Did Anne Bonny and Mary Read, in the end, make their mark on the world? Did their daring make a difference? Did they leave a legacy? Dianne Dugaw has argued that the popular genre of ballads about warrior women like Bonny and Read was largely suffocated in the early nineteenth century by a new bourgeois idea of womanhood. Warrior women, when they appeared, were comical, grotesque, and absurd, since they lacked the now-essential female traits of delicacy, constraint, and frailty. The warrior woman, in culture if not in fact, had been tamed.42
But the stubborn fact remained: even though Bonny and Read did not transform the terms in which the broader societal discussion of gender took place, and even though they apparently did not see their own exploits as a call for rights and equality for all women, their very lives and subsequent popularity represented a subversive commentary on the gender relations of their own times as well as “a powerful symbol of unconventional womanhood” for the future. The frequent reprinting of their tales in the romantic literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries surely captured the imaginations of many girls and young women who felt imprisoned by the bourgeois ideology of femininity and domesticity.43 Julia Wheelwright has shown that nineteenth-century feminists used the examples of female soldiers and sailors “to challenge prevailing notions about women’s innate physical and mental weakness.” Bonny and Read, like many others, offered ample disproof of then-dominant theories on women’s incapacity.44
Anne Bonny, Mary Read, and women like them captured many an imagination in their own day, including those at work in the realm of literature. Bonny and Read were real-life versions of Defoe’s famous heroine Moll Flanders. In fact, Bonny, Read, and Flanders had a lot in common. All were illegitimate children, poor at birth and for years thereafter. All were what Defoe called “the offspring of debauchery and vice.” Flanders and Bonny were born of mothers who carried them in the womb while in prison. All three found themselves on the wrong side of the law, charged with capital crimes against property, and facing “the steps and the string,” popular slang for the gallows. All experienced homelessness and roving transience, including trips across the Atlantic. All recognized the importance of disguise, the need to be able to appear in “several shapes.” Flanders too had cross-dressed: her governess and partner in crime “laid a new contrivance for my going abroad, and this was to dress me up in men’s clothes, and so put me into a new kind of practice.”45 Flanders even had a brush with pirates during her passage to Virginia, though she encountered no women on board. Had she decided to join up with those who sailed beneath the Jolly Roger, the lives of Bonny and Read might be read as one possible outcome to the novel, which was published the year after our heroines’ adventures.
Christopher Hill writes, “The early novel takes its life from motion.” Commenting on the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, he concludes that “the novel doesn’t grow only out of the respectable bourgeois household. It also encompasses the picaro, the vagabond, the itinerant, the pirate—outcasts from the stable world of good householders—those who cannot or will not adapt.” Peter Linebaugh also emphasizes the proletarian origins of the picaresque novel in the early modern age, especially in England, where the literary form “reached an apogee in the publication of Moll Flanders in 1722.” Thus the experiences of the teeming, often dispossessed masses in motion—people like Anne Bonny and Mary Read—were the raw materials of the literary imagination. Hannah Snell’s contemporary biographer made the connection when he insisted that his subject was “the real Pamella,” referring to Samuel Richardson’s famous novel. The often desperate activity of working-class women and men in the age of nascent capitalism thus helped to generate one of the world’s most important and durable literary forms, the novel, which indeed is inconceivable apart from it.46
Bonny and Read also affected another major area of literary endeavor: drama. It is widely known that John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera was one of eighteenth-century England’s most popular and successful plays. It is less widely known that in 1728–29 Gay wrote Polly: An Opera, being the Second Part of the Beggar’s Opera. The sequel’s obscurity was a matter of political repression, for it was censored by none other than Prime Minister Robert Walpole, who was less than happy that he had appeared in The Beggar’s Opera as Bob Booty. Disliking Gay’s effort to establish moral equivalence between highway robbers and the prime minister’s own circle in government and considering the new playa still-seditious continuation of the old, Walpole had Polly banned. But in so doing, he may have made Polly even more popular. Demand for the new play was clamorous; thousands of subscriptions brought Gay a handsome sum of money, though not nearly as much as would have been his had it not been for twenty-odd pirate printers and booksellers who produced and sold their own editions. Polly achieved a popular presence and visibility well before its first performance in 1777.47
The namesake of the play was the daughter of a Jonathan Wild–type character called Peachum. Polly came to the New World, the West Indies in particular, in search of her love, Macheath, the highwayman of The Beggar’s Opera, who had been transported for his crimes. Macheath, Polly discovered, had turned pirate and was disguised as Morano, a “Negro villain” and captain of a crew of freebooters.48 En route to America, Polly’s money was stolen, which forced her to indenture herself as a servant. She was bought by a Mrs. Trapes, who ran a house of prostitution, then sold by the “madame” to a wealthy sugar planter, Mr. Ducat. Polly escaped the situation by cross-dressing “in a man’s habit” and going to sea as a pirate in search of Macheath. She did it, she explained, “To protect me from the violences and insults to which my sex might have exposed me.”49
The very act of writing a play that featured women pirates only a few years after Anne Bonny and Mary Read had stood trial suggests that Gay knew of and drew on the adventures of the real women pirates. The likelihood is made even stronger by specific similarities between the play and the freebooting reality of the Caribbean earlier in the decade. Jenny Diver, a prostitute in The Beggar’s Opera and Macheath’s (Morano’s) “doxy” aboard the pirate ship, may have, in the new play, been modeled on Anne Bonny. Like Bonny, Jenny is the lover of the pirate captain; she also falls for another pirate, who turns out to be a woman in disguise, in this case the cross-dressed Polly rather than Mary Read. For her part, Polly resembles Mary Read in her modest, even “virtuous” sexual bearing.50
Bonny and Read may have influenced posterity in yet another, more indirect way, through an illustration by an unknown artist that appeared as the frontispiece of the Dutch translation of Captain Charles Johnson’s General History of the Pyrates, now called Historie der Engelsche Zee-Roovers. It featured a bare-breasted woman militant, armed with a sword and a torch, surging forward beneath the Jolly Roger, the international flag of piracy. In the background at the left hangs a gibbet with ten executed pirates dangling; at the right is a ship in flames. Trampled underfoot are an unidentifiable document, perhaps a map or a legal decree; a capsizing ship with a broken mainmast; a woman still clutching the scales of justice; and a man, possibly a soldier, who appears to have his hands bound behind his back. Hovering at the right is a mythical figure, perhaps Aeolus, Greek god of the winds, who adds his part to the tempestuous scene.51 Bringing up the rear of the chaos is a small sea monster, a figure commonly drawn by early modern mapmakers to adorn the aquatic parts of the globe.
Figure 9. An allegory of piracy (1725); Captain Charles Johnson, Historie der Engelsche Zee-Roovers (Amsterdam, 1725).
The illustration is an allegory of piracy, the central image of which is female, armed, violent, riotous, criminal, and destructive of property—in short, the very picture of anarchy.52
The characteristics of the allegory of piracy were equally characteristic of the lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who, not surprisingly, were featured prominently in the Historie der Engelsche Zee-Roovers, not only in its pages but in separate illustrations and even on the cover page, directly opposite the frontispiece, wher
e the book proudly advertised its account of their lives. It seems almost certain that these two real-life pirates, who lived, as their narrative claimed, by “Fire or Sword,” inspired the illustrator to depict insurgent piracy in the allegorical form of a militant, marauding woman holding fire in one hand and a sword in the other.
It is instructive to compare the work to a famous painting, Eugène Delacroix’s Liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty leading the people), for the similarities are striking.53 Compositionally the works are remarkably similar: a central female figure, armed, bare-breasted, and dressed in a Roman tunic, looks back as she propels herself forward, upward, over, and above a mass of bodies strewn below. The proletarian identity of each woman is indicated by the bulk, muscle, and obvious strength of her physique; Parisian critics in 1831 were scandalized by the “dirty” Liberty, whom they denounced as a whore, a fishwife, a part of the “rabble.”54 Moreover, flags and conflagrations help to frame each work: the Jolly Roger and a burning ship at the right give way to the French tricolor and a burning building in almost identical locations. An armed youth, a street urchin, stands in for the windmaker.55 Where the rotting corpses of pirates once hung now mass “the people.” Two soldiers, both apparently dead, lie in the forefront.
There are differences: Liberty now has a musket with bayonet rather than a sword and torch. She still leads but now takes her inspiration from the living rather than the dead. “The people” in arms have replaced “the people”—as a ship’s crew was commonly called in the eighteenth century—who are hanging by the neck in the Dutch illustration.56
More important, Delacroix has softened and idealized both the female body and face, replacing anger and anguish with a tranquil, if determined, solemnity. His critics notwithstanding, Delacroix has also turned a partly naked woman into a partly nude woman, exerting over the female body an aesthetic control that parallels the taming of the warrior woman in popular balladry. Liberty thus contains her contradictions: she is both a “dirty” revolutionary born of action and an otherworldly, idealized female subject combining a classical artistic inheritance and a new nineteenth-century definition of femininity.57
Figure 10. Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People (1830); the Louvre, Paris.
It cannot be proven definitively that Delacroix saw the earlier graphic and used it as a model. In 1824 the artist discontinued his journal, where he might have noted such an influence, and did not return to it until 1847. And in any case, both the Dutch and the French artist probably drew on classical depictions of goddesses such as Athena, Artemis, or Nike as they imagined their subjects.58 Regardless, there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence to suggest that the allegory of piracy may have influenced Delacroix’s greatest work.
First, it is well known that Delacroix drew on the experiences of real people in his rendition of Liberty Leading the People, including Marie Deschamps, who during the hottest of the July days seized the musket of a recently killed citizen and fired it against the Swiss guards. Another subject familiar to the artist was “a poor laundry-girl” known only as Anne-Charlotte D., who was said to have killed nine Swiss soldiers in avenging her brother’s death.59 These real women, like Anne Bonny and Mary Read, were bound to appeal to the romantic imagination.60
Second, Delacroix himself noted in his journal that he often studied engravings, woodcuts, and popular prints as he conceptualized his paintings and sought to solve compositional problems. By the time Delacroix composed his famous painting, in late 1830, at least twenty editions of A General History of the Pyrates had appeared, six (or more) of these in French and many containing the Dutch illustration. The majority of these editions, which, including the French, advertised the stories of Bonny and Read on their title pages, would have been available to the artist in Paris.61
Third, and most important, it can be established that piracy was on Delacroix’s mind at the very moment he was painting Liberty. The English romantic poet Lord Byron was, according to the art historian George Heard Hamilton, “an inexhaustible source of inspiration” for the painter. Delacroix engaged the work of Byron intensely during the 1820s, exhibiting three major paintings on subjects from Byron’s poetry in 1827 and executing several others on the Greek civil war, in which Byron ultimately lost his life. More crucially still, Delacroix was reading Byron’s poem “The Corsair”—about piracy—as he was painting Liberty. In 1831, at the very same Salon in which he exhibited his greatest painting, Delacroix also entered a watercolor based on Byron’s poem.62
The image of piracy (1725) preceded the image of liberty (1830) by more than a century. And yet it seems that the liberty seized by Anne Bonny and Mary Read—the liberty they found so briefly, so tantalizingly, beneath the Jolly Roger—took a strange, crooked path from the rough, rolling deck of a ship in the Caribbean to the polished, steady floor of an art salon in Paris. It was a case of liberty seized in action; of low culture affecting high culture; of New World struggles supplying and driving what once would have been seen as the genius and originality of European art and culture. It would be a fitting tribute to Bonny and Read if the example of these two women who seized liberty beneath the Jolly Roger in turn helped to inspire one of the most famous depictions of liberty the modern world has ever known.
7. “To Extirpate Them Out of the World”
ADDRESSING PIRATES WHO STOOD on the gallows of Boston in November 1717, Cotton Mather solemnly intoned: “All Nations agree to treat your Tribe, as the Common Enemies of Mankind, and [to] extirpate them out of the World.” Mather told a threefold truth. The ruling classes of his day, representing, as they claimed, “All Nations,” were in agreement about pirates; they did indeed regard them as hostes humani generis (the common enemies of mankind); and they would organize and carry out a campaign of extermination against them. They would, in short, produce a lurid and violent propaganda as part of the war against the pirates. They would make the pirate a villain on an international stage, not least because many of the people attending the drama of execution, as in Boston in 1717, did not share Mather’s judgment.1
Now that we have seen who the pirates were (poor, working seamen), how they organized themselves (in egalitarian and democratic ways), and how they represented themselves (as “honest men” seeking justice for the common sailor), let us explore these issues from the other side, as taken up by those who sought not to understand them on their own terms but to obliterate them. The campaign to “cleanse the seas” was undertaken and supported by royal officials, attorneys, merchants, publicists, clergymen, and writers who created, through proclamations, legal briefs, petitions, pamphlets, sermons, and newspaper articles, an image of the pirate that would legitimate his annihilation. The rhetorical, military, and legal campaign would, in the end, be successful. Piracy would come to an end by 1726.
Before we discuss the image of the pirate drawn by his enemies, let us survey the interested parties who sought the extermination and in whose name they claimed to speak. Piracy was, first and foremost, a crime against property, more specifically, in almost every instance, the property of merchants, who traded across vast distances in national, imperial, and international commerce. Judge Nicholas Trott of the South Carolina Court of Admiralty stated bluntly that “the Law of Nations never granted to [pirates] a power to change the Right of Property.” He was right. Pirates broke the law as they stole property, taking plunder in money and cargo, and as they destroyed property, throwing goods riotously into the sea, burning and sinking ships. They interfered with the very security of possessing property. These acts, according to the King’s attorney in Massachusetts, carried “Destruction to the utmost parts of our Territories.”2 Pirates attacked intercolonial trade—in New England, the mid-Atlantic region, the Chesapeake, the lower South, the West Indies—and they assailed strategic trading areas such as West Africa and Spanish America, thereby damaging the interests of not only British merchants but “Trade and Commerce between Nation and Nation.”3 Pirates were accounted enemies of each law-
abiding person, as stated by John Valentine as he prosecuted thirty-six pirates in Rhode Island in 1723: “This sort of Criminals are engag’d in a perpetual War with every Individual.” As a foe to all of His Majesty’s subjects, the pirate was someone with whom “no Faith, Promise, nor Oath is to be observed,” someone “every Man may lawfully destroy.” Ministers urged that children be protected from this disorderly round of life: they should be kept from going to sea.4
The pirate was an opponent of the government because, as one of the King’s men in court explained in 1717, “It is the Interest of the State that Shipping be improved.” In this logic, attacks on trade “may justly be accounted Treason,” as Sir Edward Coke had allowed in his seventeenth-century codification of English law. And of course no “wise or honest Men...who love their Country” would turn pirate, since maritime commerce had always produced the “Wealth, Strength, Reputation and Glory of the English Nation.” In 1719 proclamations were sent around the empire offering rewards to anyone willing to serve king and country by apprehending or killing pirates. Pirates were declared enemies to the Crown of Great Britain because their disorders were “in Contempt and Defiance of His Majesty’s good and wholesome Laws.” And in 1722 the King made the antinational character of piracy explicit by announcing that persons injured in any battle against pirates “shall be provided for as if they were actually in the Service of the Crown.”5
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