Anne herself was likely inspired by a 16th-century Irishwoman named Grace O’Malley, whose fierce visage (she claimed her face was scarred after an attack by an eagle) became infamous along the coast of the Emerald Isle. When the crew of a passing French merchant ship spotted Anne wielding an ax over her creation, they surrendered their cargo without a fight.Ī surprising number of women ventured to sea, in many capacities: as servants, prostitutes, laundresses, cooks and-albeit less frequently-as sailors, naval officers, whaling merchants or pirates. One legend holds that she launched her pirating career with an ingenious ploy, creating a “corpse” by mangling the limbs of a dressmaker’s mannequin and smearing it with fake blood. Woodes, a former pirate himself, composed a “most wanted” list of ten notorious outlaws, including Blackbeard, and vowed to bring them all to trial.Īnne, meanwhile, spent most of her time drinking at local saloons and seducing pirates in A General History, Johnson contends that she was “not altogether so reserved in point of Chastity,” and that James Bonny once “surprised her lying in a hammock with another man.” Anne grew especially enamored of one paramour, John “Calico Jack” Rackam, so-called due to his affinity for garish clothing, and left Bonny to join Rackam’s crew. Anne and her new husband set off for New Providence (now Nassau) in the Bahamas, where James is said to have embarked on a career as a snitch, turning in pirates to Governor Woodes Rogers and collecting the bounties on their heads. He disowned her when, in 1718, she married a poor sailor by the name of James Bonny. William, a successful planter, disapproved of his daughter’s rebellious ways the endless rumors about her carousing in local taverns and sleeping with fishermen and drunks damaged his business. Mary died in 1711, at which point the teenaged Anne began exhibiting a “fierce and courageous temper,” reportedly murdering a servant girl with a case knife and beating half to death a suitor who tried to rape her. When Anne’s true gender and parentage were discovered, William, Mary and their child emigrated to what is now Charleston, South Carolina. To avoid scandal, he dressed her as a boy and introduced her as the child of a relative entrusted to his care. The maid, Mary Brennan, gave birth to Anne, and over time William grew so fond of the child he arranged for her to live with him. Her father, an attorney named William Cormac, had an affair with the family maid, prompting his wife to leave him. A General History places Bonny’s birth in Kinsale, County Cork, Ireland, circa 1698. Much of what we know about the early lives of Bonny and Read comes from a 1724 account titled A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, by Captain Charles Johnson (which some historians argue is a nom de plume for Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe). Indeed, were it not for Bonny and Read, John “Calico Jack” Rackam’s crew would’ve suffered indignity along with defeat during its final adventure in the Caribbean. Not that Anne Bonny and Mary Read had much in common with kindly old David O’Keefe-they were pirates, for one thing, as renowned for their ruthlessness as for their gender, and during their short careers challenged the sailors’ adage that a woman’s presence on shipboard invites bad luck.
Last week Mike Dash told a tale of high seas adventure that put me in mind of another, somewhat earlier one.