SYMHC Classics: Anne Bonny & Mary Read

This 2016 episode covers famed lady pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who have been 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 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Coming up on the show, we're going to
be talking about somebody who got a lot of discussion,
a lot of things written about him shortly after his
death or during his life, but some of that work
is often attributed to Daniel Defoe. We mentioned in this
upcoming episode that there are some other purportedly factual writings

(00:22):
that may have been Defoe's work, may or may not
have really been by de Foe are actually accurate, and
that is something that is part of today's Saturday classic
On and Body and Mary Read. This episode originally came
out on August Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in

(00:43):
History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and
welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Vie 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

(01:04):
who does I know? And so today we have the
much requested duo of and Bonnie and Mary Read, and
it's like, really a lot, a lot of requests. Most
of the pirates we have talked about on the show
have been captains of their own ships, or in the
case of Chungy South from the Sarah and Debilina years
a whole fleet of ships. As a side note, I

(01:27):
listened to the beginning of that podcast the other day.
I have listened to it before, but I was really
listening to the beginning beginning of it. And Sarah and
Doublina also mentioned that they also got a lot of
requests for and 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

(01:48):
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
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.

(02:13):
It is it possible that at about two o'clock yesterday afternoon,
I am Holly and said, I understand why no one
did this yet, uh, because it's weirdly vague. And we
are going to talk about why 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

(02:36):
quite famous. So we'll start with Mary Reid, who was
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, and
that sailor didn't return from a voyage, and Mary Reid's mother,
still living with her in laws, later became pregnant and

(02:58):
enough time had passed that her depart husband could not
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

(03:20):
leaving the young Mary with her late husband's mother. Disguised
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 this situation didn't
agree to take her off her mother's hands, but she
did offer them some money to help with expenses, which

(03:41):
meant that Mary had to continue to masquerade as her
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, decide did that she should continue
her life of disguise, and so Mary went to work

(04:04):
as a footboy. However, before long, Mary got tired of
that job and decided to go to 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,

(04:27):
she quit military life and for a while she abandoned
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

(04:48):
on the right side of the law until for unknown reasons,
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 j a ship, and that
woman was Anne Bonnie. As for Anne, Bonnie's early upbringing,
and Bonnie was reportedly born near Cork in Ireland, she

(05:10):
was also an illegitimate child, the illegitimate child of an attorney,
and that attorney is reported by some people to be
William Cormick, although this is really unsubstantiated. Bonnie's mother is
reported to have been one of the household maids in
this attorney's home. Also under the cold the category of
reportedly here is that her father eventually took Anne to

(05:34):
live with him, but disguised her as a boy, supposedly
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

(05:57):
so much uh draft egg and like shifted identities and
I want to see, yeah, I 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.

(06:19):
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 Ann's
mother died when Anne was thirteen. 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.

(06:44):
When Anne took her mother's place running the household, there
were rumors that she had an incredibly bad temper. One
of these rumors 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

(07:05):
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 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. Anne's father, frustrated by

(07:31):
her behavior and the impact that it was having on
his business, arranged a marriage for her, but instead she
got married to 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

(07:55):
well that Anne wanted to go to the Bahamas on
her own, so she hired a woman to tend to
be her mother's so 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

(08:16):
two began an affair. When John Bonnie found out about it,
Rackham offered to pay him to divorce her, but he
refused to grant that divorce. Ultimately, Anne abandoned her husband
and joined Rackham on 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

(08:36):
to talk about and Bonnie and Mary Reid's brief lives
with Calico Jack after we first pause and have a
word from one of our sponsors. By seventeen twenty, both

(08:58):
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,
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

(09:20):
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
and the rest of the naysayers aboard a small sloop Uh,
leaving the Brigantine under Rackham's command instead. On two different occasions,

(09:40):
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, 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

(10:02):
been threatened with whipping if they continued their affairs, so
they just left. On August seventeen twenty, Jack Rackham and
Bonnie and Mary Reid were all part of 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

(10:25):
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 take the
fish and 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

(10:47):
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 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

(11:08):
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 of course new
Bonnie was a woman because he was in relationship with her.
Still others claimed that they wore men's clothing, but still
were very obviously to any outside observer women. A General

(11:32):
History of Pirates seems to change its mind on this score,
Like within the same paragraph, I kept having to go
back and be like, no, 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,

(11:52):
stealing its cargo, which included fifty rolls of tobacco. The
next day, they captured and kept the British schooner Mary
and Sarah h. When they realized they didn't have enough
crew to manage three ships, 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

(12:14):
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 that at this point, we're
off the coast of Jamaica, and on September five he
had dispatched the privateer captain Jonathan Barnett to take care

(12:36):
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 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,

(12:59):
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, 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.

(13:20):
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, killing one of Rackham's crew
in the process. I was going to liken this to
like those projects that happened sometimes when you're in school

(13:44):
or at work with a team and you do all
the work, but you usually you don't kill your other
team members. Uh. Bonnie and Reid's attempt to hold off
Barnett's crew was unsuccessful. The William and the Mary and Sarah,
which they were still keeping as a prize, we're both captured.
Two frenchmen who had been forced into service testified against

(14:04):
them and were allowed to go. Trials for Rackham and
his crew began on November sixteenth, seventeen twenty, and they
were all found guilty and hanged. Rackham's last request was
to get to see a Bonnie one last time, but
she had no 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

(14:27):
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 to Rackham's crew and being convicted, were brought
up and asked if either of them had anything to say,

(14:47):
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 her upon the
court past sentence as in cases of piracy, but ordered
them back till a proper jury should be appointed to
inquire into the matter. So both women were spared execution

(15:11):
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
or possibly possibly due to complications of childbirth before being
released from prison. She's probably the same Mary Read who

(15:34):
was mentioned in a death record from April 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 did used for a lot of the
research we're going to talk about all of that. Of
a first, we will pause once again for a word
from one of our fantastic sponsors. So A General History

(16:09):
of the Pirates from their first rise and settlement in
the Island of Providence to the 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

(16:29):
out in seventy eight, and this book was hugely popular
in its day. There were four editions in print by
seventeen twenty six, and then 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

(16:52):
Robinson Crusoe and Maul Flanders fame. Uh. The first person
that made that connection was John Robert Moore into 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

(17:13):
no documentation of any Captain Charles Johnson. Yeah, a lot
of a lot of places just take completely for granted
that it was Daniel Dafoe who wrote it. But apparently
John Robert Moore's methodology was basically, hey, you know who's
writing this? Sounds like to me Daniel Dafoe. I bet

(17:35):
Daniel Dafoe wrote this like that. And there there's there's
more of a paper trail that says maybe it's a
Nathaniel mr or some other person than Daniel Dafoe, 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,

(17:55):
we can really just take for granted that at least
some of this book is embellished. Even so, 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, in addition to being like a

(18:16):
go to source that just is cited over and over,
it basically standardized a lot of the things that we
think of as the golden age of piracy. And it's
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

(18:39):
Calico Jack Rackham. Now, now that's a matter of accepted history,
even though we don't we don't know. Uh. 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

(19:01):
goes on to say, quote, it is certain we have
produced some particulars which were not so publicly known. 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,

(19:23):
they are not invented or contrived for that purpose. It
is a kind of reading this author is but little
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

(19:44):
this sounds made up, but it really happened. And then
once he actually gets to an Bonnie uh and Mary
reads part of the book which is within the Captain
to 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

(20:05):
be tempted to think the whole story is no better
than a novel or romance. But since it is supported
by 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 than
that there are such men in the world as Roberts

(20:27):
and Blackbeard who were pirates. So much insistence, like for real,
for real, I mean just I mean, I know it
sounds weird, but really this is weird. It's but it's real,
is basically, what are you saying? Yeah, this is just
a whole lot of reassurance that he's being truthful. Uh.

(20:49):
On top of that, the accounts of Bonnie and Read's
early lives are simultaneously incredibly vague and full of completely
unnecessary detail. There's very little in the 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

(21:10):
use to scare away the maid 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
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

(21:33):
gossipy titillation about Bonnie and Reid's time on the ship
together and their lives beforehand as adults. Uh. In this
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 Reid

(21:57):
joined the crew disguised as a man and then maintained
that disguise once a board. Then, according to this book,
and 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

(22:18):
come to a right understanding with her, and to the
great disappointment of an Bonnie, she let her know she
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,

(22:39):
you know, actually I can't because I'm also a woman.
And it's just it's all told in this very gossipy,
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,
what woman, And this whole bit, as Tracy said, it's

(23:02):
told with a lot of slyness and you know, nudge nudge,
wink wink, like we're all, oh, it's all very til eating. Yeah,
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

(23:25):
of this like gossipy tilation about and Bonnie and Mary
read was unique to their stories. And basically, yeah, I mean,
there's plenty of stuff that seems sensationalized and overly dramatized
in the other Pirates stories, but like and Bonnie and
Mary read are really a whole category apart in terms
of like sensational gossip. And on top of that, the

(23:46):
depictions of and Body and Mary Read shifted in subsequent
editions of the book. So in the first edition, this
the illustration of them you would probably think of as
more stereotypically masculin, and 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

(24:09):
a women's hairstyle at the time, and they have this
baggy clothing on, 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 dressed as men. And the Dutch
second edition, though, they're wearing open jackets that revealed their

(24:31):
bare chests, and it's unquestionable that number one, they are women,
and that number two there is some degree of naughtiness
in this whole affair, like it is definitely a that
like the kind of picture that you would see in
the textbook in seventh grade and giggle with your friends over.

(24:51):
And the text describing Bonnie and Read shifts as well
by seventeen sixty five read specifically refers to Bonnie as
her lover, whereas that was not the case in earlier additions.
The number and amorousness of and Bonnie's affairs also grows
in subsequent editions. So, long story short, and Bonnie and

(25:12):
Mary Reid were definitely real people who were definitely aboard
Calico Jack Rackham's ship. They definitely stood trial, they definitely
were 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

(25:32):
particular over time. In a way, it's kind of disappointing
because like they've become such like people have that they're
in the collective 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

(25:56):
about being on trial and being spared execution due to
pregnant see. And then 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,

(26:16):
and then a lot of it that's very clearly like
meant to titlate people while not being like explicit but
hinting at explicitness a lot by so much for joining

(26:39):
us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of
the archive, if you heard an email address or a
Facebook U r L or something similar over the course
of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current
email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com.
Our old health stuff works email address no longer works,
and you can find us all over social media at

(27:01):
missed in History and you can subscribe to our show
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(27:23):
favorite shows. M