February 23, 2011 • 19 mins
When people think of pirates, their minds often turn to legendary brigands such as Bluebeard -- but piracy wasn't restricted to males. Join Molly and Cristen as they recount the fascinating adventures of genuine female pirates.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stump Mom Never told you?
From House top Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. This is Molly fan on Christmas Christman. It's
(00:20):
only February, but I think I've got our Halloween costumes
for next year in the bag. Excellent, especially if we're
going to go to the same party. I've got the
perfect duo costumes. What do I need to start looking
for pirate clothing? Um? Well, I don't you know, I
don't want to do some kind of salcle. No, we're
(00:41):
not going to be saucy pirate wenches, and we're gonna
take all those other pirate costumes out there up a
notch into historical territory because we're going to be the
famed pirates, the famed female pirates of the Golden Age
of piracy and Bonnie and Mary read Why don't I
feel like this is a little them in costume? Because
(01:05):
sometimes I can't help the Liz woman coming out of
here because spurts and spurts because it's just that good. Um.
But no, that was our topic of research this week,
and I mean if we're going to represent you know,
womanhood past President of Future Christen, we gotta we gotta
represent these pirately. We gotta dress up as cross dressing
pirate ladies from the golden age of piracy, precisely. All right,
(01:28):
So let's explain who these women are so that next
Halloween everyone's ready for us. So, yes, no matter what
party we go, do you when we walk in, people like,
oh my gosh, there Stam Body and Mary Read. So many,
so many facts I know about them. Um, it should
be said that when we started talking about researching female pirates,
you know, we kind of thought maybe there'd be a
big list of them. Yeah, but when you kind of
(01:50):
get down into it, these are the two that, you know,
just keep coming up in searches. Yeah, I mean everything
is and Bonny Mary Read and Bonny Mary, I mean,
can we get it? Surely they were the only gals
who hopped on pirate ships. That makes me think that
maybe our our hallowing constums should actually be the two
female pirates that weren't an Bonnie Mary taken at good
(02:13):
next level, all right, before we get that far, let's
talk about the stories of an Bonnie Mary, because they're
pretty pretty awesome ladies, I think, And they happen to
sail the same pirate ship. What a coincidence, which one
scholar says, maybe the only reason we know about them
is because on this pirate ship, if there were two
of them, it became safe to reveal their identity that
maybe it wouldn't have been if it had just been
(02:34):
one of them. Maybe they were, you know, just the
ones that got famous because the other pirates on their
ship were tried. Um, you know, there's there's some there's
some question of how the two most famous women pirates
ended up on the same ship. But so they did
on the ship of Calico Jack Rackham. Calico Jack. We
need a we need a guy to play Calico Jack. Chuck.
(02:56):
We can get Calico Jack, all right. So much of
what we know about these women comes from a book
that was published in seventeen and seventeen called A General
History of the Pirates, written by one Captain Charles Johnson.
And some people think that Captain Charles Johnson, fun fact,
was Daniel Dafoux, writer of Moll Flanders, because the stories
(03:18):
of Ann Bonnie Mary kind of echo some of the
character descriptions that you find in that book. But he
kind of lays out their lives and both Mary and
an uh, we're illegitimate children. Um, which one you want
to talk about first? Christ And as we do Mary
or and why don't we start out with a Bonnie
who was the illegitimate child of her wealthy lawyer father
(03:43):
and a maid in the house, and scandal erupts once
the wife figures out what's going on, and the father,
the maid and little baby and flee to the Carolina's.
And sometimes Anne was disguise as a child of the
relative rather than the child of this man and this
(04:03):
and this maid, because the father, as you said, was
very wealthy. Now that becomes key because as Anne gets older,
she turns her back on all this wealth and privilege
because she falls in love with the sailor James Bonnie.
The downfall of every young girl to fall in love
with the sailor, And so she follows him and begins
cross dressing in men's clothing so that she can be
(04:24):
on ships with him. But eventually he kind of proved
the dud, and so she leaves him to become Calico
Jack fellow pirate and lover lover. Now, right around that
same time when she's getting on the ship and getting
cozy with Calico Jack. She meets another lady in disguise
(04:44):
whose name is Mary Reid. And Mary Reid has a
much different story instead of Uh. In contrast, I should
say to and Bonnie's fall from wealth. Mary Reid grew
up the illegitimate daughter of a prostitute, and to her
mother would dress her as a boy. I guess, just
because it would be easier. Back back in the day.
(05:07):
It was something far saucier Kristen. Her husband had died
and she had had a baby by him, who was
a boy. So in order to get the husband's family
to pay out the money for the baby, she said, Oh,
here's that boy I had, uh, And it was little
little Mary dressed up as a boy. And according to
some legend, Mary didn't figure this cell until she was
(05:27):
pretty old. She was not a boy um because she
crossed dress for pretty much the entire time she grew up. Yeah,
And she went off to join the navy as a
man um and she was she fell in love with
a soldier and that's like I think the first time
that she revealed to someone that she was a female.
And a scholar named Joanna pastel. When she's recoining this,
(05:48):
Mary Reid has to do a lot of like big reveals.
Apparently she's a woman, and apparently the way that Mary
Reid would always reveal her womanhood was just to rip
open her shirt and say, here are my breasts. I
am a woman. Um And you just gotta imagine that
happening on a pirate ship. And it's kind of funny
that was never in any of the Giant Dept movies
I saw. Um So anyway, when when she's not revealing
(06:10):
her breast dramatically, she's a soldier. She is fighting and
one time she falls in love with this guy and
the guy matches to pick a fight with someone and
they're going to fight a duel, and Mary realizes, oh god,
this this guy is not going to handle himself in
a duel. So she goes off and picks a fight
with the same guy and arranges for her duel to
take place two hours earlier. She goes off to her duel,
(06:32):
kills her enemy and that way saves the guy's life,
but not before bearing her breast to demonstrate before she
kills him that he had just been beaten by a woman. Yeah,
she was like look at this suck up, which I
guess maybe gave him a nice final moment. Anyway, then
after all this this drama, she ends up on Calico
(06:53):
Jack's ship, and there's a little bit of a rumor
that maybe Anne fell in love with all Mary. Yeah,
there are some being undertones and certain retellings of the
story solved, of course, and that the theory is that
An didn't know that Mary was a woman. So therefore
Mary revealed herself as Mary because I guess what she did, folks,
pulled up her top and revealed her breath, which which
(07:16):
led Anne to do the same thing. And that's how
it became known on this ship that there were two
women aboard. Now, as you as you can guess, I mean,
is common knowledge. Pirate ships are sort of like a
floating man cave. I mean, it's it's a very testosterone
heavy situation. And by all accounts, Mary and Anne were
(07:36):
right in there with them doing all the heavy grunt
work that they thought ladies the time would be unable
to do. They got to go aboard ships that they conquered,
which was a very big honor for any pirate, and
it was accorded to these women. So uh, the scholar mentioned.
Joanna Pastel writes about how these women really did kind
of live outside of the normative female roles to become pirates,
(07:58):
but then they managed to sort of take back again
by you know, managing to maintain harmony on the ship
even when it was exposed that they were women. Yeah,
because pirate ships often had very strict rules of no
women aboard, and that's not just for people sailing on
the ship, but also for people they capture, um pirates
(08:19):
trying to bring lovers onto the ship. A lot of
times it was pretty much outlawed. Even though we often
associate piracy with raping and pillaging, right, they thought, you know,
it was in their by laws that you could not,
especially on this ship, that you could not have women
on there because it would destroy the peace. Men's ships
were these fraternities as a word that keeps coming up
that you know, they lived by these codes that were
(08:41):
ones that they had set rather than the strict rules
that they're you know, awful captainance set. And for someone
to break these rules was really you know, punishable by death.
So the fact that these women were exposed to managed
to survive despite the fact that it was no Girls
Allowed Club. Uh, pretty pretty interesting. And Bonnie and Reed
ended up outlasting all of the other sailors on Calico
(09:04):
Jack's ship because at one point, of course, the ship
is captured because like we mentioned, this is going on
during the Golden Age of piracy, which is from seventeen
thirteen to seventeen thirty. And a little fun historical fact, Uh,
the English really started going after these pirate ships at
the behest of slave traders because they were the ones
(09:27):
who were getting who are bearing the brunt of all
the pirate ships. The pirate ships would would come and
find them and then ransack all their stuff and screw
up their um their slave trade. So the slave traders
were basically lobbying the English Parliament to go out and
get these pirates. So this happens, and at one point
(09:48):
Calico Jack Jack's ship is overtaken. All the sailors are
drunk though, and they can't come out and defend their
pirate ship except for Bonnie and Read. Apparently they're the
only ones who aren't wasted, and so they yelled down
to their their fellow pirates and say, come up, your
(10:09):
cowards and fight like men, and and it does that
one of them shoot one of the one of their
fellow pirates because he's just being such a think So yeah,
I mean, they're just really having to take matters into
their own hands. But unfortunately get captured. They get captured,
so they go to trial, and the trial becomes kind
of a big deal because the country wants to make
an example of these pirates. So the pirates are growing
(10:31):
up one by one, including Calico Jack, and they're all
being sentenced to death. And so then it comes up
for old Mary Read and a Bonnie and they say
by what, by what words should you not be executed?
And they replied, my Lord, we plead our bellies. And
so then they just like this would be key of
the Halloween cost and Kristen by the way, then they
(10:52):
just you know, they show like, oh, we're pregnant, look
show off their baby bugs. I feel like at this
point Mary Read probably would have ripped a shirt open,
but probably not in a courtroom, but that seems like
something she would do. Um anyway, so they're like, yeah,
we're pregnant, and but lo and behold they were, Yeah,
we're pregnant, lo and behold they were. There's no I
guess Calico Jack maybe fathered one of them. There's really
(11:14):
no evidence as to who these which pirates were the
Lucky Fathers, um, but so they their their execution was postponed.
And I think my favorite factoid is that a Bonnie
got to see Calico Jack one last time and um,
the only thing she said to him, it was not
like some tearful goodbye. It was like, you know, we
(11:34):
wouldn't be in this situation if you were a better pirate. Well,
may I quote welly, of course I hope you will.
Had you fought like a man, you needn't have been
hanged like a dog. I mean, that's so burn Calico. Yeah,
and especially hearing that from a woman at the time.
That's why I think these these ladies become so iconic
(11:56):
is that they sort of, you know, outlasted the guys
and but at the same time they were able to
reclaim some femaleness by by being pregnant at the very
climactic moment, I mean, and constantly bearing their breasts. Yeah.
You have to wonder like if they if that ship
hadn't been caught and they had brought these parancs at term,
would they have been like these pirate moms like on
(12:18):
the ships, Like you don't get any indication that their
bellies that have slowed them down right, they were just
really a very convenient excuse. Now here's one thing we
got to talk about with this whole lady pirate history is,
of course An Bonnie and Mary Reid are the two
most prominent figures that we hear about. We also hear
about Grasa Malley, who was an Irish landowner who had
(12:41):
a fleet of ship. She wasn't technically a pirate, but
she's often lumped in with you know, women on the
seas around this time, we have Hannah Snell, who fought
with the English Army by cross dressing, and some other characters.
But over and over and over again, when we're looking
into this history of piracy, it's very Anglo centric. In fact,
(13:02):
I think the only one that we were able to
come across that wasn't you know, from this golden age
of piracy, that wasn't you know an English lady was
um a pirate from China named Chang So who married
a pirate captain named Chang and when he passed away,
she kind of worked her match to become the most
powerful pirates of the South China. Sea. Yeah. According to
(13:24):
an article from CNN, uh she controlled a fleet of
more than fifteen hundred ships and upwards of eighty thousand sailors,
and she was reputedly more strict than her husband was.
It was like once he died, she really tightened the reins,
probably because she was a woman in control of eighty
(13:46):
thousand men and had to kind of prove herself. And
so the code of context she wrote for her men
included beheading as payment for disobedience and deserters might lose
their ears. Pretty hard core. But what about female prisoners?
So Molly, this was kind of this was kind of interesting.
She she would return ugly women to shore free of charge,
(14:09):
whereas attractive women captives were auctioned off to the crew.
She was a piggy one, she was. She had some
weird carrots and sticks in her operation. And pirates are
aren't non existent these days. Of course, when we hear
about piracy on the seas, it's often related to Somalia.
(14:30):
But when it comes to women and pirates in the
situation with Somalia, we don't have there. There aren't the
and bodies and Mary reads that come up right, Molly,
and no, and you know, I really don't know if
history could handle another Mary read walking around flashing everybody.
So this we found this article about the smally pirate
situation by Shakira Deany, who writes about how smaller pirates
(14:53):
have affected the women of that area. UM. On the
one hand, the pirates do sometimes bring money into the
region that the women desperately need to care for their families. UM.
In some respects, they're really marriageable prospect because they do
have money. It's a very poor area. UM. But on
the other hand, Uh, Denie makes the point that if
(15:14):
we bring these women into the conversations about piracy that
they're not at the table for right now, that might
be the way to end the piracy. And that's something
we've talked about before Christen on the podcast, about bringing
women in the developing world to the table so that
they can talk about these issues that affect them. Because
Denie believes that because these men have wives, that that's
(15:36):
an influence that the world you know at large, is
not utilizing to stop the piracy. So. UM, it was
really interesting article about how you know, on one hand,
the piracy can benefit the smaller women. On the other hand,
you know, a lot of men get killed and those
men our husbands and fathers, and they that leaves the
women impoverished. So it was just an interesting reminder that, uh,
(15:57):
in this pirate situation, it does help to remember the women. Yeah,
because for piracy today, it certainly doesn't seem like there
are many women actually involved in um, you know, on
the ships, involved in the hand to hand combat and
things like that and holding people ransom, but they're still
having to deal with the repercussions of it. So maybe
(16:18):
working with them rather than the men might help things exactly. So,
if there are any tidbits about women in piracy, prominent
female pirates, we have failed to mention. I know we
talked a lot about Bonnie and Red, but because it
was Halloween research, Halloween research in February, you can never
call us underprepared. So send us an email mom Stuff
(16:42):
at how stuff works dot com. And I've got an
email here from Tori who writes, I am a twenty
five year old post menopausal female and so this is
about the podcast on hot Flashes, and Tory gives us
a little bit of the background as to why she
went through menopause, but what I really want to share
is how she dealt with hot flashes. She writes, I
(17:02):
usually have strong feelings of claustrophobic like panic before a
hot flash. I'd be sitting in seventeenth century French lit,
fighting strong or just to plea the room, and suddenly
I'd be distracted by an overwhelming and very embarrassing wave
of heat. My favorite trick was to look for something metal,
such as a bar, on the side of my desk,
and place the inside of my wrist against it. Usually
metal in an air conditioned space is fairly cool, and
(17:23):
the inside of the wrist is very sensitive. I love
this because it's a lot more discrete than an ice
pack or desperate removal of clothing, So thank you, toys.
I've got an email here in response to our podcast
on dreams, and this is from Christine, who writes, I'm
a male to female transsexual who started hormone replacement therapy
a little over a year ago. Was within six months
(17:44):
on testosterone blockers in estrogen. I noticed a few significant
changes in my dreams. For one, I now remember a
lot more of them. Before I remembered maybe a couple
of months, and now I recalled details from dreams several
nights a week now. Whether this is simply because I'm
remembering more of them or not of also had an
increase in the number of nightmares. These range from the mundane,
(18:04):
such just getting yelled at by my boss, to outlandish,
like defending myself during an alien invasion. I've never been
prone to dreaming me about money, violence, or sex, but
I can add that my dreams have become more structured
or before my dream would change settings or problems frequently.
Now they tend to play out. But again that might
just be because my memory of them has improved. Either way,
(18:25):
very interesting observation. So again, if you'd like to email
us our addressed as mom Stuff at how stuff works
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(18:47):
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(19:08):
on iTunes, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand
twelve camera. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stump Mom Never told you?
From House top Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. This is Molly fan on Christmas Christman. It's
(00:20):
only February, but I think I've got our Halloween costumes
for next year in the bag. Excellent, especially if we're
going to go to the same party. I've got the
perfect duo costumes. What do I need to start looking
for pirate clothing? Um? Well, I don't you know, I
don't want to do some kind of salcle. No, we're
(00:41):
not going to be saucy pirate wenches, and we're gonna
take all those other pirate costumes out there up a
notch into historical territory because we're going to be the
famed pirates, the famed female pirates of the Golden Age
of piracy and Bonnie and Mary read Why don't I
feel like this is a little them in costume? Because
(01:05):
sometimes I can't help the Liz woman coming out of
here because spurts and spurts because it's just that good. Um.
But no, that was our topic of research this week,
and I mean if we're going to represent you know,
womanhood past President of Future Christen, we gotta we gotta
represent these pirately. We gotta dress up as cross dressing
pirate ladies from the golden age of piracy, precisely. All right,
(01:28):
So let's explain who these women are so that next
Halloween everyone's ready for us. So, yes, no matter what
party we go, do you when we walk in, people like,
oh my gosh, there Stam Body and Mary Read. So many,
so many facts I know about them. Um, it should
be said that when we started talking about researching female pirates,
you know, we kind of thought maybe there'd be a
big list of them. Yeah, but when you kind of
(01:50):
get down into it, these are the two that, you know,
just keep coming up in searches. Yeah, I mean everything
is and Bonny Mary Read and Bonny Mary, I mean,
can we get it? Surely they were the only gals
who hopped on pirate ships. That makes me think that
maybe our our hallowing constums should actually be the two
female pirates that weren't an Bonnie Mary taken at good
(02:13):
next level, all right, before we get that far, let's
talk about the stories of an Bonnie Mary, because they're
pretty pretty awesome ladies, I think, And they happen to
sail the same pirate ship. What a coincidence, which one
scholar says, maybe the only reason we know about them
is because on this pirate ship, if there were two
of them, it became safe to reveal their identity that
maybe it wouldn't have been if it had just been
(02:34):
one of them. Maybe they were, you know, just the
ones that got famous because the other pirates on their
ship were tried. Um, you know, there's there's some there's
some question of how the two most famous women pirates
ended up on the same ship. But so they did
on the ship of Calico Jack Rackham. Calico Jack. We
need a we need a guy to play Calico Jack. Chuck.
(02:56):
We can get Calico Jack, all right. So much of
what we know about these women comes from a book
that was published in seventeen and seventeen called A General
History of the Pirates, written by one Captain Charles Johnson.
And some people think that Captain Charles Johnson, fun fact,
was Daniel Dafoux, writer of Moll Flanders, because the stories
(03:18):
of Ann Bonnie Mary kind of echo some of the
character descriptions that you find in that book. But he
kind of lays out their lives and both Mary and
an uh, we're illegitimate children. Um, which one you want
to talk about first? Christ And as we do Mary
or and why don't we start out with a Bonnie
who was the illegitimate child of her wealthy lawyer father
(03:43):
and a maid in the house, and scandal erupts once
the wife figures out what's going on, and the father,
the maid and little baby and flee to the Carolina's.
And sometimes Anne was disguise as a child of the
relative rather than the child of this man and this
(04:03):
and this maid, because the father, as you said, was
very wealthy. Now that becomes key because as Anne gets older,
she turns her back on all this wealth and privilege
because she falls in love with the sailor James Bonnie.
The downfall of every young girl to fall in love
with the sailor, And so she follows him and begins
cross dressing in men's clothing so that she can be
(04:24):
on ships with him. But eventually he kind of proved
the dud, and so she leaves him to become Calico
Jack fellow pirate and lover lover. Now, right around that
same time when she's getting on the ship and getting
cozy with Calico Jack. She meets another lady in disguise
(04:44):
whose name is Mary Reid. And Mary Reid has a
much different story instead of Uh. In contrast, I should
say to and Bonnie's fall from wealth. Mary Reid grew
up the illegitimate daughter of a prostitute, and to her
mother would dress her as a boy. I guess, just
because it would be easier. Back back in the day.
(05:07):
It was something far saucier Kristen. Her husband had died
and she had had a baby by him, who was
a boy. So in order to get the husband's family
to pay out the money for the baby, she said, Oh,
here's that boy I had, uh, And it was little
little Mary dressed up as a boy. And according to
some legend, Mary didn't figure this cell until she was
(05:27):
pretty old. She was not a boy um because she
crossed dress for pretty much the entire time she grew up. Yeah,
And she went off to join the navy as a
man um and she was she fell in love with
a soldier and that's like I think the first time
that she revealed to someone that she was a female.
And a scholar named Joanna pastel. When she's recoining this,
(05:48):
Mary Reid has to do a lot of like big reveals.
Apparently she's a woman, and apparently the way that Mary
Reid would always reveal her womanhood was just to rip
open her shirt and say, here are my breasts. I
am a woman. Um And you just gotta imagine that
happening on a pirate ship. And it's kind of funny
that was never in any of the Giant Dept movies
I saw. Um So anyway, when when she's not revealing
(06:10):
her breast dramatically, she's a soldier. She is fighting and
one time she falls in love with this guy and
the guy matches to pick a fight with someone and
they're going to fight a duel, and Mary realizes, oh god,
this this guy is not going to handle himself in
a duel. So she goes off and picks a fight
with the same guy and arranges for her duel to
take place two hours earlier. She goes off to her duel,
(06:32):
kills her enemy and that way saves the guy's life,
but not before bearing her breast to demonstrate before she
kills him that he had just been beaten by a woman. Yeah,
she was like look at this suck up, which I
guess maybe gave him a nice final moment. Anyway, then
after all this this drama, she ends up on Calico
(06:53):
Jack's ship, and there's a little bit of a rumor
that maybe Anne fell in love with all Mary. Yeah,
there are some being undertones and certain retellings of the
story solved, of course, and that the theory is that
An didn't know that Mary was a woman. So therefore
Mary revealed herself as Mary because I guess what she did, folks,
pulled up her top and revealed her breath, which which
(07:16):
led Anne to do the same thing. And that's how
it became known on this ship that there were two
women aboard. Now, as you as you can guess, I mean,
is common knowledge. Pirate ships are sort of like a
floating man cave. I mean, it's it's a very testosterone
heavy situation. And by all accounts, Mary and Anne were
(07:36):
right in there with them doing all the heavy grunt
work that they thought ladies the time would be unable
to do. They got to go aboard ships that they conquered,
which was a very big honor for any pirate, and
it was accorded to these women. So uh, the scholar mentioned.
Joanna Pastel writes about how these women really did kind
of live outside of the normative female roles to become pirates,
(07:58):
but then they managed to sort of take back again
by you know, managing to maintain harmony on the ship
even when it was exposed that they were women. Yeah,
because pirate ships often had very strict rules of no
women aboard, and that's not just for people sailing on
the ship, but also for people they capture, um pirates
(08:19):
trying to bring lovers onto the ship. A lot of
times it was pretty much outlawed. Even though we often
associate piracy with raping and pillaging, right, they thought, you know,
it was in their by laws that you could not,
especially on this ship, that you could not have women
on there because it would destroy the peace. Men's ships
were these fraternities as a word that keeps coming up
that you know, they lived by these codes that were
(08:41):
ones that they had set rather than the strict rules
that they're you know, awful captainance set. And for someone
to break these rules was really you know, punishable by death.
So the fact that these women were exposed to managed
to survive despite the fact that it was no Girls
Allowed Club. Uh, pretty pretty interesting. And Bonnie and Reed
ended up outlasting all of the other sailors on Calico
(09:04):
Jack's ship because at one point, of course, the ship
is captured because like we mentioned, this is going on
during the Golden Age of piracy, which is from seventeen
thirteen to seventeen thirty. And a little fun historical fact, Uh,
the English really started going after these pirate ships at
the behest of slave traders because they were the ones
(09:27):
who were getting who are bearing the brunt of all
the pirate ships. The pirate ships would would come and
find them and then ransack all their stuff and screw
up their um their slave trade. So the slave traders
were basically lobbying the English Parliament to go out and
get these pirates. So this happens, and at one point
(09:48):
Calico Jack Jack's ship is overtaken. All the sailors are
drunk though, and they can't come out and defend their
pirate ship except for Bonnie and Read. Apparently they're the
only ones who aren't wasted, and so they yelled down
to their their fellow pirates and say, come up, your
(10:09):
cowards and fight like men, and and it does that
one of them shoot one of the one of their
fellow pirates because he's just being such a think So yeah,
I mean, they're just really having to take matters into
their own hands. But unfortunately get captured. They get captured,
so they go to trial, and the trial becomes kind
of a big deal because the country wants to make
an example of these pirates. So the pirates are growing
(10:31):
up one by one, including Calico Jack, and they're all
being sentenced to death. And so then it comes up
for old Mary Read and a Bonnie and they say
by what, by what words should you not be executed?
And they replied, my Lord, we plead our bellies. And
so then they just like this would be key of
the Halloween cost and Kristen by the way, then they
(10:52):
just you know, they show like, oh, we're pregnant, look
show off their baby bugs. I feel like at this
point Mary Read probably would have ripped a shirt open,
but probably not in a courtroom, but that seems like
something she would do. Um anyway, so they're like, yeah,
we're pregnant, and but lo and behold they were, Yeah,
we're pregnant, lo and behold they were. There's no I
guess Calico Jack maybe fathered one of them. There's really
(11:14):
no evidence as to who these which pirates were the
Lucky Fathers, um, but so they their their execution was postponed.
And I think my favorite factoid is that a Bonnie
got to see Calico Jack one last time and um,
the only thing she said to him, it was not
like some tearful goodbye. It was like, you know, we
(11:34):
wouldn't be in this situation if you were a better pirate. Well,
may I quote welly, of course I hope you will.
Had you fought like a man, you needn't have been
hanged like a dog. I mean, that's so burn Calico. Yeah,
and especially hearing that from a woman at the time.
That's why I think these these ladies become so iconic
(11:56):
is that they sort of, you know, outlasted the guys
and but at the same time they were able to
reclaim some femaleness by by being pregnant at the very
climactic moment, I mean, and constantly bearing their breasts. Yeah.
You have to wonder like if they if that ship
hadn't been caught and they had brought these parancs at term,
would they have been like these pirate moms like on
(12:18):
the ships, Like you don't get any indication that their
bellies that have slowed them down right, they were just
really a very convenient excuse. Now here's one thing we
got to talk about with this whole lady pirate history is,
of course An Bonnie and Mary Reid are the two
most prominent figures that we hear about. We also hear
about Grasa Malley, who was an Irish landowner who had
(12:41):
a fleet of ship. She wasn't technically a pirate, but
she's often lumped in with you know, women on the
seas around this time, we have Hannah Snell, who fought
with the English Army by cross dressing, and some other characters.
But over and over and over again, when we're looking
into this history of piracy, it's very Anglo centric. In fact,
(13:02):
I think the only one that we were able to
come across that wasn't you know, from this golden age
of piracy, that wasn't you know an English lady was
um a pirate from China named Chang So who married
a pirate captain named Chang and when he passed away,
she kind of worked her match to become the most
powerful pirates of the South China. Sea. Yeah. According to
(13:24):
an article from CNN, uh she controlled a fleet of
more than fifteen hundred ships and upwards of eighty thousand sailors,
and she was reputedly more strict than her husband was.
It was like once he died, she really tightened the reins,
probably because she was a woman in control of eighty
(13:46):
thousand men and had to kind of prove herself. And
so the code of context she wrote for her men
included beheading as payment for disobedience and deserters might lose
their ears. Pretty hard core. But what about female prisoners?
So Molly, this was kind of this was kind of interesting.
She she would return ugly women to shore free of charge,
(14:09):
whereas attractive women captives were auctioned off to the crew.
She was a piggy one, she was. She had some
weird carrots and sticks in her operation. And pirates are
aren't non existent these days. Of course, when we hear
about piracy on the seas, it's often related to Somalia.
(14:30):
But when it comes to women and pirates in the
situation with Somalia, we don't have there. There aren't the
and bodies and Mary reads that come up right, Molly,
and no, and you know, I really don't know if
history could handle another Mary read walking around flashing everybody.
So this we found this article about the smally pirate
situation by Shakira Deany, who writes about how smaller pirates
(14:53):
have affected the women of that area. UM. On the
one hand, the pirates do sometimes bring money into the
region that the women desperately need to care for their families. UM.
In some respects, they're really marriageable prospect because they do
have money. It's a very poor area. UM. But on
the other hand, Uh, Denie makes the point that if
(15:14):
we bring these women into the conversations about piracy that
they're not at the table for right now, that might
be the way to end the piracy. And that's something
we've talked about before Christen on the podcast, about bringing
women in the developing world to the table so that
they can talk about these issues that affect them. Because
Denie believes that because these men have wives, that that's
(15:36):
an influence that the world you know at large, is
not utilizing to stop the piracy. So. UM, it was
really interesting article about how you know, on one hand,
the piracy can benefit the smaller women. On the other hand,
you know, a lot of men get killed and those
men our husbands and fathers, and they that leaves the
women impoverished. So it was just an interesting reminder that, uh,
(15:57):
in this pirate situation, it does help to remember the women. Yeah,
because for piracy today, it certainly doesn't seem like there
are many women actually involved in um, you know, on
the ships, involved in the hand to hand combat and
things like that and holding people ransom, but they're still
having to deal with the repercussions of it. So maybe
(16:18):
working with them rather than the men might help things exactly. So,
if there are any tidbits about women in piracy, prominent
female pirates, we have failed to mention. I know we
talked a lot about Bonnie and Red, but because it
was Halloween research, Halloween research in February, you can never
call us underprepared. So send us an email mom Stuff
(16:42):
at how stuff works dot com. And I've got an
email here from Tori who writes, I am a twenty
five year old post menopausal female and so this is
about the podcast on hot Flashes, and Tory gives us
a little bit of the background as to why she
went through menopause, but what I really want to share
is how she dealt with hot flashes. She writes, I
(17:02):
usually have strong feelings of claustrophobic like panic before a
hot flash. I'd be sitting in seventeenth century French lit,
fighting strong or just to plea the room, and suddenly
I'd be distracted by an overwhelming and very embarrassing wave
of heat. My favorite trick was to look for something metal,
such as a bar, on the side of my desk,
and place the inside of my wrist against it. Usually
metal in an air conditioned space is fairly cool, and
(17:23):
the inside of the wrist is very sensitive. I love
this because it's a lot more discrete than an ice
pack or desperate removal of clothing, So thank you, toys.
I've got an email here in response to our podcast
on dreams, and this is from Christine, who writes, I'm
a male to female transsexual who started hormone replacement therapy
a little over a year ago. Was within six months
(17:44):
on testosterone blockers in estrogen. I noticed a few significant
changes in my dreams. For one, I now remember a
lot more of them. Before I remembered maybe a couple
of months, and now I recalled details from dreams several
nights a week now. Whether this is simply because I'm
remembering more of them or not of also had an
increase in the number of nightmares. These range from the mundane,
(18:04):
such just getting yelled at by my boss, to outlandish,
like defending myself during an alien invasion. I've never been
prone to dreaming me about money, violence, or sex, but
I can add that my dreams have become more structured
or before my dream would change settings or problems frequently.
Now they tend to play out. But again that might
just be because my memory of them has improved. Either way,
(18:25):
very interesting observation. So again, if you'd like to email
us our addressed as mom Stuff at how stuff works
dot com. You should also follow us, I say, should
we would like you to how about that? We'd like
you to follow us on Twitter at mom Stuff Podcasts,
and you can also like us on Facebook, leave a
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(18:47):
read our blog during the week. It's stuff Mom Never
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and thousands of other topics. Visit how stuff works dot
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