Anne Bonny: Transcript & Bibliography
A look at one of the most famous female pirates to have ever sailed
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Transcript
🎙️ Today I’ve got the transcript and bibliography for Unruly Figures episode 3, Anne Bonny. At the beginning of each paragraph is a time code for where you can find that in the episode. I also do endnotes throughout, in case you want to follow up with a resource for more reading!
You can listen to Unruly Figures on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.
0:05 Hey everyone, welcome to Unruly Figures, the podcast that celebrates history’s greatest rule-breakers. I’m your host, Valorie Clark, and today I’m doing a bit of a Halloween theme. Okay, it’s a loose Halloween theme. In fact, it’s not really spooky at all. It’s really only Halloween-themed because when I was a teenager, I dressed up as today’s subject for three or four years in a row. I’ll be talking, of course, about the famous swashbuckling female pirate, Anne Bonny.
0:29 Real quick: For a full transcript of today’s episode, head over to Unruly Figures dot Substack dot com. That’s U-N-R-U-L-Y-F-I-G-U-R-E-S dot S-U-B-S-T-A-C-K dot com. In addition to the full transcript, you can also get ad-free episodes, a bibliography of my research, photos of everyone I’m covering, discussion threads, and so much more. So check it out now!
0:55 Before we hop back in time, I just want to acknowledge that searching Anne Bonny on Google ten times will get you ten different stories of her life. The same goes for the main cast of characters you’re about to meet. Between lost records and the way pirate stories have been so mythologized over time, firm timelines are a rare thing in this tale. Many times as I was researching I realized that every historical record contradicts every other. So! If you hear something in here and you think, “I heard the opposite,” I did too. It’s just the nature of the beast. I will do my best to acknowledge when sources have opposing versions.
1:28 And yet, despite all that, it’s amazing that we know as much about Anne Bonny as we do. For a woman’s life to be documented at all in this time period is a rare and precious thing. In fact, it’s because her life is documented that we can infer how extraordinary she was to people in her own time. For many reasons—a mix of misogyny, lack of education, lack of resources, lack of historians—women tend to fade into the background of historical tales. In fact, most every day people fade into the background. The people with money and power were the only ones documented for posterity, and due to misogynistic laws about who could even hold money and power, those people were almost always men. So just the fact that Anne Bonny’s name has survived this long is a testament to her power and influence in her lifetime.
2:11 What we do know about her comes mostly from Captain Charles Johnson’s 1724 book A General History of the Pyrates. He was one of the first to document the pirates operating in the Atlantic and Caribbean, and so most information about any pirate that operated in those regions during the Golden Age of Piracy tends to start with his coverage. Captain Johnson, by the way, is thought to be a pseudonym for Daniel Defoe, who was a famous journalist, novelist, and spy. You probably recognize his name from his famous novel Robinson Crusoe. Some also claim that Defoe is the author of The King of Pirates and The Pirate Gow. I’m going to be honest, I have my doubts about these attributions, mostly because Defoe spent a bunch of time in prison for other work he had written. He produced over three hundred pieces of published writing in his lifetime, and he wasn’t afraid to put his name on some very controversial ideas. So I don’t know why he wouldn’t put his name on these three pirate texts if he had in fact written them.
3:03 All that to say, while we are pretty sure the first edition of A General History of Pyrates was well-researched and reliable, later editions were heavily embellished, and the lack of clear authorship presents a few problems in terms of research. And yet here we all are, relying on it.
3:20 Okay, now that I’ve said all that, let’s hop back to Anne Bonny’s time.
3:23 Anne Bonny was born Anne Cormac around 1700 in Old Head of Kinsale, a small town near Cork, Ireland. Her father, William Cormac, was a lawyer, but Anne wasn’t one of his legitimate children. It’s the age-old tale of the father and the maid he slept with while his wife was sick or pregnant—very classy. Johnson tells a long tale about how this affair was discovered that is almost certainly entirely fictional. You’ve heard the joke about someone hiding a missing item in a girl’s bed, only for the girl to never discover it because she was sleeping somewhere else, right? I feel like I’ve heard five variations on it this month alone. In any case, Johnson claims that their affair was found out because the maid, called either Peggy or Mary Brennan, didn’t find some missing silver spoons that someone had hidden in her bed as a joke, leading William’s wife to realize that the maid had been sleeping in her husband’s bed while the wife was recovering from childbirth. Furious over the affair, she had Peggy arrested for theft and adultery and then left William, taking their children with her. Supposedly, William continued to get an allowance from his wife’s family, but when they found out that Peggy had been released and moved back in with William to live with him in a public relationship with their child, William was cut off.
4:30 Naturally there is absolutely no way to verify any of this, but it adds some color to the tale.
4:36 This story was probably embellished to try to explain a part of Anne’s life that we’re pretty sure is fact: Her father dressed her as a boy when she was very young. Captain Johnson says this is because everyone in the town was so distressed by her father’s affair and subsequent separation from his wife that Anne needed to be disguised for her own protection.
4:55 I don’t really believe that tale for a second. It seems more likely to me that Anne was dressed as a boy because boys and girls were dressed basically the same when they were very young. It’s a fashion history detour that I won’t go down too far, but basically in the Western world from the mid-16th century to the late 19th-century, so during Anne’s lifetime, there was a practice called ‘breeching’ that has since fallen out of fashion. Breeching, B-R-E-E-C-H-I-N-G, was the first time a boy was dressed in trousers, which usually happened anytime between the ages of 5 and 8. Until that time, a boy was dressed in gowns just like a girl.1 The gowns had subtle differences between a girl’s and a boy’s so that contemporaries usually could tell the difference between them, but it’s possible that Anne’s parents didn’t know the difference and so dressed her in the boy’s version by accident.
5:42 The whole point of the breeching moment was to signify when a father became more active in the son’s upbringing—until breeching, the son was the responsibility of the mothers and nurses. If we believe that the wife left and William raised Anne largely alone, it’s totally possible that he made this small mistake because he’d never been involved in this young period of a child’s life. Or maybe he did dress Anne as a boy on purpose, I just have my doubts about the whole scandalous origin of the story. Illegitimate children were not uncommon in this time, nor was a man having an affair while his wife was sequestered after childbirth. I don’t think it would have caused such a big scandal that Anne’s identity had to be shielded for years after; it seems much more likely to me that if Anne was ever dressed as a boy, it was just a fashion faux pas.
6:25 Whatever the reason, Anne was apparently dressed as a boy during her young childhood in Ireland. One thing that is sort of generally agreed on is that, for some reason, William’s practice suffered after her birth. Whatever the cause of this decline in his clientele, he sold everything and moved to the English colony of Carolina with Anne and Peggy.
6:45 In Carolina, William turned his attention to either farming or trade instead of law and was very successful, becoming quite wealthy. It doesn’t seem like he had any more children with Peggy or any other woman. At some point, Peggy died, possibly of typhoid, and so as Anne grew up, she ran the household.
7:01 Anne was described as having, quote, “a fierce and courageous temper, ” end quote, as a young teen.2 One story goes that she stabbed a cook over a dispute about chicken, and that William dismissed it, saying that both Anne and the cook were stubborn about their opinions. Another story says that she killed a servant-maid in a fury once, but even Captain Johnson dismisses that story as ridiculous. He does give credence to another story though: A man tried to rape her once and Anne beat him so thoroughly that he was hospitalized and never fully recovered.
7:30 Anne was also apparently quite beautiful, with a clear complexion and lustrous red hair. For a young girl whose only job was to marry well, this was beneficial to her, and is also part of why we remember her. Naturally, William planned to marry Anne off to the highest bidder in Carolina, but she decided to go her own way. In 1717 or 1718, Anne eloped with a young man named James Bonny. Some say James was a pirate and others say a sailor. No matter how he sailed though, most historical accounts agree that he was completely useless and that this was a bad match. Anne’s father was furious about their marriage and turned them both away without a dime, probably foiling the boy’s plans to live comfortably off the Cormac fortune. One legend said that Anne set fire to her father’s plantation as retaliation for this, but there’s not a ton of historical record to back it up.3 Undeterred by her father’s fury, together Anne and her new husband set off to Charles Town, now known as Nassau, on New Providence Island, where he hoped to find some work.
8:31 All through the 1690s, the old pirate havens like Tortuga had disappeared due to governments cracking down and driving out the pirates. Laura Sook Duncombe, in her book Pirate Women, writes that New Providence, part of the present-day Bahamas, was the last great Caribbean pirate stronghold. Pirates flocked there as their other havens closed. By 1713, pirates outnumbered law-abiding inhabitants in New Providence two to one.4 Furthermore, the island lacked a governor from 1706 to 1717, meaning there was significantly less supervision there than anywhere else. The fact that James chose to take his new bride there instead of literally anywhere else points toward one or both of them being very interested in piracy, if not already involved in it.
9:11 According to a few accounts, including Jane Yolen’s in Sea Queens, once in Nassau James used his seafaring skills to spy on other pirates. Taking advantage of growing anti-piracy sentiment, he began informing Governor Woodes Rogers about pirate activities, which infuriated Anne. She began going out alone to make friends by visiting local taverns.
9:32 This is how Anne met the handsome pirate captain John Rackham, usually remembered as ‘Calico’ Jack. He pursued Anne despite her marriage, and even offered James money to go away and let Anne be with Jack. (Apparently, this was a common practice.) When James refused, he went too far: He took the case to the governor, trying to get Anne punished under an old adultery law that, while technically still on the books, had already fallen out of favor. He wanted her publicly stripped and beaten as punishment for falling in love with someone else. Anne, of course, wasn’t going to have this. Rackham gave her some of his clothes to use as a disguise and they ran off together to sail away with his pirate crew. Once they boarded his ship, the Vanity, Anne never saw her first husband again.
10:16 A lot of historians agree that Anne took up men’s clothes full-time at this point, supposedly disguising herself as a man so she wouldn’t draw attention among Rackham’s crew. However, according to Yolen’s account, it was actually well-known that she was a woman and considered Rackham’s wife on board. Regardless, she quickly proved to be, quote, “His equal with sword and pistol and his superior in audacity and reckless courage. She fought, pillaged and plundered with reckless brutality.”5 End quote. She was his trusted lieutenant on board, respected and even well-liked by the rest of the crew.
10:45 Eventually, Anne got pregnant. Rackham dropped her off in Cuba, leaving her to live among some friends while she waited out her pregnancy. During these months on land, she apparently lived in the greatest luxury, wealthy and comfortable in a house by the beach, as we always imagine in movies that successful pirate lovers do.6 After she gave birth and was well enough to rejoin him at sea, she picked up her pistol again, leaving their child behind with the friends. Some people also think that maybe the child died, because it never shows back up.
11:13 At this time, Spain had colonized Central America and was shipping literal boat-loads of stolen gold back to Spain. The ships that did this were called the Spanish Treasure Fleet, and every ship loaded with goods was guarded by several military vessels to and from Spain. The journey back to Spain with treasure took each vessel due east from the Central American coastline, passing all the islands in the Caribbean that England had colonized first.
11:37 It’s often said that the Caribbean waters were treacherous with pirates and that only some tiny number of Spanish ships actually made it past the pirates and back to Spain. There’s some evidence that that’s really just mythology building on itself—the Spanish government recently released a map of all its known sunken treasure ships around the world, and the reasons why they sank. It shows that over 90% of the ships that sank were actually sunk by bad weather and the unmapped reefs in the Caribbean.7 A measly .8% of the ships were sunk by pirates, and another .6% of the ships were sunk by other conflicts, that is, English and Dutch privateers.8 However, privateers were just pirates with papers, but I’ll get to that more in a moment.
12:14 So, some people use this map and stuff like this kind of evidence to say that all of the history of piracy is just tall tales that have been hugely embellished over time. None of it really happened, the pirates weren’t as powerful as we believe, that sort of thing. Here’s the thing though: those numbers from that Spanish map are just the ships that sank. But, think about it this way: It would have been pointless for pirates to sink a perfectly good ship. They would steal it if they could. It would have been the most valuable part of their take.
12:43 But, at the same time, that also wouldn’t have necessarily served their ends. It took huge crews to man a treasure ship, and so a small crew on a sloop couldn’t easily take one over. They could maybe convince some of the crew of another ship to become pirates, but how do 30 guys with cutlasses force 100 guys with cannons into service? Logistically it doesn’t make any sense. It was easier for pirates to rob and run, which is what Rackham and his crew did most often. But maps like this map from Spain don’t acknowledge that reality. They just kind of try to downplay piracy.
13:16 So, at this point, after her first birth, Anne was probably 18 years old. Stories tell us that she had already returned to Rackham’s side after giving birth when they heard that King George I of England had issued The Act of Grace in September 1717, otherwise known as the Proclamation for Suppressing of Pirates, or just the King’s Pardon. It was an act which fully pardoned any pirates who surrendered themselves to authorities by September of 1718.
13:39 The Act of Grace was part of a desperate attempt by European monarchs to curb piracy in the Western Hemisphere. In the early days of the Golden Age of Piracy, pirates had at least honored their own nations and didn’t attack ships sailing under their home flag. But, two things happened at once: more and more ships were sailing from North America to Europe heavy with treasure, and more and more people were abandoning legitimate employment and becoming pirates. Competition among pirates themselves became fierce and they stopped respecting the boundaries of national kinsmanship and began attacking ships from their home countries. Pardoning them and bringing them back into the nation’s fold at least helped monarchs believe that their own ships would be left alone. King George I’s deadline was actually extended to January 1719 when he became convinced that news travelled too slowly for pirates to have heard about the offer in time for the 1-year deadline.
14:24 We know Anne had given birth and returned to Rackham before this second deadline because Rackham and his crew surrendered themselves under the proclamation, and became privateers, which are basically legally sanctioned pirates. The role of privateers is a legally murky one. Basically, privately owned ships were issued orders, called commissions, by various governments to attack other ships as part of maritime war, and if they managed to take some sort of prize as part of it, they had to give the crown a cut as part of payment for their commission. Usually there were restrictions about who they could attack, usually meaning they couldn’t attack any ship bearing their own nation’s flag, and if they were challenged in court they had to be able to produce paper copies of the commissions for their acts to stay legal. Otherwise, they could be charged with piracy.
15:03 Now, privateers were great for the colonies. Colonial outposts often didn’t have much income, especially in early years, and privateers brought in a lot of needed resources, financial and otherwise. Plus, privateers were expected to defend their nation against any invading force, so they were useful for defense of the colonies as well. So often, colonial governors would look the other way if a privateer was occasionally doing some pirating too, you know what I mean?
15:26 So, again, this is where Anne is at this point. At least according to the colonial government, she was disguised as Tom Bonny, a crewmate on Rackham’s ship. As far as I can tell, nothing about their day-to-day lives changed much, except maybe they were more strategic about what ships they attacked. It seems they focused more heavily on French ships than Spanish, often attacking French merchants around present-day Haiti. Eventually, Rackham and his crew grew restless over the limitations put upon them by the king’s seal. They turned back to regular piracy, disregarding flags flown in favor of their own interests.
15:56 Now, there’s a fun tale of how the crew got themselves a new ship around this time. One afternoon, as they were leaving Cuba after doing some ship repairs in harbor, a Spanish man-of-war sailed in, dragging an English sloop behind it. The sloop had been taken in for piracy but was in very good shape. The Spanish man-of-war spotted the Vanity and shot at it, but couldn’t take it. The Spaniards positioned themselves between the Vanity and the way out of the harbor and settled in for the night.
16:20 Not ready to be cornered, Rackham, Bonny, and the rest of the crew abandoned the Vanity, slipping into small canoes with all their provisions and going to the captured ship in the dead of night. There were only a few Spaniards on board guarding her, and the whole crew managed to board before the guards were able to raise an alarm. They slipped the cables and sailed out to sea under moonlight. At first light, the Spaniards immediately fired on the Vanity again but realized much too late that the ship had already been abandoned and their other prize taken. The ship the pirates had won was in much better shape than their own, and it enabled them to continue sailing the Caribbean for a while longer.
16:54 I want to point out that some tales about Anne Bonny have her not joining Rackham at all until this point, meaning she wasn’t part of this daring theft and didn’t act as a privateer at any point. Personally, I think this is wrong because it would mean that she only sailed with Rackham for about six months, completely negating the story of her giving birth in Cuba. Of course, that would explain why we never hear from that child again. This is what I meant when I said the historical records sometimes really contradict each other.
17:26 Now, at this point, another woman joined the crew. You probably know her name if you’ve ever heard of Anne Bonny—her name was Mary Read. Most people lump the two of them into one tale because they were close friends and served on the same ship together, but I wanted to keep them separate. They both have really interesting stories and I thought putting them into the same episode would short them both. So, come back at some future point when I cover Mary Read! For now, just know that she was another female pirate disguised as a man aboard Captain Rackham’s ship, and that Mary and Anne became close friends.
17:55 There’s a question to be asked here about who on board knew they were women. On the one hand, plenty of old seafaring lore says it’s bad luck to have a woman on board a ship—this was even repeated in Pirates of the Caribbean. On the other hand, pirate laws--yes, there was a Pirate Council that made decisions--often forbade women on ships simply because it was assumed that all the men would compete for her attention, which would cause dissension among the crew. On yet a third hand--this metaphor is really falling apart--, the Vanity was a tiny ship and it would have been difficult for Anne and Mary to remain disguised for long. In her account, Yolen brought up eyewitness testimony from a couple of their victims to prove that Anne and Mary were probably known to be women by the entire crew.
18:33 One eyewitness was a woman named Dorothy Thomas, who was attacked by the crew. She testified that the women, quote, “wore men’s jackets and long trousers, and handkerchiefs tied around their heads,” but that she knew they were women, quote, “by the largeness of their breasts,” end quote.9
18:48 Another testimony came from two Frenchman captured by Rackham’s crew, who swore at their trial that the women actually wore women’s clothing most of the time they were on board the ship, though when they went to battle they put on men’s gear.
18:59 A third testimony comes from Duncombe’s Pirate Women. Thomas Dillon testified that “[the women] were both very profligate, cursing and swearing much, and very ready and willing to do anything on board.”10
19:10 Whatever the case, historian Jo Stanley asserts that the two women were, quote, “not marginalized but played a central role in Rackham’s raids, as integral members of a tightly knit group.”11 End quote.
19:20 Now, we know that in the late summer and fall of 1720, Rackham and his crew were focused on the north and west parts of Jamaica, scouring inlets and harbors and taking small vessels when they could.12 All through September and into October of 1720, they took ship after ship in Jamaica, getting rich in gunpowder and gold. They began getting bold, and decided to steal a much larger Royal Navy vessel, the William, right out of Nassau Harbor. (As a side note, there’s a chance that the theft of the William is the same ship-theft that I mentioned earlier, though some records indicate it was two different ships.)
19:52 Things were going really well for the crew. But then, on October 17, 1720, near Port Maria Bay on Jamaica’s north coast, they made a fatal error. They spotted a schooner belonging to a Captain James Spenlow, and once onboard they stole fifty rolls of tobacco, nine bags of pimentos, and the ship’s rigging.13 A fortune in product. Little did they know that Spenlow had already been robbed once that year and he wasn’t going to stand for it again. He went straight to Governor Woodes Rogers and gave a very detailed account of the ship and the crew that had robbed him.
20:23 Rogers was furious. Remember, Rackham and his crew were supposed to be working for the English crown, but had abandoned their commission. It’s not Iike they wrote a resignation letter, though —they just stopped turning up and turning in the government’s cut of the take. Rogers had probably just assumed that either Rackham and co would turn up eventually, or that Rackham’s ship had been sunk with everyone on board dying. So when the English governor heard that Rackham was in fact alive and robbing people in his neighborhood, he went after him. They outfitted a man-of-war called Albion and gave it to a man named Captain Jonathan Barnet, who immediately began pursuing the pirates.
20:56 Barnet found them within a couple of months near Negril Point, Jamaica, apparently enjoying a drink and a smoke! While searching the shores for ships to take, our pirate friends had spotted a ship they knew, so they put down their anchor and invited the other pirates over. They were drinking and smoking when someone spotted Barnet’s sloop closing in. The alarm was raised and the anchor was pulled up, the guests still on board. They tried to escape, but Barnet’s ship was faster and so he caught up with the William quickly. There was some volleying of gunfire, but eventually, Barnet’s men boarded the pirate ship and were stunned to find only two people on deck ready to fight: Anne Bonny and Mary Read.
21:30 The two women, armed with cutlasses and pistols, fought the dozen British navy troops alone. And they fought well! They killed some of their attackers and injured several others. Anne, furious with the cowardice of the rest of her crew, shot down into the hold at some point, killing at least one of her crewmates. But, of course, they were eventually overpowered and arrested with the rest of the crew.
21:49 Yolen’s version of the story goes that the men on board had no idea they were being attacked because they were already drunk on stolen rum below deck. Anne and Mary called down for help but their drunk crewmates ignored them. The end result is still the same: Anne was so enraged that she and Mary had to fight alone that she shot down into the hold, killing at least one crewmate. They were defeated and captured. Some put the date down as October 22nd, 1720, others as October 31st. One more reason I wanted to do this story for Halloween.
22:17 The prisoners were taken to Port Royal in Jamaica. This would have made Barnet a very rich man, by the way. The same Act of Grace in 1717 that extended clemency to the pirates also had provisions for rewarding the capture of pirates after the deadline passed. The reward for a captured pirate captain, for instance, was 100 British pounds. 100 British pounds in 1720 is worth 21,000 British pounds today!14 There was good money to be made in pirate hunting! And, ironically, it might have made Anne’s first husband James rich too—remember, he was spying for Governor Rogers, and making money for every bit of information he turned in that led to an arrest.
22:52 On November 16, 1720, a court of admiralty was held, where several of the crew members were convicted of piracy and sentenced to death. Among them were Captain Jack Rackham, Master George Fetherston, Quartermaster Richard Corner, and several crewmates.
23:06 Now, there were several people in Jamaica at this point who remembered Anne as the young wife of James Bonny and the daughter of William Cormac. Her father’s reputation as a wealthy trader meant his name was known throughout the colonies. Now, that relationship counted for something, because they decided to allow Anne and Jack to see each other one last time before he was executed. When he was allowed into her cell to say goodbye, he told her that he loved her and that he was sorry they had gotten caught, et cetera. She told him, quote, “I am sorry to see you there, but if you had fought like a man you need not be hang’d like a dog.”15 End quote.
23:37 Which, like, what a line. Can you imagine that being the last thing someone said to you on this earth? Brutal. That line, probably more than anything else, has enshrined Anne as a heroine of the Golden Age of Piracy. As Duncombe said, quote, “One hopes that [Rackham] went to his death smiling at the thought that even the specter of death could not cow the woman he loved.”16
23:57 When it was Anne’s turn to be tried ten days after Rackham’s execution, she apparently offered no statement in her own defense. While some of the pirates convicted two weeks before had tried to claim they’d been forced into piracy, neither Anne nor Mary made any such claim. It wasn’t until the judge, Sir Nicholas Lowes, pronounced them guilty that they both claimed to be pregnant. Some stories say that Anne wasn’t revealed as a woman until she bared her pregnant stomach in the court, and used her pregnancy to beg for clemency. I doubt she literally stripped in court, but who knows? Maybe. We know that story can’t be true, because we know that they already knew she was a woman, because they had brought in a special judge to preside over hers and Mary’s cases because they were women. If they were still disguised as men, they would have been tried with the other men on November 16th. However it happened, Anne was still convicted for piracy and sentenced to death, but her execution was delayed until after she gave birth. Mary Read was also convicted but allowed to wait out her own pregnancy.
24:50 The capture and subsequent trial of the two women caused a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. While people had worried over women running off to sea to be pirates, Anne and Mary were the first two women to actually be caught committing piratical crimes as part of a normal pirate crew operating in the Caribbean. Historian Jo Stanley, in her book Bold In Her Breeches: Women Pirates Across the Ages, estimated that during the Golden Age of Piracy, only .5% of Anglo-American pirates were women disguised as men.
25:15 I mean… A life of piracy was dangerous. Ships sank, there was fighting both among pirates and with navies, and if you were caught, you could be executed, like Rackham was. Knowing that death was the almost certain outcome, why sign up for this life? Well, most pirates began their lives as legal enlisted members of the navies. But the navy was an uncomfortable life--bad food, cramped quarters, low wages, and a long time following orders with no promise of advancement. In fact, many Royal Navy seamen were pressed into the King’s service; they were sometimes even shackled in the hold to prevent them escaping when a ship docked in port.17 It was often cruel and exhausting and hopeless.
25:53 Pirate ships on the other hand, were democratic. Each member of a crew had a voice, and people voted on decisions. The captain was in charge, but he was considered, quote, “the first among equals.”18 End quote. There was a set of articles that all members of a crew agreed to and signed before coming aboard, including the captain, and if he disobeyed those rules, he could be voted out. In fact, that’s how Rackham became a captain; the previous one was voted too cowardly! Crews received an equal share of any treasure they found, they generally had better food and cleaner quarters, and they were free to leave if they decided they wanted to. What I also think is really amazing is that pirate ships even had an early welfare fund--everyone contributed to a pot that was used to compensate anyone injured or disabled in battle or on the ship.19 If a pirate died and had children or a wife somewhere, money was sent with notice to take care of the family.
26:40 The structure and governance of pirate crews during the Golden Age of Piracy was the first successful experiment in democracy in Europe and the Americas. Some researchers even theorize that this successful application of democracy was the real reason that pirates were so feared and therefore vigilantly hunted by the monarchs of Europe.20 Yes, sure, they were impacting trade, but the pirates also represented a different vision of life that was dangerous to the ruling class of the time.
27:04 Finally, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a time of great social injustice and really prejudicial class systems. Women were property! So were Black people! Of course, they wanted an escape from that, and piracy was an option where women and Black people were treated like human beings with opinions that were valued. However, I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush here, so to be clear: crews were usually racially homogenous, and some pirates did take slaves as part of goods seized during a raid. So it wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t absolute equality, but people’s chances were often better with pirates than what they faced on land.
27:36 So why join? The real question to me is why wouldn’t someone join?! I’m not at all surprised that Anne chose this life over a life with James Bonny who wanted her stripped and beaten in the public square. It’s not a hard choice, is it? Sure, maybe you die young, but at least you die young after living a free life.
27:52 Okay, let’s do a quick “where they ended up” recap.
27:55 First up: Remember that governor, Woodes Rogers, who sent Barnet after Rackham? His story is pretty interesting. He was a former pirate himself, which meant he knew all the tricks of the trade. But for some reason, he had a change of heart. He vowed to end piracy in the Caribbean, and did so by turning pirates against each other with rewards for informing on their crewmates. Instead of sending pirates back to England to be tried, he tried them right there in New Providence, making himself seem like the supreme authority in those waters. His plan was really effective, and the Golden Age of Piracy ended under his watch. But, ironically, without the pirate economy, the colony fell into financial ruin and Rogers was imprisoned for the debts he created as governor. He died in a debtor’s prison and is largely left out of history books.21 Today, a lot of New Providence’s legitimate livelihood is from piracy-related tourism. As Duncombe points out in Pirate Women, Rogers is probably rolling in his grave over that.
28:47 As for Calico Jack Rackham, he died. We know that. He’s remembered less for his own feats as a pirate captain and more for the fact that he let Anne and Mary on his ship at all.22 You probably noticed I only covered one really amazing pirate adventure that they all had together. Rackham wasn’t the most talented pirate, he was just kind of a good guy, a good captain. I guess that’s a nice thing to be remembered for.
29:07 We do have to thank Rackham for one other thing though. When you think of pirate flags, or the Jolly Roger as it’s usually called, most people think of one of three designs: a black field with a white skull dominates them all. One has two crossed bones behind the skull, another has the crossbones under the skull, and a third replaces the bones with two crossed cutlasses under the skull. Every pirate captain actually had his own flag though; Edward Teach, the famous Blackbeard, flew a flag that featured a devil stabbing a heart while drinking from what looks like a martini glass. (I’m obsessed with it?) Rackham’s flag is one of the famous ones that we remember. He raised the skull with crossed cutlasses on every ship he commanded.23 It’s one of the main pirate flags we remember today; I mean, it’s one of the main pirate images we have at all, and we have to thank Rackham for it.
29:53 Now, I’m not going to tell you what happened to Mary, you’ll just have to tune into a future episode to find out. What happened to Anne has long been considered a great mystery. Executions were meticulously documented by the English government, and even though she was sentenced to death, her execution was never documented, nor was her release. So what happened?
30:11 Yolen supposed that another man might have fallen in love with her and helped her escape somehow.24 Others think that she escaped on her own.
30:19 Duncombe offers yet another exciting theory, though a slightly less popular one because it requires more moving parts. I’m just going to read it in full, because she tells it well. So the following is all one quote:25
Picture Anne in her jail cell one night, furious that she had been caught, and unable to sleep. Suddenly, she hears a muffled thump and a crash in the dark hallway. Someone is jiggling the key in her door’s rusty lock. The heavy wooden door is thrown open to reveal Bartholomew Roberts, resplendent in his fine clothes and jewels. Although they have never met, Anne recognizes him from the stories she’s heard in port. There’s a glint in his eye that speaks of mischief. “Come on, Anne, let’s get you out of here. Will you join my crew?” Roberts asks. Anne just stares, in a rare moment of speechlessness. “Why did you come for me?” She asks Roberts, who in turn opens his jacket to reveal that he is most definitely a she. “We women have to stick together, don’t we? Come on!” The shocked Anne follows the legendary Black Bart to the waiting dinghy in the harbor, and by dawn they are on the Royal Ranger, sailing toward a lifetime of more adventures…
31:19 End quote. Black Bart, one of the most famous pirates ever, is someone I’ll probably cover in the future because his (or maybe her!) story is really interesting. Even for a pirate, Black Bart was a rule breaker. Of course, this theory would have required that Black Bart had heard that Anne was arrested, which would have taken a long time because news traveled so slowly back then, and he would have had to arrive perfectly in between Anne giving birth and her rescheduled execution. But wouldn’t it be nice if it were true?
31:45 Now, interestingly, there’s a chance that a 22-year-old YouTuber solved the case of what happened to Anne Bonny. According to a Post and Courier article, there was a recorded death of an Ann Bonny, without the ‘e’ at the end of Anne, in 1933, in Port Royal.26 It could be that she got out of prison by using her child as a way of saying she’d had a change of heart and repudiated piracy. That would have left her with 12 to 13 years to raise the child before she would have died at just 33 years old.
32:12 According to Encyclopedia Britannica, Anne was definitely released off-book, due to her father’s influence, and returned to Charleston, South Carolina. She gave birth to Rackham’s child, who she kept this time. One legend says that on December 21st, 1721, she married a man named Joseph Burleigh, with whom she had ten children.27 She apparently recovered her reputation, felt finished sowing her wild oats, and lived peacefully until 1782.28
32:36 It’s interesting to me that Anne is one of the most remembered pirates, right up there with Blackbeard. She and her crew weren’t particularly successful in terms of daring feats of piracy, and she only sailed as a pirate for about two years, that we know of. As Duncombe pointed out, it helps to be white and beautiful when it comes to becoming famous, and Anne was both. But I think she also represented a new aspiration for women to be the captains of their own fate, if you’ll pardon the overly-cheesy metaphor. She is represented in countless works of fiction and media, perhaps most famously in the recent Black Sails series. But she also makes her way into The Lost Pirate Kingdom and Detective Conan and Assassin’s Creed and a Death Grips album and so much more. Anne’s story will probably go on fascinating historians and pirate lovers alike for generations to come.
33:21 So that’s the story of Anne Bonny! I hope you liked today’s episode of Unruly Figures! I know that Anne Bonny’s story has a lot of holes and question marks, but I think the mystery is part of the fun! I loved doing this research, so you can count on me covering a lot more pirates in the future.
📚Bibliography
Books
Duncombe, Laura Sook. Pirate Women: The Princesses, Prostitutes, and Privateers Who Ruled the Seven Seas. Chicago Review Press, 2019.
Croce, Pat. Pirate Soul: A Swashbuckling Voyage through the Golden Age of Pirates. Running Press, 2006.
Johnson, Charles. A General History of the Pyrates. 1726.
Lewis, Jon E. The Mammoth Book of Pirates: In Which Is Related Many True and Eyewitness Accounts of the Most Notorious Plunderers to Rove the Seas. Robinson, 2011.
Yolen, Jane. Sea Queens: Women Pirates Around the World. Charlesbridge, 2010.
Websites
“Anne Bonny.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anne-Bonny.
Bartelme, Tony. “A 22-Year-Old YouTuber May Have Solved Anne Bonny Pirate Mystery 300 Years after Trial.” Post and Courier, The Post and Courier, 19 Jan. 2021, https://www.postandcourier.com/news/a-22-year-old-youtuber-may-have-solved-anne-bonny-pirate-mystery-300-years-after/article_78fc0a2e-2914-11eb-a5f5-03b65f4d281a.html.
“Breeching (Boys).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 10 Oct. 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeching_(boys).
“Death of Irish Pirate Anne Bonny.” Rare Irish Stuff, https://www.rareirishstuff.com/blog/death-of-irish-pirate-anne-bonny-.5133.html.
“Inflation Calculator.” Bank of England, https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator.
Olaya, Vicente G. “Shipwrecks of the Caribbean: Spain Drafts Treasure Map of Its Own Days of Empire.” EL PAÍS English Edition, 11 Mar. 2019, https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2019/03/01/inenglish/1551436896_082581.html.
“Breeching (Boys).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 10 Oct. 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeching_(boys).
Johnson, Charles. A General History of the Pyrates. 1726.
Duncombe, Laura Sook. Pirate Women: The Princesses, Prostitutes, and Privateers Who Ruled the Seven Seas. Chicago Review Press, 2019.
Duncombe, pg 120.
Lewis, Jon E. The Mammoth Book of Pirates: In Which Is Related Many True and Eyewitness Accounts of the Most Notorious Plunderers to Rove the Seas. Robinson, 2011.
Lewis, pg 208
Olaya, Vicente G. “Shipwrecks of the Caribbean: Spain Drafts Treasure Map of Its Own Days of Empire.” EL PAÍS English Edition, 11 Mar. 2019, https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2019/03/01/inenglish/1551436896_082581.html.
Ibid.
Yolen, Jane. Sea Queens: Women Pirates Around the World. Charlesbridge, 2010.
Duncombe, pg 124
Duncombe, pg 125
Johnson, pg 113
Yolen, pg 70
“Inflation Calculator.” Bank of England, https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator.
Yolen, pg 71
Duncombe, pg 127
Croce, Pat. Pirate Soul: A Swashbuckling Voyage through the Golden Age of Pirates. Running Press, 2006.
Croce, pg 10
Ibid.
Ibid.
Duncombe, pg 121
Croce, pg 35
Croce, pg 17
Yolen, pg 71
Duncombe, pg 128-9
Bartelme, Tony. “A 22-Year-Old YouTuber May Have Solved Anne Bonny Pirate Mystery 300 Years after Trial.” Post and Courier, The Post and Courier, 19 Jan. 2021, https://www.postandcourier.com/news/a-22-year-old-youtuber-may-have-solved-anne-bonny-pirate-mystery-300-years-after/article_78fc0a2e-2914-11eb-a5f5-03b65f4d281a.html.
“Death of Irish Pirate Anne Bonny.” Rare Irish Stuff, https://www.rareirishstuff.com/blog/death-of-irish-pirate-anne-bonny-.5133.html.
“Anne Bonny.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anne-Bonny.