Anne Bonny & Mary Read

Famed lady pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read are often requested as a topic by listeners. But telling their story requires navigating some rather suspect historical accounts.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode is brought to you by square Space. Start
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Squarespace Build it Beautiful. Welcome to Steph you missed in
history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and

(00:23):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Tray Wilson and I'm Holly Frying.
You know what we haven't talked about in a while?
What pirates? It has been a bit and who doesn't
story I know, And so today we have the much
requested duo of an Bonnie and Mary read, and it's like,
really a lot, a lot of requests. Most of the

(00:46):
pirates we have talked about on the show have been
captains of their own ships or, in the case of
Chungy Sou from the Sarah and Dublina Years, a whole
fleet of ships. As a side note, I listened to
the beginning of that podcast the other day. I have
listened to it before, but I was really listening to
the beginning the beginning of it, and Sarah and Bablina
also mentioned that they also got a lot of requests

(01:08):
for a Bonnie and Mary read, and so people have
been asking for that for quite a while. Uh. Bonnie
and Read though they were members of another pirate's crew,
and they were made famous by a book called A
General History of the Pirates from their first rise and
settlement of the island of Providence to the present time.
And that book is where most of the information on

(01:28):
their lives came from. So we're also going to talk
about that book itself in today's show. And so you're
probably going to notice when we're talking about the early
lives of these two women that we are being weirdly vague.
It is possible that at about two o'clock yesterday afternoon,

(01:50):
I am Holly and said, I understand why no one
did this yet, Uh, because it's weirdly fake. And we
are going to talk about I it is weirdly vague
in the third act of today's show when we talk
about this book that made and Bonnie and Mary Read
quite famous. So we'll start with Mary Reid, who was

(02:11):
most likely born in England, and although there's no historical
documentation to substantiate it, according to a General History of Pirates,
her mother married a sailor and had a son. That
sailor didn't return from a voyage and Mary Reid's mother,
still living with her in laws, later became pregnant and
enough time had passed that her departed husband could not

(02:32):
have been the father, so to avoid the stigma of
having a child out of wedlock, she went away to
the country. Before she was born, Mary's half brother died,
and then after her birth, Mary's mother stayed in the
country with her until she started to run out of money.
Then she went back to London with the hope of
leaving the young Mary with her late husband's mother. Disguised

(02:56):
as her late son. She was basically trying to pass
her daughter off as her now deceased son to her
mother in law. Mary's purported grandmother in the situation didn't
agree to take her off her mother's hands, but she
did offer them some money to help with expenses, which
meant that Mary had to continue to masquerade as her

(03:17):
own deceased half brother, and this went on until Mary's
grandmother died when Mary was about thirteen years old, and
her mother, who by this point had filled her in
about her actual parentage, decided that she should continue her
life of disguise, and so Mary went to work as
a footboy. However, before long, Mary got tired of that

(03:39):
job and decided to go see herself, hoping to win
a commission. That did not work out, though, so she
spent some time in a military regiment, still disguised as
a man, and there she met her future husband, who
was a fellow soldier who she quote allowed to discover
that she was really a woman. When they got married,
she quit military life even for a while she abandoned

(04:01):
her disguise. Her husband, however, died not long after they married,
and Mary Reid decided to head for the Caribbean, and
according again to the general history of pirates, Reid resumed
her disguise and fell in with another pirate crew first,
but the historical record seems to suggest that she stayed
on the right side of the law until, for unknown reasons,

(04:23):
she disguised herself as a man and joined the crew
of John Rackham, a k a. Calico Jack. And there
was another woman on Calico Jack's ship, and that woman
was Anne Bonnie. As for Anne Bonnie's early upbringing, and
Bonnie was reportedly born near Cork in Ireland, she was
also an illegitimate child, the illegitimate child of an attorney,

(04:46):
and that attorney is reported by some people to be
William Cormick, although this is really unsubstantiated. Bonnie's mother has
reported to have been one of the household maids in
this attorney's home. Also under the cow the category of
reportedly here is that her father eventually took Anne to
live with him, but disguised her as a boy, supposedly

(05:11):
a relative that he was training to be a clerk.
And he did this to avoid raising the suspicions of
his estranged wife, who knew that he had had an
affair with the maid, but did not know that that
affair had produced Anne. It's all very confusing. There's there's
so much drag and like shifted identities, and yeah, I

(05:39):
do want to clarify that for both of these women,
I mean, according to every historical account, these were disguises
and not expressions of their gender. Uh. This ruse, by
the way, did not work. His wife found out what
was going on, so Ann's father and and AND's mother
the maid relocated from Ireland to Charleston, South Carolina, where
they all lived until Anne's mother died when Anne was thirteen.

(06:03):
Thirteen seems to be the magic age to lose a
relative in this story, yeah, yeah, they are very similar.
According to general history of the Pirates. When Anne took
her mother's place running the household, there were rumors that
she had an incredibly bad temper. One of these rumors

(06:23):
was that she actually killed a serving maid with like
a table knife. Another rumor was that she had beaten
a man who tried to sexually assault her basically senseless.
It's possible that in this behavior and the habit that
she developed of carousing with pirates, that Anne was inspired
by Grace O'Malley, which is an Anglicized version of the
Irish name Grannemalia uh O'Malley, plundered off the coast of

(06:48):
Ireland in the sixteenth century and had a reputation for
being incredibly fierce. She also, in case you are wondering
or are about to write in, is already a frequently
requested podcast topic. As father, frustrated by her behavior and
the impact that it was having on his business, arranged
a marriage for her, but instead she got married to

(07:09):
a sailor named John Bonnie. In seventeen eighteen. They went
to the Bahamas, where John Bonnie started to work for
Governor Woods Rogers as an informant against pirates. Essentially, he
would turn pirates into the governor to get the reward money.
And there's another version of that story as well, that
Anne wanted to go to the Bahamas on her own,

(07:29):
so she hired a woman to pretend to be her
mother's who that she could book passage, and then she
met John Bonnie and married him after she was already
in the Bahamas. So two differing accounts regardless. At some
point during their time in the Bahamas, and Bonnie also
fell in with Calico Jack Rackham and the two began
an affair. When John Bonnie found out about it, Rackham

(07:51):
offered to pay him to divorce her, but he refused
to grant that divorce. Ultimately, Anne abandoned her husband and
joined Rackham his pirate ship, although she did leave it
temporarily to give birth to their child in Cuba, and
then she rejoined the ship later. And we're going to
talk about a Bonnie and Mary Reid's brief lives with
Calico Jack after we first paused and have a word

(08:13):
from one of our sponsors. By seventeen twenty, both and
Bonnie and Mary Read were part of John Rackham a
k a. Calico Jack Rackham's crew. As for Rackham, he
had served as quartermaster under another pirate named Charles Vain

(08:36):
aboard Vain's ship, the briganteam Uh. During this time of
the crew, the brigantine came across a French man of
war that Rackham and several of the rest of the
crew wanted to take over, but Vain refused. The members
of the crew, who rejected this decision from their captain
all rallied around Rackham. They deposed Vain, They put him

(08:58):
and the rest of the naysayers aboard us all Sloop,
leaving the Brigantine under Rackham's command instead. On two different
occasions after taking over the Brigantine, Jack Rackham actually gave
up piracy and took the King's pardon. He was also
briefly a privateer. However, he just kept returning to piracy,

(09:19):
and the last time he did it was because, purportedly,
it was discovered that Anne Bonnie was again pregnant with
his child while still married to John Bonnie, and they
had been threatened with whipping if they continued their affairs,
so they just left. On August of seventeen twenty, Jack
Rackham and Bonnie and Mary Reid were all part of

(09:39):
a party that stole a sloop called the William, which
belongs to a man named John Ham. Sadly, that is,
with only one m and not two. They took on
a crew of twelve and began sailing the William around
the Bahamas, plundering as they went. They mostly for a
while went after small fishing boats, and they would just

(10:01):
take the fish in the tackle and then be on
their way. Reid struck up a relationship with one of
the other pirates, although he is never named in any
of the the accounts. She was apparently fond enough of
him that when he was challenged to a duel by
another pirate, she challenged that pirate to her own duel
two hours before and killed him on the spot. Sources

(10:23):
disagree about whether Bonnie and Read maintained their disguises while
aboard rackham ship. In some versions they made no effort
to hide their gender, but they did don more masculine
clothing when they were raiding other ships, basically because it
was more practical. Others claimed that they steadfastly disguised themselves
until they were eventually bought brought to trial, even though Rackham,

(10:46):
of course new Bonnie was a woman because he was
in a relationship with her. Still, others claimed that they
wore men's clothing, but still were very obviously to any
outside observer women. A General History of pirate seems to
change its mind on the score, like within the same paragraph,
I kept having to go back and be like, no,

(11:08):
but it said, but that's that's not what it said
two sentences. On October nineteen, Rackham and crew captured a
British schooner called the Neptune, stealing its cargo, which included
fifty rolls of tobacco. The next day they captured and
kept the British schooner Mary and Sarah, and when they
realized they didn't have enough crew to manage three ships,

(11:31):
they let some of their prisoners go aboard the Neptune,
and at about the same time they also robbed a
canoe crewed by a woman named Dorothy Thomas, who rack'em
let go over Bonnie and reads objections that she might
report them to the authorities. That they didn't really need
to be worried about that, because the authorities already knew
Governor Governor Woods Rogers had heard about Rackham's piratical activities

(11:55):
that at this point, we're off the coast of Jamaica,
and on September five he had dispatched to the privateer
Captain Jonathan Barnett to take care of it. Bonnie and Read,
we're on deck when Barnett's ship found and approached them
on October of seventeen twenty. By this time, the crew,
for reasons that are not clear, had shrunk from twelve

(12:16):
people to seven, and most of the crew had spent
much of the night drinking with the crew of a
turtling boat that they had come across and invited aboard.
Rackham gave the order to flee, but ultimately they were overtaken,
so most of Rackham's crew were intoxicated when Barnett ordered
them to surrender. Bonnie and Read, however, refused to surrender,

(12:37):
and also, we're not intoxicated, and they were at least
not intoxicated enough to not fight. They fought back with
pistols and blades until they were captured. Read was purportedly
so incensed at the fact that the two of them
were basically the only ones offering any resistance that she
yelled below decks for the men to come up and fight,
and when no one answered, her. She fired into the hold,

(13:00):
killing one of Rackham's crew in the process. I was
gonna liken this to like those projects that happened sometimes
when you're in school or at work with a team
and you do all the work, but you usually you
don't kill your other team members. Uh. Bunny and Reed's
attempt to hold off Barnett's crew was unsuccessful. The William

(13:23):
and the Mary and Sarah, which they were still keeping
as a prize, were both captured. Two frenchmen who had
been forced into service testified against them and were allowed
to go. Trials for Rackham and his crew began on
November sixteenth of seventeen twenty, and they were all found
guilty and hanged. Rackham's last request was to get to
see an Bonnie one last time, but she had no

(13:45):
patience for him at all, purportedly saying quote, if you
had fought like a man, you need not have been
hanged like a dog. Bodies of Rackham and two of
his crew were then displayed in chains along the coast
as a warning to other pirates, and Bonnie and Mary
Reid were tried on November. According to the General History
of Pirates, quote, two other pirates were tried that belonged

(14:08):
to Rackham's crew and being convicted, were brought up and
asked if either of them had anything to say, why
sentence of death should not pass upon them in like
manner as had been done to all the rest, And
both of them pleaded their bellies, being quick with child,
and prayed that execution might be stayed, where upon the
court passed sentence as in cases of piracy, but ordered

(14:30):
them back till a proper jury should be appointed to
inquire into the matter. So both women were spared execution
because they were pregnant and then sent to prison, and
Bonnie apparently survived her time in prison, but it's really
unclear what happened her after that. She basically disappears from
the historical record. Mary Read died, possibly of a fever

(14:53):
or possibly possibly due to complications of childbirth before being
released from prison. She's probably lee the same Mary Read
who was mentioned in a death record from April twenty
eight of seventeen twenty one. So, uh, Next up, we're
going to talk about why is this episode so weirdly
vague and what is up with the book that Tracy

(15:14):
did used for a lot of the research. We're gonna
talk about all of that, but first we will pause
once again for a word from one of our fantastic sponsors.
So A General History of the Pirates from their first
rise and settlement in the Island of Providence to the

(15:35):
present time was published under the name of Captain Charles Johnson.
The addition that is cited most often is the second edition,
which is significantly expanded from the first edition. Both of
them were published in seventeen twenty four. A whole second
volume came out in seventeen twenty eight, and this book
was hugely popular in It's a day. There were four

(15:57):
editions in print by seventeen twenty six, and multiple versions
and multiple other languages as well. Historians generally agree that
Captain Charles Johnson is a pseudonym, and there's some debate
about who actually wrote this book. It's often attributed to
Daniel Dafoe of Robinson, Crusoe and Maul Flanders fame. Uh

(16:17):
The first person that made that connection was John Robert
Moore in two and it's common enough that a lot
of sources say it's by Daniel Dafoe without including any
qualifiers to that assertion. One other candidate is Nathaniel Missed,
who was a sailor before becoming a printer and a journalist,
and there's definitely no documentation of any captain Charles Johnson. Yeah,

(16:41):
a lot of a lot of places just take completely
for granted that it was Daniel Dafoe who wrote it.
But but apparently John Robert Moore's methodology was basically, hey,
you know who's writing this? Sounds like to me Daniel Dafoe.
I bet Daniel Dafoe wrote this like that, And there
there's there's more of a paper trail that says maybe

(17:01):
it's a Nathaniel mr or some other person than Daniel Defoe,
which seems to be mostly like a gut instinct. So,
I mean, based on all of this nebulosity about who
wrote it and the fact of the things that we've read,
I mean, we can really just take for granted that
at least some of this book is embellished. But even so,

(17:22):
it crops up again and again and again as source
material about lots of pirates who lived up through the
early eighteenth century, including some other previous subjects from our podcast,
including Blackbeard and Steve Bonnet. So uh, in addition to
being like a go to source that just is sited
over and over. It basically standardized a lot of the

(17:44):
things that we think of as the golden age of piracy,
and it sort of standardized the image of a lot
of these particular pirates, like Calico Jack Rackham got his
name in this book based on his garish clothing, which
might have actually been made up. But it's like how
everybody imagines Calico Jack Rackham. Now, now that's a matter
of accepted history, even though we don't we don't know. Uh.

(18:07):
And when it comes to Bonnie and Read specifically, Captain
Johnson spends a pretty good chunk of words reiterating that
the story that he is telling is absolutely true. In
the introduction, he takes time to mention their trials and
living eyewitnesses as additional proof that this really happened, and
then he goes on to say, quote, it is certain
we have produced some particulars which were not so publicly known.

(18:29):
The reason is we were more inquisitive into the circumstances
of their past lives than other people who had no
other design than that of gratifying their own private curiosity.
If there are some incidents and turns in their stories
which may give them a little the air of a novel.
They are not invented or contrived for that purpose. It
is a kind of reading this author is but little

(18:51):
acquainted with. But as he himself was exceedingly diverted with
them when they were related to him, he thought they
might have the same effect upon the reader. He's basically saying,
this is totally true. You guys. Yeah, I know this
sounds made up, but it really happened. And then once

(19:12):
he actually gets to Ann Bonnie uh and Mary Read's
part of the book, which is within the cap the
chapter that's on Calico Jack Rackham, he takes the time
to say it again. He says, quote, the odd incidents
of their rambling lives are such that some may be
tempted to think the whole story is no better than
a novel or romance. But since it is supported by

(19:32):
many thousand witnesses, I mean the people of Jamaica who
were present at their trials and heard the story of
their lives upon the first discovery of their sex, the
truth of it can be no more contested. Then that
there are such men in the world as Roberts and Blackbeard,
who were pirates. So much insistence like for real, for real,

(19:57):
I mean just I mean, I know it sounds weird,
but real, this is weird, it's but it's real. It's
basically what are you saying? Yeah, this is just a
whole lot of reassurance that he's being truthful. On top
of that, the accounts of Bonnie and Read's early lives
are simultaneously incredibly vague and full of completely unnecessary detail.

(20:21):
There's very little in the way of names and dates
and specific places, and yet the story of Anne Bonnie's
young life spends at least four pages on the saga
of three silver spoons that Ann's father tried to use
to scare away the maid's suitor, which instead revealed his
affair to his wife and landed the maid in jail.
And in addition to that whole spoon drama, there's also

(20:42):
a lot of gossipy aside in Bonnie's life story about
all of the drama between her mother and her father
and her father's wife with multiple extramarital affairs and even
an inheritance to argue over. There's also a lot of
gossipy titillation about Bonnie and Red's time on a ship
together and their lives beforehand as adults. Uh. In this

(21:05):
particular account, as told in the General History of the Pirates,
Rackham obviously knew that Anne Bonnie was a woman because
they were in a relationship together. But uh, Mary Read
joined the crew disguised as a man and then maintained
that disguise once aboard. Then, according to this book, and

(21:26):
Bonnie quote took a particular liking to her, and then
Quote first discovered her sex to Mary Read. Mary Read,
knowing that 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 to the
great disappointment of Anne Bonnie, she let her know she

(21:47):
was a woman also. So basically according to uh this book, uh,
and Bonnie was like, Hey, I'm actually a woman if
you want to get together, and Mary Reid was like, oh,
you know, actually I can't because I'm also a woman.
And it's just it's all told in this very gossipy,

(22:09):
kind of flirty, winky way. And Jack Rackham was apparently
incredibly jealous of Bonnie's attention to Read, at which point
Bonnie let him know that there was nothing to worry
about because Read was as we've just been saying, also
a woman, and this whole bit, as Tracy said, it's
told with a lot of slyness, and you know, nudge, nudge,
wink wink, like we're all, oh, it's all very titil eating. Yeah,

(22:33):
And then I'm gonna say I did not get to
read the whole entire book while preparing this thing, but
I did read the chapters on some of the other
pirates to see to see whether my suspicion that all
of this like gossipy tilation about and Bonnie and Mary
Read was unique to their stories. And basically, yeah, I mean,

(22:54):
there's plenty of stuff that seems sensationalized and overly dramatized
and the other pirates stories, but like and Bonnie Mary
Read are really a whole category apart in terms of
like sensational gossip. And on top of that, the depictions
of an Body and Mary Read shifted in subsequent editions

(23:14):
of the book, So in the first editions, the illustration
of them you would probably think of as more stereotypically masculine.
They're in men's clothing, they're holding weapons, they look fierce,
their hair is down and long. But that wouldn't have
necessarily meant that that, like that was a women's hairstyle
at the time, and they have this baggy clothing on,

(23:35):
so in looking at them, today's reader might not immediately
categorize them as any particular gender before actually looking at
the caption that spells out that these are women that
are addressed as men. Uh and the Dutch second edition though,
they're wearing open jackets that reveal their bare chests, and
it's unquestionable that number one they are women, and that

(23:59):
number two there is some degree of naughtiness in this
whole affair, like it is definitely a but like the
kind of picture that you would see in the textbook
in seventh grade and giggle with your friends over. And
the text describing Bonnie and Read shifts as well. By
seventeen sixty five, Read specifically refers to Bonnie as her lover,

(24:21):
whereas that was not the case in earlier editions. The
number and amorousness of and Bonnie's affairs also grows in
subsequent editions. So long story short, and Bonnie and Mary
Reid were definitely real people who were definitely aboard Calico
Jack Rackham's ship. They definitely stood trial. They definitely were

(24:42):
spared execution because they were each pregnant. But our conceptions
of them draw mostly from a really sensational problem riddled
book that got even more sensationalized about them in particular
over time. In a way, it's kind of disappointing because
like they've become like people have. They're in the collective

(25:03):
memory as like these two incredible fierce lady pirates who
fought bravely next to each other and like had all
these wild adventures. Uh. And in reality, the historical documentation
of them is a few sentences mostly about being on
trial and being spared execution due to pregnancy. And then

(25:24):
it's like a weird sexy romp in some like it's
just very I mean, number one, there's like a lot
of stuff in it that is that is very very gendered,
even by today's standards, very gendered. And then a lot
of it that's very clearly like meant to titlate people

(25:44):
while not being like explicit but hinting at explicitness a lot. Uh.
Uh do you want to explicitly read the listener mail there?
It's pre fun from David. Uh. David says theorist Tracy
and Holly, I must thank you first and foremost for

(26:06):
introducing me to how exciting and funny informative podcasts can be.
Prior to May, I had never so much as attempted
to listen, because I thought podcasts were for boring private
school kids and stuffy professors at institutions named after curmudgeing
ly did white men. Yes, it's true, I'd never even
listened to a podcast before yours, and I am so
tremendously grateful I fell upon it. After today's podcast aired,

(26:29):
I scrambled to see what increasingly fantastical and unusual topic
you had picked for this morning's musings on the train,
I must admit I was mildly shocked by the title
Marjarine versus Butter, and gazed confused at first, wincing at
my screen. I've never been so enticed by what became
the most hiilating journey about something I would otherwise consider

(26:51):
an uninteresting subject. I laughed at been a thirty times
out lad on my ride. While listening, I heard the
name love a bond tentometer, and, instead of doing what
I invariably do, pretend I know what someone else is
talking about, nod my head and make a vague reference
to some similar topics change the subject I googled to
my heart's content. Apparently, the tintometer was originally meant for

(27:12):
beer and to help brewers to make a better, more
consistent product. There is even a Love a Bond beer
colored database Love a Bond beer company called John Love
a Bond and sons and Joseph Love a Bond and author.
So I love beer. I love your podcast. That being said,
I asked in full earnest that you do a podcast
on the life of Joseph Joseph Love a Bond and

(27:35):
the Tintometer. Any man who has a beard like his
and a passion for beer like mine deserves a solid
thirty minute podcast from the audacious sirens of stuffy ms
in history, Stay well in podcast on Sincerely yours, David
uh Thank you so much, David uh So. I also
was incredibly amused that by the existence number one of

(27:57):
this tintometer number two, by the fact that the government
turned to it as like deciding what counted as yellow
butter and what didn't. Um I did not realize that
the person who apparently developed it such an interesting figure.
I don't know if he will make it into the
show in the near future, just because our list is
so long. But I have been for a long time

(28:19):
having in reserve that I wanted to do a podcast
on the history of beer, like kind of want to
like corral my friend Eric, who is a brewer, into
being on the show. I haven't actually asked him about
this in any concrete science that I think he and

(28:42):
his wife both listen and so they might be like, hey,
you know you have our numbers. You could just ask
us anyway. Uh yeah, So thank you so much again
for that letter. If you would like to write to us,
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(29:03):
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(29:25):
Pirates Work, which I wrote long ago during my time
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(29:46):
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