Villains of All Nations

by Marcus Rediker

  26. Tryals of Bonnet, 8; Deposition of Edward North. [back]

  27. Snelgrave, New Account, 199; History of Pyrates, 138, 174; Morris, “Ghost of Captain Kidd,” 282. [back]

  28. Boston News-Letter, August 15, 1720; American Weekly Mercury, September 6, 1722. [back]

  29. Mr. Gale to Colonel Thomas Pitt, junr, November 4, 1718, CSPC, item 31 i, vol. 31 (1719–20), 10; Board of Trade to J. Methuen, September 3, 1716, CO 23/12; History of Pyrates, 315, 582; Downing, Compendious History, 98, 104–5; Uring, Voyages, 241; George Shelvocke, A Voyage round the World (London, 1726), 242; H.R. McIlwaine, ed., Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia (Richmond, 1928), 3:612; Dow and Edmonds, Pirates of New England, 341; Deposition of R. Lazenby, in “Episodes of Piracy,” by Hill, 60; “Voyage to Guinea, Antego, Bay of Campeachy, Cuba, Barbadoes, &c, 1714–1723,” Add. MS 39946, British Library; “Proceedings of the Court,” HCA1/99, f. 157; History of Pyrates, 640. [back]

  30. Trial of Thomas Davis (1717), in Privateering and Piracy, ed. Jameson, 308; Boston News-Letter, November 4, 1717. [back]

  31. Tryals of Bonnet, 45. [back]

  32. Deposition of Samuel Cooper, Mariner, May, 24, 1718, CSPC, item 551 i, vol. 30 (1717–18), 263; Tryals of Bonnet, 29, 50; History of Pyrates, 195. [back]

  33. Governor Hamilton to the Council of Trade and Plantations, October 3, 1720, CSPC, item 251, vol. 32 (1720–21), 165; American Weekly Mercury, October 27, 1720; Boston Gazette, October 24, 1720. [back]

  34. Alexander Spotswood to the Council of Trade and Plantations, May 31, 1721, CSPC, item 513, vol. 32 (1720–21), 328. [back]

  35. Council meeting of May 3, 1721, in Council of Colonial Virginia, ed. McIlwaine, 542; abstract of Alexander Spotswood to Board of Trade, June 11, 1722, CO 5/1370; Spotswood to Board of Trade, May 31, 1721, CO 5/1319; Mr. Urmstone to the Secretary, May 10, 1721, Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Archives, Manuscripts A/15, f. 44, Colonial Virginia Records Project, Virginia State Library, Richmond, Virginia. [back]

  36. Dow and Edmonds, Pirates of New England, 281–82; History of Pyrates, 355; American Weekly Mercury, May 21, 1724. [back]

  37. Charles Hope to Council of Trade, January 14, 1724, CO 37/11, f. 37. [back]

  38. Jameson, Privateering and Piracy, 346; Treasury warrant to Captain Knott, August 10, 1722, Treasury Papers (T) 52/32, Public Record Office, London. [back]

  39. John Barnard, Ashton’s Memorial: An History of the Strange Adventures, and Signal Deliverances of Mr. Philip Ashton (Boston, 1725), 2, 4; emphasis added. Perhaps this was what M.A.K. Halliday has called an “anti-language”. This is “the acting out of a distinct social structure [in speech]; and this social structure is, in turn, the bearer of an alternative social reality.” An “anti-language” exists in “the context of resocialization.” See his “Anti-Languages,” American Anthropologist 78 (1976): 572, 575. [back]

  40. William Smith, A New Voyage to Guinea (London, 1744), 42–43; Snelgrave, New Account, 217; Barnard, Ashton’s Memorial, 7; History of Pyrates, 312. See also Morris, “Ghost of Captain Kidd,” 286. [back]

  41. Anthropologist Raymond Firth argues that flags function as instruments of both power and sentiment, creating solidarity and symbolizing unity. See his Symbols: Public and Private (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973), 328, 339; S. Charles Hill, “Notes on Piracy in Eastern Waters,” Indian Antiquary 52 (1923): 147. For particular pirate crews known to have sailed under the Jolly Roger, see Boston Gazette, November 29, 1725 (Captain Lyne); Boston News-Letter, September 10, 1716 (Jennings? Leslie?), August 12, 1717 (Napin, Nichols), March 2, 1719 (Thompson), May 28, 1724 (Phillips), and June 5, 1721 (Rackam?); Jameson, ed., Privateering and Piracy, 317 (Roberts); Tryals of Sixteen Persons, 5 (Fly); Snelgrave, Account of the Slave Trade, 199 (Cocklyn, LaBouche, Davis); Trials of Eight Persons, 24 (Bellamy); Hughson, Carolina Pirates, 113 (Moody); Tryals of Bonnet, 44–45 (Bonnet, Teach, Richards); Dow and Edmonds, Pirates of New England, 208 (Harris), 213 (Low); Boyer, ed., Political State, 28:152 (Spriggs); Biddulph, Pirates of Malabar, 135 (Taylor); Donnan, ed., Documents of the Slave-Trade, 96 (England); and History of Pyrates, 240–41 (Skyrm), 67–68 (Martel), 144 (Vane), 371 (captain unknown), 628 (Macarty, Bunce), 299 (Worley). Royal officials affirmed and attempted to reroute the power of this symbolism by raising the Jolly Roger on the gallows when hanging pirates. See chapter 8. [back]

  42. Boyer, ed., Political State, 28:152; Snelgrave, Account of the Slave Trade, 236. Pirates also occasionally used red, or “bloody,” flags. For a more extended discussion of the Jolly Roger, see chapter 8. [back]

  43. Lieutenant Governor Hope to [Lord Carteret?], June 25, 1723, CSPC, item 603, vol. 33 (1722–23), 287; Governor John Hope to Council of Trade and Plantations, January 14, 1724, CO 37/11, f. 36. [back]

  44. Brock, ed., Letters of Spotswood, 2:319, 274; Gale to Pitt, November 4, 1718, CO 23/1, ff. 47–48; Tryals of Bonnet, 9. [back]

  45. Lieutenant General Mathew to Governor Hamilton, September 29, 1720, CO152/13, f. 23; Governor John Hope to Council of Trade and Plantations, January 14, 1724, CO 37/11, f. 37; Edward Vernon to Josiah Burchett, November 7, 1720, Edward Vernon Letter-Book, Add. MS 40812 (January–December 1720), ff. 96–97. [back]

  46. Hughson, Carolina Pirates, 112, 100–101; Barnaby Slush, The Navy Royal: or a Sea-Cook Turn’d Projector (London, 1709), viii. [back]

  47. History of Pyrates, 28, 43, 244, 159, 285, 628, 656, 660; Arthur L. Hayward, ed., Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals (London, 1735; reprint, New York: Dodd, Mead, 1927), 39; Rankin, Golden Age, 155; [Mather], Vial Poured Out, 47; Jameson, ed., Privateering and Piracy, 341; extract of letter from Lieutenant General Mathew to Governor Hamilton, September 29, 1720, CSPC, item 251 i, vol. 32 (1720–21), 167. [back]

  48. Bartholomew Roberts, the Pirate, to Lieutenant General Mathew, Royall Fortune, September 27, 1720, CSPC, item 251 v, vol. 32 (1720–21), 169. [back]

  49. Governor Hamilton to the Council of Trade and Plantations, October 3, 1720, CSPC, item 251, vol. 32 (1720–21), 165. [back]

  50. Boyer, ed., Political State, 28:153. For similar vows and actual attempts, see chapter 8. [back]

  Chapter 6: The Women Pirates: Anne Bonny and Mary Read

  1. Boston News-Letter December 19, 1720. On the trial, see The Tryals of Captain John Rackam and Other Pirates (Jamaica, 1721). [back]

  2. Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates, ed. Manuel Schonhorn (London, 1724, 1728; reprint, Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 152 (hereafter cited as History of Pyrates). [back]

  3. See the important work edited by Jo Stanley, Bold in Her Breeches: Women Pirates across the Ages (London: HarperCollins, 1995), and David Cordingly, Women Sailors and Sailors’ Women: An Untold Maritime History (New York: Random House, 2001). [back]

  4. The publishing history of History of Pyrates can be followed in A Bibliography of the Works of Captain Charles Johnson, by Philip Gosse (London: Dulau, 1927). [back]

  5. See “By his Excellency Woodes Rogers, Esq; Governour of New-Providence, &c. A Proclamation,” Boston Gazette, October 10, 1720; Tryals of Captain John Rackam, 16–19; Governor Nicholas Lawes to Council of Trade and Plantations, June 12, 1721, in Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1574–1739, CD-ROM, consultant editors Karen Ordahl Kupperman, John C. Appleby, and Mandy Banton (London: Routledge, published in association with the Public Record Office, 2000), item 523, vol. 32 (1720–21), 335 (italics in original); American Weekly Mercury, January 31, 1721; Boston Gazette, February 6, 1721; Boston News-Letter, February 13, 1721. [back]

  6. It is possible that Captain Johnson used this pamphlet, as he did others, in preparing his text. See Schonhorn’s commentary in History of Pyrates, 670. [back]

  7. Tryals of Captain John Rackam, 16. [back]

  8. Linda Grant Depauw notes that women frequently worked in artillery units during the American Revolution. See her “Women in Combat: The Revolutionary War Experience,”
Armed Forces and Society 7 (1981): 214–17. [back]

  9. Tryals of Captain John Rackam, 18. [back]

  10. The narratives are in almost all respects plausible. Literary convention of the day played a part in constructing the narratives, to be sure, as in the invocation of the conflict between Mars and Venus in the life of Mary Read. [back]

  11. Linda Grant Depauw, Seafaring Women (Boston: Houghton Mi‰in, 1982), 18, 71. Seafaring was only one of many lines of work formally to exclude women, for the sexual division of labor was clearly established and indeed growing in the eighteenth century, even if not yet as severe in some respects as it would become. Medieval guilds and the apprenticeship system had long before segregated the majority of crafts by sex. See the excellent work by Bridget Hill, Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), especially her comments at 49, 260. [back]

  12. Dianne Dugaw, ed., The Female Soldier: Or, the Surprising Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell (London, 1750; reprint, Los Angeles: Augustan Reprint Society, 1989), v. Linda Grant Depauw has pointed out that during the American Revolution “tens of thousands of women were involved in active combat,” a “few hundred” of these—like Deborah Sampson, Sally St. Clair, Margaret Corbin, and a woman known only as “Samuel Gay”—fighting in uniform with the Continental line. See her “Women in Combat,” 209. [back]

  13. “Female Warriors,” originally published in the British Magazine, was reprinted as an “unacknowledged essay” in The Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Peter Cunningham (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1881), 3:316–19. [back]

  14. Historians have only recently begun to study the process by which seafaring became a masculine activity. See Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling, eds., Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). [back]

  15. Rudolf M. Dekker and Lotte C. van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe (London: Macmillan, 1989), 80, 81; Julia Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in the Pursuit of Life, Liberty, and Happiness (London: Pandora, 1989), 51, 53, 78. Maritime employers probably felt about women sailors the way employers of indentured labor felt about the ten thousand or so women who were transported as felons to Britain’s American colonies between 1718 and 1775; they considered these women less skilled, less capable of heavy physical labor, and more likely to lose labor time to pregnancy. See A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 48–50, 89. [back]

  16. Arthur N. Gilbert, “Buggery and the British Navy, 1700–1861,” Journal of Social History 10 (1976): 87–88. [back]

  17. John Flavel, A Pathetical and Serious Disswassive ... (Boston, 1725), 134; Depauw, Seafaring Women, 162, 184–85. The women who regularly came aboard were passengers and increasingly the wives of officers, the great majority of whom were separated from the crew by chasms of gender and class. The trend of captains’ wives accompanying them to sea reached a peak in the nineteenth century and declined in the twentieth. [back]

  18. The fear of female sexuality probably drew on an older superstition about the magical, spiritual, and supernatural powers of women that arose during the terrifying early days of seafaring. Linda Grant Depauw maintains that it is a myth and a shoreside invention that women were regarded as bad luck at sea, having little or nothing to do with the actual beliefs of seamen. But her argument is contradicted by too much evidence (some of it her own) to be persuasive. See her Seafaring Women, 15–18. [back]

  19. Clive Senior, A Nation of Pirates: English Piracy in Its Heyday (London: David & Charles Abbott, 1976), 39. [back]

  20. History of Pyrates, 212, 343; William Snelgrave, A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea and the Slave Trade (London, 1734; reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1971), 256–57. [back]

  21. Roberts and his crew may have known—and disapproved—of Bonny and Read. Another of their articles of agreement stated: “If any Man were found seducing any of the [female] Sex, and carry’d her to Sea, disguised, he was to suffer Death.” See History of Pyrates, 212. [back]

  22. Tryals of Captain John Rackam, 18. [back]

  23. “At a Court held at Williamsburg” (1727), HCA 1/99, ff. 2–8. Harley’s husband, Thomas, was also involved in the piracy but somehow eluded arrest. For information on Thomas and Mary Harley (or Harvey), identified as husband and wife, see Peter Wilson Coldham, English Convicts in America, vol. 1: Middlesex, 1617–1775 (New Orleans: Polyanthos, 1974), 123. Mary Harley (or Harvey) was transported to the colonies in April 1725. Thomas was sentenced in October and transported in November of the same year. The leader of the gang, John Vidal, requested and was granted the King’s mercy, receiving pardon for his capital crime in September 1727. See H.R. McIlwaine, Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1930), 4:149, 150. [back]

  24. “Proceedings of the Court of Admiralty [in Virginia]” (1729), HCA 1/99. See also Coldham, English Convicts in America, 67 (Crichett) and 290 (Williams). No record exists to show whether the hangings took place. [back]

  25. By limiting the role of women aboard their ships, pirates may have made it more difficult to reproduce themselves as a community and hence easier for the state to wage its deadly assault on them. [back]

  26. Julia Wheelwright writes: “Women who enlisted as soldiers and sailors were most often from the labouring classes where they were used to hard, physical work. They came from communities where the women were confident of their strength as they worked side by side with men in the fields” or other areas. See her Amazons and Military Maids, 42, and Dekker and van de Pol, Tradition of Female Transvestism, 2. [back]

  27. Based on 119 instances of cross-dressing, which were found in the archives of the Dutch East India Company, Rudolf M. Dekker and Lotte C. van de Pol have concluded: “Throughout the early modern era passing oneself off as a man was a real and viable option for women who had fallen into bad times and were struggling to overcome their difficult circumstances.” See their Tradition of Female Transvestism, 1–2 (quotation), 11, 13, 42. [back]

  28. See Anne Chambers, Granuaile: The Life and Time of Grace O’Malley, c. 1530–1603 (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1983); Sydney is quoted at 85. See also Depauw, Seafaring Women, 24–25. Read, who kept an inn at Breda, in turn may have influenced the Netherlands’ most famous female cross-dresser, Maria van Antwerpen. See Dekker and van de Pol, Tradition of Female Transvestism, 40. [back]

  29. James Caulfield, Portraits, Memoirs, and Characters of Remarkable Persons from the Revolution in 1688 to the End of the Reign of George II (London: T.H. Whitely, 1820), 2:43–51. [back]

  30. Ibid., 4:111, 112. [back]

  31. Dugaw, ed., Female Soldier, vi, 1, 5, 6, 17, 19, 22–23, 39, 41. Hannah Snell’s story was often told in celebration of the British nation, emphasizing the patriotism of her military service. The stories of Bonny and Read admitted no such emphasis, for the inescapable fact remained that they attacked British ships and British commerce, refusing the logic of nationalism in their depredations. [back]

  32. Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 20. [back]

  33. Ibid., 1, 48. [back]

  34. Ibid., 124, 131, 122 (quotation). Dugaw’s conclusion about the positive popular reaction to women warriors appears to be at odds with that of Rudolf M. Dekker and Lotte C. van de Pol, but this may be a matter of a difference in responses in England and the Netherlands. See Dekker and van de Pol, Tradition of Female Transvestism, 97–98. [back]

  35. Bonny’s and Read’s cross-dressing and going to sea should be seen in the broader context that Peter Linebaugh suggested: “I think that to the many acts of survival and getting by, we should add the power of seeming to be what you are not as among the characteristics of the thick, scarred, and calloused hide of the English proletariat.” See his “Al
l the Atlantic Mountains Shook,” Labour/Le Travail 10 (1982): 99. [back]

  36. In “Women in Combat” (223), Depauw argues that in the eighteenth century “engaging in hand-to-hand combat was not considered unfeminine behavior.” [back]

  37. Tryals of Captain John Rackam, 16, 18. [back]

  38. History of Pyrates, 151; Tryals of Captain John Rackam, 11; Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, and E.P. Thompson, eds., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Pantheon, 1975); E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975); Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). [back]

  39. History of Pyrates, 597. [back]

  40. John Gillis, For Better, for Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 13, 14, 18, 37, 84, 85, 99 (quotation); anonymous letter from South Carolina, August 1716, Colonial Office Papers (CO) 5/382, f. 47 (quotation), Public Record Office, London. Richard Turnley, who not only refused to witness the wife sale but informed Governor Rogers, became an immediate object of revenge. With “many bitter Oaths and Imprecations,” Bonny and Rackam swore that if they had been able to find him (and they went in search of him), they would “have whipp’d him to Death.” See History of Pyrates, 623, 626. The narrative also suggests that this particular wife sale was initiated not by the husband, as was customary, but by Bonny herself. On wife sales, see E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin Press, 1991) chap. 7; Samuel Pyeatt Menafee, Wives for Sale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); and Hill, Women, Work, and Sexual Politics, 216. [back]