorry to see him there, but if he had fought like a Man, he need not have been hang’d like a Dog.”
Mary died in prison of a fever, but Ann’s fate is unknown. There’s no record of her being hanged, so she may have gone on to live an interesting, if less public life, elsewhere.
In this article I focused on the “bad girls”, the pirates and buccaneers. But there are plenty of women who went to sea to serve alongside their husbands aboard whalers, or as fisherwomen, or as “seamen” and sailors. There are well documented cases of women fighting for Britain during the Napoleonic wars, many of them serving with distinction before their sex was revealed and they had to leave the Royal Navy or the Marines. Sometimes the woman was only found out after dying in battle, bravely fighting alongside the other Jack Tars.
While the United States has a less colorful history of women’s naval exploits, it’s worth noting that the Flying Cloud was
navigated by Eleanor Creesy in the 1850’s when it broke all records on the New York to San Francisco voyage around Cape Horn.
If you wish to read more about seafaring women, here are some recommended books:
She Captains–Heroines and Hellions of the Sea by Joan Druett
Women Sailors and Sailors’ Women by David Cordingly
The Pirate Queen–In Search of Grace O’Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea by Barbara Sjoholm
Bold in her Breeches–Women Pirates Across the Ages by Jo Stanley
Flying Cloud–The True Story of America’s Most Famous Clipper Ship and the Woman Who Guided Her by David Shaw
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