Defiant and pregnant: The female buccaneers who escaped the noose
They were two of history’s most fearsome pirates who, during the golden age of piracy in the 18th Century, plundered their way to infamy across the Caribbean until the law finally caught up with them.
What marked this duo out among the 600-or-so people sentenced to hang for piracy was that these notorious buccaneers were both women, and both claimed to be pregnant.
On November 28, 1720, Anne Bonny and Mary Read stood defiantly in a courtroom in Spanish Town, Jamaica, having pleaded not guilty to charges of piracy.
Yet after the court heard former hostages describe the women swearing and fighting with pistols and cutlasses even more fiercely that their male crewmates, they were found guilty.
While the noose was the fate of those found guilty for piracy, the idea of hanging women was still considered distasteful and, given they were pregnant, downright abhorrent. And so their sentences were commuted until the birth of their children.
So how did Anne Bonny and Mary Read join the ranks of the world’s most feared pirates?
It’s believed Anne travelled from Carolina to Nassau on the island of New Providence, where she married a former pirate, James Bonny.
When her husband turned informer and started tracking down pirates, Ireland-born Bonny left him and made a living in a brothel. Local pirate James ( Jack) Rackham met and fell hard for free-spirited Bonny. When her husband refused to grant a divorce the pair gathered a crew, stole a ship called the William and left to be pirates in August 1720.
Part of their crew was Mary Read, a soldier’s widow from England. Accounts differ but it was claimed Read met her husband in the army in Flanders after enlisting disguised as a man, and later found work as a sailor after his death, again passing as a man. She fell into piracy when her ship was seized by pirates in the West Indies and wound up in Nassau, where she joined Rackham and Bonny’s crew.
Some claim she joined dressed as a man, her gender eventually uncovered by Bonny who pursued a romantic relationship with her, while official accounts of their arrest stated both were known as women when they sailed from Nassau.
What does seem to be true is that they took part in piracy of their own volition as they attacked and plundered a number of ships around the Bahamas during a two-month period.
They were eventually hunted down by Captain Jonathan Bartlett, whose crew boarded and captured all on the William.
The male crew of the William, including Rackham, were hanged, except their hostages who testified at their trial. Read and Bonny, both said to be in their second-trimester of pregnancy at the time of their capture and trial, remained imprisoned.
Whether the female pirates were eventually executed or released was never documented. However, a record of burials in St Catherine, Jamaica, notes the death and burial of a Mary Read on April 28, 1721, suggesting she could have died due to complications with her pregnancy.
The fate of Anne Bonny, whose story featured in hit TV series Black Sails, and her child remains a mystery.