18th-Century Female Pirates

Black Sails on the Horizon: Female Pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read

From “The Life of Anne Bonny”, A General History of the Pyrates (1724)

“…she became acquainted with Rackam the Pyrate, who making Courtship to her, soon found Means of withdrawing her Affections from her Husband, so that she consented to elope from him, and go to Sea with Rackam in Men’s Cloaths…”

“The day that Rackam was executed, by special Favour, he was admitted to see her; but all the Comfort she gave him, was, that she was sorry to see him there, but if he had fought like a Man, he need not have been hang’d like a Dog.”

The stories of Anne Bonny and Mary Read are fascinating and confusing, surprising and entertaining. They were printed in A General History of the Pyrates, now attributed to Daniel Defoe, which recounts numerous tales of piracy from the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-centuries, including the tale of the infamous Captain Teach, aka Blackbeard. The volume, available through Dover Thrift, numbers over 700 pages, and includes masses of information not just about various pirates, but also their trials, lists of vessels, maps of the Caribbean, and illustrations of many of the pirates profiled in its pages.

Among the list of pirates appear the names of female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, both of whom, according to their stories, were passed off as boys while still children, came from impoverished backgrounds, and entered into piracy for the love of men. They passed themselves off as men in order to maintain their gender a secret aboard ship and, according to the section on Mary Read, eventually the two women met aboard Captain Jack Rackham’s ship, leading to an interesting case of mistaken identity:

“Her [Mary Read’s] sex was not so much as suspected by any Person on board till Anne Bonny, who was not altogether so reserved in Point of Chastity, took a particular Liking to her; in short, Anne Bonny took her for a handsome young Fellow, and for some Reasons best known to herself, first discovered her Sex to Mary Read; Mary Read knowing what she would be at, and being very sensible of her own Incapacity that Way, was forced to come to a right Understanding with her, and so to the great Disappointment of Anne Bonny, she let her know she was a Woman also.”

The text goes on to mention how Rackham became jealous of Mary Read in her male persona, thinking that she/he was a threat to his relationship with Bonny. Bonny had to reveal that Read was also a woman so he wouldn’t “cut her new Lover’s Throat.”

The stories of the female pirates, as related in Defoe’s History, are less interested in recounting battles and fights than they are in detailing their cross-dressing as children (in the case of Anne Bonny) and various sexual liaisons the women had with men aboard ship (in the case of Mary Read). Nevertheless, as the quotations from Bonny’s history at the beginning of this post indicate, the women were thought to be remarkably vicious, strong-willed, and conniving, “pleading their bellies” once they were caught by the authorities to avoid hanging.

 

The illustration of Anne Bonny and Mary Read from the General History.

The Stars show Black Sails has mixed fact with fiction and created two characters out of these narratives for the show: Captain Jack Rackham (Toby Schmitz) and his cross-dressing consort Anne Bonny (Clara Paget). The costumers appear to have done their homework, as Bonny’s character appears in loose trousers and jacket, much like in the engraving of Anne Bonny and Mary Read included in the General History.

 

Paget and Schmitz as Bonny and Rackham on Black Sails.

From there, however, it seems that the television show has left the rest of their stories behind, and, as yet, the show does not have a Mary Read character. The character of Anne Bonny, though, seems just as vicious and violent as her literary predecessor and, as I gear up to watch season 2 (yes, I’m behind!), I hope her role will blossom even more.

The enduring appeal of these characters does not stop at their recreation on Black Sails, as I also discovered that Read, Bonny, and Rackham are also characters in the video game Assassin's Creed, which, judging from the Wiki description, also alludes to information from the General History. 

The stories of these women, whether wholly or partially fabricated, suggests new avenues of representations in the tired old pirate stories of men on ships, just as the story of Teresia Constantia Phillips suggests a new variation on the old theme of a woman caught in a bad marriage. 

Eighteenth-Century Women Writing About Women Writing

Our friend Aphra.

A couple of years ago I had the privilege to teach an upper-level English course at Stony Brook on a topic of my choice. Since the department was looking to run an upper-level course on poetry, I proposed (successfully) to teach a course on eighteenth-century women poets. It was an exhilarating experience in many ways, as the students were mostly unfamiliar with eighteenth-century literature or culture. Together we explored the fabulous voices of female poets starting with Aphra Behn and Anne Finch and ending with Joanna Baillie and Mary Robinson.

One thing that particularly struck me was how often women wrote about writing, specifically, about being female poets and the challenges therein.

Elizabeth Thomas’s poetry is filled with the anger and frustration of being told (apparently) many times over that poetry was not “fit for women,” as in her poem, “On Sir J---- S---- saying in a Sarcastic Manner, My Books would make me Mad. An Ode”:

Unhappy sex! how hard’s our fate,

by Custom’s tyranny confined

To foolish needlework and chat,

Or such like exercise as that,

Lady Mary Chudleigh

But still denied th’ improvement of our mind!

(1722)

In these lines, she reiterates, almost to the letter, the earlier complaints of Mary, Lady Chudleigh in “The Lady’s Defense”:

‘Tis hard we should be by the men despised,

Yet kept from knowing what would make us prized;

Debarred from knowledge, banished from the schools,

And with the utmost industry bred fools;

Laughed out of reason, jested out of sense,

And nothing left but native innocence;

Then told we are incapable of wit,

And only for the meanest drudgeries fit

(1701)

Sarah Egerton’s “The Emulation” (1703), Elizabeth Tollet’s “Hypatia” (1724), Mary Leapor’s “An Essay on Woman” [not an essay…a poem] (1746), and Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “The Rights of Woman” (c. 1795) elaborate similar themes of being withheld from knowledge and education all the while being told that, as women, they were silly, useless or incapable of bettering themselves.

Poems like Anne Finch’s “The Introduction” (1713?) and Esther Lewis’s “A Mirror for Detractors. Addressed to a Friend” (1748) more specifically discuss the problem of being a woman poet:

Anne Finch

Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,

Such an intruder on the rights of men,

Such a presumptuous creature, is esteemed,

The fault can by no virtue be redeemed

--From “The Introduction”

…when a woman dares indite,

And seek in print the public sight,

All tongues are presently in motion

About her person, mind, and portion;

And every blemish, every fault,

Unseen before, to light is brought

--From “A Mirror for Detractors”

For those of us who study the literary output of the ladies of the eighteenth century, such sentiments are probably expected from our literary foremothers. For my students, however, they were a wonderful illustration of the limited rights and position of women in the eighteenth century. Even for myself, the anguish, chagrin, frustration and outright anger of these women was palpable in these poems in a way that was immediate and unmediated, and I started using them in introductory women’s studies courses as a way of foregrounding later nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s right movements.

As usual, the past reasserts itself in the present, however, and I find these poems still illustrate the frustrations of women writers writing now. Countless articles have appeared lately about how women writers are constantly belittled and their output discounted by publishers and reviewers, as well as how women’s novels are often marketed with “softer” “more feminine” book covers. All this, despite the fact that women now edge out men in pursuit of bachelor’s degrees in the United Stated. We no longer lack the education, but we are still marginalized when it comes to reviews and marketing.

Similarly, the poetry of women is, in my experience, under-taught at the undergraduate level. When I mentioned to a colleague (a male Romanticist) that I was teaching a course on “eighteenth-century women poets,” he (half-) jokingly replied, “Oh, were there any?” If he looked at almost any general literary anthology, however, he might surmise that there certainly weren’t enough to make an entire course syllabus just on them alone.