Women Sailors & Sailors' Women

by David Cordingly

  According to Captain Johnson’s account, Mary Read was born in England. Her mother had married a sailor and had a son, but the sailor disappeared, leaving her on her own. She was young and careless and found herself pregnant again. To conceal her shame, she left her husband’s relations and went to stay with friends in the country, where she gave birth to Mary Read. Soon after this, the son died and Mary decided to pass her daughter off as her son and to ask her wealthy mother-in-law for financial assistance. Mary was dressed as a boy, and the mother-in-law agreed to provide a crown a week toward the child’s maintenance. When the old woman died, Mary was thirteen and was sent out to work as a footboy for a French lady. However, Mary tired of this menial life and “growing bold and strong, and having also a roving mind” she went to Flanders and joined a foot regiment as a cadet. She fought in several engagements and then fell in love with a handsome young Flemish soldier in her regiment. They were sharing a tent, and in due course “she found a way of letting him discover her sex.” He was surprised and delighted at this revelation, but she refused to allow him to take further liberties unless he agreed to marry her. When the campaign was over they were duly married, obtained their discharge from the army, and set themselves up as proprietors of an eating house near Breda under the sign of the Three Horse Shoes.

  Unhappily, her husband soon died, and Mary decided to assume men’s clothing again and seek her fortune elsewhere. After a brief spell in another foot regiment, she boarded a ship and sailed to the West Indies. Her ship was captured by English pirates, and she was persuaded to join their crew. She later said that “the life of the pirate was what she always abhorred, and went into it only upon compulsion,” but evidence given by witnesses at her trial suggested she was as fierce and resolute as any of her fellow pirates. In September 1717, a proclamation was issued in the name of King George I declaring that any pirates who surrendered themselves by a certain date “should have his most gracious pardon.” 26 This was part of a concerted move by the British authorities to put an end to piracy in the West Indies. The crew of Mary Read’s ship decided to take advantage of the pardon and made their way to Nassau in the Bahamas. It was from this notorious pirate haven that Mary Read was to set out on her last voyage in the company of Anne Bonny.

  Anne Bonny was born near Cork, Ireland, and was the illegitimate daughter of a lawyer and his maidservant. As a result of a complex saga involving the theft of some silver spoons, the lawyer sleeping with his wife when he thought he was sleeping with the maid, and the maid being sent to prison, the lawyer and his wife had a quarrel and separated. The lawyer became so fond of his illegitimate daughter that he arranged for her to come to live with him. To prevent his wife and the townsfolk from suspecting anything, he dressed her in breeches as a boy and pretended that he was training her to be his clerk. His wife eventually found out, and the resulting scandal so affected the lawyer’s practice that he decided to go abroad. Taking Anne and the maid with him, he sailed to Carolina, where he became a successful merchant and purchased a plantation.

  Anne grew up to be a bold and headstrong young woman, and in 1718 she married a penniless sailor named James Bonny. This so upset her father that he threw her out of the house. Anne and her sailor husband made their way to the island of New Providence in the Bahamas, where they hoped to find employment. There Anne was courted by the pirate John Rackam, a somewhat reckless character whose colorful clothes had earned him the nickname of Calico Jack. Rackam, like the crew of Mary Read’s ship, had arrived in the Bahamas in 1719 in order to take advantage of the royal pardon extended to pirates. He persuaded Anne to leave her husband and go to sea with him. When she became pregnant, he took her to some friends in Cuba where she had their child. As soon as she had recovered, he sent for her and she rejoined his crew, dressed as usual in men’s clothes.

  It was around this time that the two women met on Rackam’s ship. They were both dressed as men, and Anne Bonny took such a liking to the handsome Mary Read that she let her know she was a woman. According to Johnson she was greatly disappointed when Mary let her know that she was a woman also. It has been suggested—and is perhaps true—that the two women subsequently enjoyed a lesbian affair. But the most surprising aspect of the matter was that their paths could have crossed at all. It is generally reckoned that there were between 2,000 and 3,000 pirates operating in the western Atlantic and among the hundreds of Caribbean islands around 1720. Mary Read and Anne Bonny are the only women who are known to have entered this male world disguised as men, and yet they both ended up on a small pirate ship with a crew of less than a dozen. We might be tempted to think that Captain Johnson was using some artistic license in his story, but his description of their time with Rackam is borne out by other contemporary documents. On September 5, 1720, for instance, Captain Woodes Rogers, the governor of the Bahamas, issued the following proclamation, which subsequently appeared in the Boston Gazette and elsewhere:

  Whereas John Rackum, George Featherstone, John Davis, Andrew Gibson, John Howell, Noah Patrick &c, and two Women, by name Ann Fulford alias Bonny, & Mary Read, did on the 22nd of August last combine together to enter on board, take, steal and run away with out of this Road of Providence, a Certain Sloop call’d the William, Burthen about 12 tons, mounted with 4 great Guns and 2 swivel ones, also Ammunition, Sails, Rigging, Anchor, Cables, and a Canoe owned and belonging to Capt. John Ham, and with the said Sloop did proceed to commit Robbery and Piracy . . . the said John Rackum and his said Company are hereby proclaimed Pirates and Enemies to the Crown of Great Britain, and are to be so treated and Deem’d by all his Majesty’s Subjects. 27

  In October 1720, The Boston Gazette reported that several pirates were operating on the coast of the Bahamas, including Rackam, who had with him twelve men and two women. The paper went on to say that the governor of the Bahamas had sent a sloop with a crew of forty-five men after them. The sloop failed to find Rackam and his crew, but thanks to details that came to light during the subsequent trial of the pirates, we are able to follow their movements in some detail from the time they stole the sloop William on August 22. On that day they sailed out of the sheltered anchorage at Nassau and headed northwest until they came to the snaking length of the low-lying island of Eleuthera. They failed to find any suitable victims along its sandy shores, but on September 1 they sighted the tiny settlement of wooden houses on Harbour Island. There they plundered seven local fishing boats of their fish and gear before heading south to escape any search parties sent out by Governor Woodes Rogers. They threaded their way through the dozens of islands and cays of the Bahamas toward the great island of Hispaniola. It took them a month of sailing with the tropical sun beating down on the hot deck of their sloop before they sighted its thickly wooded mountains. On October 1 they came across two British ships a mile or so offshore. The pirates fired their guns, and the two small merchant vessels heaved to and surrendered. We learn that the crew of the ships were put in fear of their lives and that the pirates proceeded to “steal, take, and carry away the two said merchant sloops, and the apparel and tackle of the same sloops to the value of one thousand pounds of current money of Jamaica.” 28

  From Hispaniola the pirates sailed through the Windward Passage and on to the north coast of Jamaica. There, on October 19, they came across a schooner lying in the beautiful bay of Port Maria. Thomas Spenlow, the owner of the vessel, and two other seamen later swore that they saw the two female pirates wearing men’s clothes and handing gunpowder to the men at the guns as they attacked his vessel. The pirates plundered the ship of fifty rolls of tobacco and nine bags of pimiento, kept Spenlow a prisoner for forty-eight hours, and then released him and his vessel. They then proceeded westward along the Jamaican coast until they came to Dry Harbor, where the sloop Mary and Sarah was lying at anchor. Rackam fired a gun at her, which prompted her captain, Thomas Dillon, and his men to pile into the ship’s boat and head for shore to get help. One of Rackam’s crew shouted that they were English pirates and
they had nothing to fear from them, whereupon Dillon and his men decided to return to their ship. Dillon noted that Anne Bonny had a gun in her hand and later recalled that the women “were both very profligate, cursing and swearing much, and very ready and willing to do anything on board.” 29 Once again the pirates ransacked the ship and moved on.

  The last recorded attack made by Rackam and his crew was on a large, provision-loaded dugout canoe, in which there was a local woman named Dorothy Spenlow. She later said that Mary Read and Anne Bonny were wearing men’s jackets and long trousers and had handkerchiefs tied around their heads. Each of them had a pistol and a cutlass in her hands and swore at the men that they must murder her. She said that she knew they were women because of the size of their breasts. Rackam’s men did not kill the woman but took all her provisions and sailed away.

  At Negril Bay, on the extreme western end of the island, the pirates’ raiding expedition came to an end. Word of their attacks had reached the governor, who dispatched two armed merchant sloops under the command of Captain Jonathan Barnet and Captain Bonnevie. Barnet was a tough, experienced seaman with a commission from the governor of Jamaica to capture pirates. 30 The two vessels reached Negril Point late in the afternoon and saw a heavily built sloop lying at anchor in a small cove ahead of them. Barnet suspected that this was the pirate ship they were looking for, as there was no good reason for a vessel to be anchored off this part of the island. The coast beyond the four-mile stretch of sandy beach was mostly swamp and a breeding ground for mosquitoes.

  The light was fading fast, but Barnet decided to investigate. As he changed course and headed inshore, the sloop weighed anchor and set sail. Barnet maintained a steady course and slowly closed the gap between them, but it was ten o’clock at night before he was close enough to hail the sloop. Across the water came the reply, “John Rackam from Cuba.”

  Barnet ordered him to strike immediately to the flag of the King of England. Rackam shouted back that he would strike no strikes and ordered his crew to fire a swivel gun at the approaching merchant ship. Barnet promptly gave the order to his men to fire a broadside from the carriage guns on his deck and followed this up with a volley of musket shot. The broadside carried away the boom of the pirate vessel and effectively disabled her. Several of the pirates called for quarter, indicating that they wanted to surrender. Barnet swung his vessel alongside and boarded the sloop. Mary Read and Anne Bonny were the only two members of the pirate crew to remain on deck and put up any resistance.

  The next day Barnet put in to a cove farther along the coast and delivered the pirates into the charge of Major Richard James, a local militia officer. The pirates were taken to Spanish Town jail to await trial. On November 17, 1720, an Admiralty Court, presided over by Sir Nicholas Lawes, the governor of Jamaica, condemned Calico Jack and the ten men in his crew to death. Anne Bonny was permitted to see Rackam on the day of his execution and is reputed to have told him that if he had fought like a man he would not have been hanged like a dog. The day after the death sentence had been passed, the men were hanged at Gallows Point, a windswept promontory on the narrow spit of land that leads out to Port Royal. The body of Calico Jack was bound in chains and suspended from a wooden gibbet on a small island at the entrance of Kingston Harbor as a warning to seafarers who might be tempted to take up piracy. Today the island is called Rackam Cay.

  The trial of the two women pirates took place on November 28. Exactly why they should have been tried separately is not made clear, because the charges they faced were exactly the same as the men’s. They were accused of piratically and feloniously attacking and plundering seven fishing boats at Harbor Island, of shooting at and taking two merchant ships off Hispaniola, and of attacking the sloops of Thomas Spenlow and Thomas Dillon and assaulting their crews. When the charges had been read, the women were asked whether they were guilty of the piracies, robberies, and felonies, and they both pleaded not guilty. Some of the people whose vessels had been attacked by Rackam and his crew were then called as prosecution witnesses, and they all swore that Mary Read and Anne Bonny had been active and willing participants in the piracies. The women could produce no witnesses in their defense, nor did they have any questions to ask, and so the verdict was inevitable. Sir Nicholas consulted the twelve commissioners who were sitting in judgment with him and then informed the women that the court had unanimously found them both guilty. He asked them whether there was any reason why the sentence of death should not be passed upon them, but neither of the women had anything to say. He therefore declared that they would be taken to the place of execution and hanged by the neck until they were dead.

  It was not until after this dreadful sentence had been passed that the women spoke up. The transcript of the trial notes that “the prisoners informed the court that they were both quick with child, and prayed that execution of sentence might be stayed. Whereupon the Court ordered that execution of the said sentence should be respited, and that an inspection should be made.” 31 When an examination was carried out, they were both found to be pregnant and therefore escaped the death penalty. Captain Johnson records that Mary Read contracted a violent fever soon after her trial and died in prison, and this is confirmed by the parish registers for the Jamaican district of St. Catharine, which indicate that she was buried on April 28, 1721. 32 There has been much speculation about the fate of Anne Bonny. There is some evidence to suggest that her father, William Cormac, persuaded the Jamaican authorities to release her from jail and took her back to Charleston, South Carolina, where she married a respectable local man named James Burleigh and had eight children by him. The same source indicates that her father also managed to locate the son she had by Rackam in Cuba. The boy was brought back to Charleston, adopted by Anne, and named John in memory of his pirate father. Anne is believed to have died in 1782 at the age of eighty-four. 33

  What is certain is that the authorities, who were engaged in a vigorous campaign against piracy in the West Indies, were able to report that one more pirate ship and her crew had been eliminated. Sir Nicholas Lawes wrote to London and reported the fate of Rackam and his men. He added that “the women, spinsters of Providence Island, were proved to have taken an active part in piracies, wearing men’s clothes, and armed, etc.” 34 On January 31, 1721, a ship arrived in New York with the news of Rackam’s capture and trial. A brief report appeared in The Boston Gazette a week or so later, which noted that he and ten of his men had been executed for piracy and hung up in chains, and that two women who were with them were likewise condemned but “pleaded their bellies.” 35

  It was not until Captain Johnson’s General History of . . . the Pyrates was published three years later that the full story came out. Evidently aware that female pirates were likely to interest the reading public, the publisher drew particular attention to their remarkable actions and adventures on the title page, and the only illustrations in the first edition were of Blackbeard, Bartholomew Roberts, and a fold-out picture of Anne Bonny and Mary Read. The two women are shown dressed in baggy sailors’ clothes, brandishing weapons and standing together on a tropical shore.

  6

  Wives in Warships

  IN OCTOBER 1811, The Boston Gazette reported that a five-month-old girl had been sent anonymously to the Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich with £50 in banknotes sewed up in her clothes. 1 Inquiries revealed that the child’s father was a seaman in a British man-of-war. He had been allowed to take his wife to sea with him, but sadly he had been killed in action. The day after his death, his wife gave birth to a baby girl between two guns and then died herself. The shipmates of the dead seaman took care of the baby. They fed her with crackers and water and took turns acting as nurses, moving her from hammock to hammock whenever they were called on deck. When the ship eventually returned to England, the sailors collected £50 from the ship’s company and arranged for the child and the money to be delivered to Greenwich. The child was reported to be remarkably healthy. She had been
baptized Sally Trunnion, in reference to her place of birth—trunnions being the term for the two lugs that support a gun barrel on a gun carriage.

  Another birth on a warship was reported by a young seaman with an American squadron in the Mediterranean in 1803. 2 Henry Wadsworth was a seventeen-year-old sailor in the American 38-gun frigate Chesapeake. He was so fond of writing that he had persuaded the ship’s carpenter to build him a writing desk, and he kept a journal of life on board the ship during her cruise. On February 21, 1803, the ship left Algiers, and from Wadsworth’s journal we learn that the following day Mrs. Low, the wife of James Low, captain of the forecastle, bore a son in the boatswain’s storeroom. A few days later the baby was baptized in the midshipmen’s mess. The christening was organized by a midshipman named Melancthon Taylor Woolsey, who became godfather to the child and provided refreshments of wine and fruit to celebrate the occasion. As Mrs. Low was feeling unwell, Mrs. Hays, the gunner’s wife, officiated. The divine service was led by the ship’s chaplain, the Reverend Alexander McFarlan. Wadsworth tells us that all was conducted with due decorum and decency and that this must have given great satisfaction to the parents. However, it failed to give any satisfaction to those ladies of the lower deck who were not invited to celebrate the christening of Melancthon Woolsey Low. We learn from Wadsworth that Mrs. Watson, the boatswain’s wife, Mrs. Myres, the carpenter’s lady, and Mrs. Crosby, the corporal’s wife, got drunk in their own quarters out of pure spite.

  These were not the only women on board the Chesapeake. The commander of the ship, Commodore Morris, had obtained permission from the secretary of the navy to bring his wife along with him, as well as their young son, Gerard, and the boy’s nurse. Wadsworth described Mrs. Morris in a letter to his girlfriend at home and said that she had all the virtues of the female sex. Her knowledge of geography and history was extensive, and she had a passion for reading. He noted, however, that “her person is not beautiful, or even handsome, but she looks very well in a veil.” Mrs. Morris did not number diplomacy among her accomplishments, and she became extremely unpopular among the officers in the squadron, who believed she had an undue influence over her husband. She was blamed for the fact that Morris allowed the squadron to spend far too much time in the fashionable ports of the Mediterranean so that she could pursue her social life. In due course, Morris was recalled to Washington, and in November 1803 he had to face a court of inquiry in which he was censured for the inactive and dilatory conduct of his squadron.