Irish pirate Anne Bonny (1700-1782) is one of a scarce number of women known to have participated in the unlawful interception and plundering of trade ships on the high seas, a problem that plagued merchants during the eighteenth century. The headstrong Bonny, an enthusiastic outlaw throughout the Caribbean, sometimes donned men's clothing, a habit she seemed to have carried over from childhood.
Bonny's life story is the stuff from which fictional tales are crafted. She was born in Kinsale in County Cork, Ireland, on March 8, 1700, to Mary (Peg) Brennan, a single woman who worked as a maid in the Cormac household. Bonny's father was apparently William Cormac, a married attorney, but their affair was not immediately discovered. Brennan was eventually fired for the suspected theft of some silver from the household, and during the course of an informal investigation Mrs. Cormac began to believe her husband may have been having an affair with the maid. In the end, Cormac and his wife separated, and Brennan gave birth to Anne.
Offspring of an Affair
At some point Cormac decided to raise his daughter himself, and dressed Bonny in boy's clothing as an attempt to pass her off as a distant male relative who was training as a clerk in his law practice. His former wife suspected the truth, and made known his deception, which caused irreparable harm to Cormac's Cork-area law practice. He then decided to take Brennan and their daughter to the colonies, where past indiscretions were unknown and fresh starts easily made. They settled in Charles Town, Carolina (now Charleston, South Carolina), and Cormac prospered there as a trader. He eventually bought a plantation, and raised his daughter alone after Brennan died. Bonny proved a willful teen with a fiery temper: one legend surrounding her youth asserts that she and a servant once argued so violently that Bonny stabbed and killed the woman. Another holds that a local youth made unwanted advances on her, and she assaulted him so badly that he took several months to fully recover.
Wed Lowly Sailor
Bonny's father hoped that his daughter would marry a young, ambitious suitor, but instead she fell in with a crowd of sailors at the harbor and her eye soon fell favorably upon James Bonny, a lowly seaman from Bristol. Bonny's father strongly objected to Anne's courtship, suspecting that James Bonny was merely attempting to make a quick and fortuitous financial match with his heir. Cormac cut his daughter out of his will, and in retaliation she was said to have burned her father's crops. The pair eloped in 1716, and headed to the notorious pirate enclave of New Providence, Bahamas. There James Bonny earned money on the side by acting as a paid informant for local authorities determined to eradicate piracy in the area.
Bonny's life path would intersect on several occasions with that of English Captain Woodes Rogers, who became the first royal governor of the Bahamas by appointment of King George I in 1718. Rogers, like James Bonny, a native of Bristol, was a privateer: captain of a ship authorized by a government to seize trade ships of an enemy nation. A pirate ship, by contrast, was not authorized by any nation and pilfered solely for its own profit. Because piracy cut into the colonial economy of the Caribbean, as well as his own income, Governor Rogers was determined to curtail the activity and began offering bounty money to informants. Bonny reportedly strongly objected to her husband's sideline, and their union was a short-lived one anyway. Leaving her husband, she became romantically involved with a wealthy local merchant, Chidley Bayard. Reportedly, Anne Bonny dueled with Bayard's Spanish lover and killed the woman, Maria Vargas, with a well-aimed rapier thrust.
Later in 1718, Governor Rogers devised a new method to ensure British ships safe passage in the Caribbean: a mass amnesty for pirates. Rogers convinced King George to issue a decree granting all pirates an official pardon if they surrendered to his governor's authorities in the Bahamas and promised to abandon illicit plundering as a way of life. One notorious outlaw, Captain John Rackham, arrived in Providence to take advantage of the offer. Rackham, called "Calico Jack" because of his exuberant clothes, was said to have been the first pirate to fly the skull and crossbones flag on his ship. Bonny met Rackham, and the two began an affair. When estranged husband James Bonny discovered this, he informed Governor Rogers of his wife's infidelity, and Rackham stepped in and offered to "buy" her freedom on her behalf. To purchase a divorce in such a way was an illegal but common practice at the time, but Bonny's husband refused, reportedly telling Rogers, "She'll kill me if she's set free," according to News of the World contributor Danny Conlon.
Ran away with Pirates
Rogers ordered Bonny to return to her husband or be flogged in public by him; instead she ran off with Rackham. The couple gathered a pirate crew and absconded with a ship in the harbor, the Curlew, thereby making Bonny one of the few known women pirates in maritime history. Generally, the pirate code forbid women on board their ships, but there are some accounts of women dressing as men and participating; observers noted that Bonny did not always try to disguise her gender, and was reportedly adept with the cutlass - a short curved sword - and a good marksman no matter what clothing she wore. Impending motherhood sidelined her for a time, but the child was stillborn and she recovered from the ordeal while in Cuba with Rackham.
Returning to the high seas with Rackham and his crew, Bonny met another female pirate, Mary Read, who had recently joined the Curlew. Read had been born in England and was also dressed in boy's clothes as a child. She had been conceived while her mother's husband was away at sea, but he then disappeared. When Polly Read's first child, a boy, died, she tried to pass Mary off to her in-laws as her son in order to obtain financial support. Read continued to dress in male clothing in her teens, and eventually joined the crew of a man-of-war, and then a horse regiment in Flanders. She lived as man until she became romantically involved with another soldier in her regiment, Corporal Jules Vosquon. Discharged from the regiment with little apparent problem, the couple even received wedding gifts from their fellow soldiers. Read and Vosquon used the funds to set themselves up in a tavern business, The Three Horseshoes, in the Dutch city of Breda.
Read returned to dressing as a man after her husband died and the tavern business declined. She tried to join another regiment, but it was a more peaceful year and many former mercenary soldiers were also looking for work. She managed to join a Dutch ship bound for the Caribbean, and when it was boarded by pirates she decided to join them. She wound up in New Providence after the general pardon was granted, but like many others was lured once again by the easy money and ready access to some of the most luxurious goods plying the waters between the Old and New worlds. As Joan Druett explained in She Captains: Heroines and Hellions of the Sea, "for a young man of the time, shipping with pirates held many temptations. Buccaneering had its definite glamour. In times when people did not dress out of their class, a maidservant with silk ribbons in her hair being an object of deep suspicion, the sight of pirates swaggering about in fancy hats and expensive finery inspired awe and admiration."
Teamed with Read
At some point, Read joined Rackham's crew, and legend has it that Bonny and Read discovered each other's gender after Bonny tried to seduce Read. By mid-1720, the trio had seized a British merchant ship, the 12-ton William, and then spent three months eluding capture in various Caribbean hideouts while plundering smaller vessels. Because all had taken the King's amnesty, an irate Governor Rogers declared Rackham, Bonny, and Read enemies of England and sent out an armed posse to hunt them down. While anchored one evening in Negril Bay, Jamaica, its crew drunk on some stolen rum, Rackham's ship was spotted by Captain Charles Barnet. Although most of the crew were reportedly too drunk to resist Barnet's men, Bonny and Read, as well as Read's male lover, were said to have fought back viciously. After Barnet fired at the William and destroyed part of its sails - thereby making flight impossible - Read was said to have turned her musket on the crew cowering below deck, firing some shots to spur them to action and inadvertently wounding Captain Rackham.
In the end, all were captured and brought to trial at the Jamaica port of Spanish Town, later St. Jago de la Vega. The men and women were tried separately, with Rackham and his crew of ten sentenced to death on November 16, 1720. Bonny was allegedly granted permission to visit Rackham one last time prior to his execution. At this last meeting she was said to have consoled her lover by saying, "Had you fought like a man, you need not have been hanged like a dog!" according to Outlaws, Mobsters, and Crooks: From the Old West to the Internet.
The trial of Bonny and Read took place at Spanish Town's Court of Vice Admiralty on November 28, 1720. Witnesses from illegally boarded ships claimed that both dressed as men and were among the fiercest of the crew. Each was found guilty and sentenced to death, but both "pleaded the belly," or claimed to be pregnant. This was a common stalling tactic for women facing death sentences in eighteenth-century England, and it worked in this case: the execution dates of both women were postponed until they could be examined by physicians. Both were apparently truthful, but Read died in prison from a fever on December 4. Bonny gave birth while in jail, and reportedly a letter from Governor Rogers effected her release. Her well-connected father back in Carolina is said to have bribed Jamaican officials for her return, and she came back to Charles Town and wed a man named Joseph Burleigh in 1721. They had five children, and Bonny died at the age of 81 on April 25, 1782. She is buried in a York County, Virginia, cemetery.
Bonny's story was first told in Charles Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates, printed in London in 1724. The Johnson name, however, was thought to be a pseudonym used by the writer Daniel Defoe.
Books
Druett, Joan, She Captains: Heroines and Hellions of the Sea, Simon & Schuster, 2000.
Gay and Lesbian Biography, St. James Press, 1997.
Johnson, Charles, A General History of the Pyrates, [London, England], 1724.
Outlaws, Mobsters, and Crooks: From the Old West to the Internet, UXL, 1998.
Periodicals
News of the World (London, England), September 14, 2003.
Sunday Telegraph (London, England), May 27, 2001.
