The Dread Trio – Part 2/3: A Bonny Pirate Lass (ca. 1705 – 1782 AD)
The official dates of Anne Bonny’s birth and death are disputed, and most of what is known about her life comes from a book written in 1724 called A General History of the Pyrates. Anne was born an illegitimate daughter to lawyer William Cormac and his serving woman, Mary Brennen – and when Cormac’s wife made his affair public, he was thoroughly shamed and his career in law destroyed. He left Ireland with Brennen and his new daughter, moving to Charleston, South Carolina.
The small family lived and worked on a plantation until Anne’s mother died when Anne was in her early teens. She became responsible for most of the household duties, and it is during this time that the rumors of Anne’s vicious temper seem to begin – one story claims that when she was 13, she became very angry with a servant girl and stabbed her in the stomach with a kitchen knife. Another tale suggests that she sent a young man to hospital, after he attempted – and failed – to sexually assault her.
Clearly, Anne was strong-willed, physically capable, and highly intelligent. At 16, she fell in love with a young pirate named James Bonny – who really only wanted her estate – and married him against her father’s wishes. Disappointed and considering himself a failure at making a young lady out of his daughter, Cormac disowned his only child. Rumor has it she was so furious that she started a fire on the plantation before leaving for Nassau in the Bahamas.
While in the Bahamas, Anne began working at the local tavern, mingling with the pirates who stopped for a drink. It was here that she met the pirate John Rackham, otherwise known as “Calico Jack”, and they began having an affair. Rackham soon offered to purchase Anne from her husband through a “divorce-by-purchase” deal, but James Bonny vehemently refused, seeking legal action against both Rackham and his own wife. Naturally, Anne would not be confined by anyone, and proceeded to elope with Calico Jack before the charges could be brought against them.
In order to prevent harassment from the rest of the crew – and since women were considered bad luck on a ship – Anne was dressed as a man while aboard Rackham’s ship Revenge. While she managed to stay in disguise for some time, fighting alongside the rest of the men with no less competence, she soon became pregnant… something that a woman simply cannot hide from anyone! And the one man who challenged her before the pregnancy ended up with a cutlass through the heart, so if anyone had suspected she wasn’t a man before that, it was rather unlikely that they would have spoken up.
Since a ship was no place to give birth, Calico Jack sailed to Cuba, where he left Anne with friends until after the child was born. The child died soon afterward, and Jack returned in a few months to pick her up. It was around this time that the second female on the Revenge had arrived – the notorious Mary Read – and the two women soon discovered each other’s identities, becoming close friends. Naturally, rumors swirled that Anne and Mary were more than “just friends”, and these rumors were fueled by other suggestions of Jack, Anne, and Mary’s unnaturally close relationship. However, this may simply have been the result of creative imagination, as there is no evidence of any obtuse sexual behavior ever occurring aboard the ship.
When Rackham’s ship was finally attacked by the British Navy in Jamaica, Anne and Mary fought hard to stave off the sailors, while the men hid below deck in a drunken stupor. The women yelled at the men to come up and “fight like men”, but they were far too drunk to even stand up – the celebration of recent victories simply had come at a bad time. The women were overwhelmed, and everyone on board was clapped in irons.
At the sentencing, Anne and Mary managed to escape the sentence of hanging by “pleading their bellies”, since it was illegal to kill an unborn child according to British law. Their sentences were temporarily stayed until after they gave birth… but no record of Anne’s execution has ever been found. Neither is there a record of her release, which has led to speculation over whether she was ransomed by her father, returned to her husband, or that perhaps she escaped and resumed her life of piracy under another name.
Her supposed descendents provided some information to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which is the only semi-concrete information about the rest of her life, and therefore may be the most plausible theory: “Her father managed to secure her release from gaol [jail] and bring her back to Charles Town, South Carolina, where she gave birth to Rackham’s second child. On 21 December 1721 she married a local man, Joseph Burleigh, and they had eight children. She died in South Carolina, a respectable woman, at the age of eighty-four and was buried 25 April 1782.” However, this seems like an unlikely end for a formerly ruthless female pirate…
Nevertheless, it is the only information left about the rest of Anne’s life, whether it is true or not. And yet, what ever became of Mary Read, and how did she end up choosing a life of piracy…?
Want to read more?
Tomorrow: Read about Mary…Read.
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