Women Pirates Once Roamed Bahamian Seas

They plundered and pillaged on the Caribbean seas, claiming “tender young males” as their booty, but ultimately they were saved from the hangman’s noose by the babies in their bellies.

They were women pirates, contemporaries of Blackbeard and Captain Kidd. They too sailed under the skull and crossbones of the Bloody Flag, but unlike the men, they were all but forgotten by history.

Their names were Mary Read and Anne Bonny. They dressed like male pirates, swore like male pirates, stole like male pirates, even dueled like male pirates. But they got pregnant like women.

Few traces remain here of the 1,000 or so pirates that controlled the Bahamas in the early 1700s. Blackbeard’s hilltop tower is in ruins, his favorite tree chopped down, his well filled in, marked now by only an obscure circle of rocks in a hotel courtyard.

But at least people here and abroad know of Blackbeard, the most notorious of the Bahamian pirates. The same cannot be said of the women.

“There’s nothing to memorialize the female pirates,” said Gail Saunders, director of the Bahamas national archives.

Read and Bonny were among a half-dozen or so female pirates recorded in history. They were never as powerful as Ching Shih, a woman who controlled 800 junks in 19th-Century Asia, but they may well have been as fierce.

Some contemporary accounts have survived, although they are riddled with contradictory details and layered with legend about the two women who claimed “struggling and tender young males” as part of their loot.

“Even in their day, they were good copy. Pirate trials were fodder for the equivalent of tabloids. And pirate hangings were great shows,” said Jenifer Marx, a Florida-based researcher who recently published a book on Caribbean pirates.

Other women probably accompanied their men--some who became pirates to flee indentured servitude--but Read and Bonny were probably the only ones to actually become West Indian pirates, Marx said.

Bonny was the illegitimate daughter of a married Irish attorney and a maid in his Cork household who ran off to raise their baby in the New World.

Anne was born in 1700 and raised in Charleston, S.C., which could not contain what one account called “her fierce and courageous temper.”

She supposedly stabbed her maid with a table knife, quarreled with her father and eloped to the Bahamas with a seaman or smuggler named James Bonny. She soon abandoned him for the dashing and notorious pirate “Calico Jack” Rackam.

Read would eventually end up on the same pirate crew.

Originally from London, Read was born while her mother’s husband had been at sea for years. From early childhood, she was dressed in boy’s clothes, apparently because her mother wanted to pass her off as a legitimate male child who had died in infancy.

Still dressed as a man, she served in the infantry, cavalry and navy, but settled into a more traditional female role when she fell in love with a Dutchman. They wed and opened a tavern in Holland, but he soon died, and the young widow took to the seas again, on a ship that was captured by Calico Jack and Bonny.

With a few interruptions, piracy then remained her vocation although there are some suggestions that after marrying a man taken prisoner, she had wanted to resume a more conventional lifestyle.

“Mary had a very high regard for her new husband, who was a quiet, amiable man, and not at all suited to his present life, and as he had become a pirate for the love of her, she did everything she could to make life easy for him,” one historical account says.

In October, 1720, their ship was raided by a British sloop near Jamaica. According to testimony at the subsequent trial, the only two who fought ferociously were Read and Bonny. The men were all cowering below deck.

In court, they faced death sentences. But they revealed that they were women, claimed that they were pregnant and won clemency.