From Pirate to respectable old age
ANNE Bonny was born in 1698 in Ireland; that is, she was barely into her 20s when her adventures with Calico Jack began. But by then she had already had a colourful and violent life.
She was the illegitimate daughter of a lawyer, William Cormac, and his maidservant. The three of them would go to South Carolina where Cormac became a successful businessman and plantation owner.
Anne was a handful as a child and in 1718 she married a sailor named James Bonny, much against her father’s wishes. He threw her out of the house, suspecting that he was only after Anne for her father’s money. She was said to have set fire to his plantation in revenge.
The couple ended up at New Providence in the Bahamas, where Anne was soon in a relationship with Jack Rackam, while her husband had turned informer for Woodes Rogers, much to her disgust.
Rackam persuaded Anne to leave her husband and go to sea with him, disguised as a man. The pretence had to be dropped when it was clear she was pregnant. Rackam took her to Cuba where she gave birth to a son before rejoining the crew, dressed as usual in men’s clothing.
When Mary Read joined Rackam’s crew she and Anne became close friends, though yarns of a lesbian relationship are probably just prurient speculation.
While Read died in prison, it now seems very likely that Anne Bonny, who was no more than 23 years old when she was sentenced to die, managed to get away with it.
Much as he had been appalled at her marriage to James Bonny, her father was a wealthy and influential man, and research in more recent times suggests that he managed to get her released and brought back home to Charles Town – long since known as Charleston – in South Carolina, where she gave birth to the second child she had by Rackam.
In 1721, just over a year after being sentenced to hang, she married a local man, Joseph Burleigh, with whom she had eight children. She was an elderly and much-respected member of the community when she died in 1782.