Kingston by Starlight

by Christopher John Farley

  Whisper to the flashing water your real name, write your signature in the sand, and shout your identity to the sky until the answer returns to you in thunder. The whole world conspires to tell us who we are, every nation assaults us with amnesia, and so we must do those things that will never be forgotten if we are to preserve our souls. Did I do wrong? Yes, but tho’ blood stains, it fades and sometimes washes off. Could I have chosen another path than the one I took? Ahhh— as a mariner I have learned, over these long years, to take whatever wind blows, and then bend it to one’s will. By my faith— we steer by the stars, they do not steer us! The end comes to all of us whether we be governors or sailors, harlots or craftsmen, scoundrels or monks. But the end comes quicker to those who do not live their lives as they choose. If your life is not your own then in what way is it living?

  Ah, my darling, my loved one, my voyage is far from finished! Wave to me from the farthest shore, for I have pulled up anchor and I sail again. I bequeath my body to the beach for the tide to take. Read is at my side, and we are young, and the sheets are full of wind. I taste sea-salt in my mouth and it is as intoxicating as Jamaican rum. The water below, the swift warm current of the Caribbean, is as clear as tears, the kind happily shed after a healthy laugh or a loved one’s return. Read claps me on the shoulder and starts to sing, and, smiling, I lift my cutlass to the sky. All ships in sight will quaver at the fear of our coming!

  Together, we raise the Black Flag.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The main characters in this novel— Bonn, Read, and Calico— are real people. Their trial, held in 1720, was one of the most infamous events in the history of the West Indies, drawing attention in newspapers from Boston to London, and inspiring plays and ballads. The surprising ending to the trial is also a matter of record. For the most part, the public has forgotten their story, but their exploits are still celebrated in museums in the Bahamas and Jamaica, and in historical tomes about the history of pyracy and female mariners. As a native of Jamaica, I first heard bits of this story when I was a child.

  The many period works I’m indebted to include: A Cruising Voyage Around the World by Woodes Rogers, A Trip to Jamaica (1700) by Edward Ward, A Discourse of the State of Health in the Island of Jamaica by Thomas Trapham, A Voyage to the Islands Madeira, Barbados and Jamaica by Sir Hans Sloane, The History of the Isle of Providence by John Oldmixon, A New Voyage Round the World by William Dampier, The Buccaneers of America by A. O. Exquemelin, The Pirates Own Book by the Marine Research Society, Gems of the Cork Poets by various authors, The History of Jamaica by Edward Long, The Tryals of Captain John Rackam and Other Pirates (1721), printed by Robert Baldwin, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates by Captain Johnson, and Daniel Defoe’s novels A Journal of the Plague Year and Moll Flanders.

  Contemporary books I found useful include: Life Among the Pirates by David Cordingly; Pirate Utopias by Peter Lamborn Wilson; Seamanship in the Age of Sail by John Harland; Boarders Away by William Gilkerson; Port Royal and History of Jamaica by Clinton V. Black; Buccaneer Harbor by Peter Briggs; A Short History of Kingston by H. P. Jacobs; The Capitals of Jamaica, edited by Adolphe Roberts; Port Royal, Jamaica by Michael Pawson and David Buisseret; Black Roadways by Martha Warren Beckwith; Historic Nassau by Gail Saunders and Donald Cartwright; The Diligent by Robert Harms; Irish Cities, edited by Howard B. Clarke; Discovering Cork by Daphne D. C. Pochin Mould; A Dictionary of Cork Slang by Sean Beecher; Atlantean by Bob Quinn; The Story of the Irish Race by Seamus MacManus; The Black Celts by Ahmed Ali and Ibrahim Al; Charleston! Charleston! by Walter J. Fraser, Jr.; A Short History of Charleston by Robert Rosen; The Monster City: Defoe’s London, 1688–1730 by Jack Lindsay; Bold in Her Breeches, edited by Jo Stanley; She Captains, Hen Frigates: Wives of Merchant Captains Under Sail, and Rough Medicine: Surgeons at Sea in the Age of Sail by Joan Druett; Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700–1920, edited by Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling; Women Pirates: And the Politics of the Jolly Roger by Ulrike Klausmann, Marion Meinzerin, and Gabriel Kuhn; The Book of Pirate Songs by Stuart M. Frank; and Men-of-War by Patrick O’Brian.

  In researching this work, I traveled to Ireland and the Bahamas and used material in the Jamaica Archives in Kingston, the Public Records Office in London, and the New York Public Library (the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem was particularly helpful). Rick and Erin Borovoy, Tara Harper, Aisha Labi, and my agent, Caron K., gave me invaluable advice and support, and, of course, my terrific editor, Rachel Kahan, also deserves my gratitude. Two of my Jamaican aunts, Hyacinth Anglin and Rosalie Markes, aided my research on the island’s history and culture. Finally, I’d like to thank my parents, my wife, Sharon, and my son, Dylan, for general and infinite inspiration.

  A Conversation with Christopher John Farley

  Q: You say in your author’s note that, as a native of Jamaica, you’d heard stories of Anne Bonny and Mary Read when you were growing up. Are they still part of the cultural imagination in Jamaica and the Caribbean? Does your version of the story differ at all from what you’d heard?

  A: I heard a lot of Jamaican legends and stories over the years— about Anancy, the trickster spider of myth; about Nanny, the warrior queen who fought British colonists; and about the pirates who made Jamaica their capital during the eighteenth century. Pirates still are very much part of the cultural imagination of Jamaica and the Caribbean. You’ll find them in museums, on bottles of rum, in the insurgent attitude of citizens, in the lyrics of reggae songs.

  My version of Anne Bonny’s story differs from the conventional version— which is not to say that it is in variance with the truth. Kingston by Starlight is a novel, not a straight history book. Much of Anne’s story, as historians know it, is drawn from Captain Johnson’s book A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, published in 1724. Nobody really knows who Captain Johnson was (he may have been Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, or he may have been, as I speculate in my novel, someone else). Nobody really knows where Captain Johnson got his facts. Fact-based writers—“journalists” may be too kind a term for them— in the eighteenth century often made up facts and embellished tales (and the tradition still survives, and perhaps flourishes, in the twenty-first). Ben Franklin, for example, frequently made up stories under pen names and published them in his newspaper, and he was one of the more honest newspapermen. I did try to remain faithful to the historical record I believed was true, but I also recognized that other parts of the record were probably flawed. So if an event could have happened and felt true, I followed it.

  Q: Did your research into the lives of Bonn, Calico, and Read uncover anything unexpected?

  A: I was fascinated to find how easily lines of race, sex, and class blurred on pirate ships. Paupers could become buccaneer kings; aristocrats sometimes tired of their pampered lives and joined the brethern of the coasts; black slaves and white slaves found freedom afloat; and there are more then a few stories of women who became successful pirates in the Caribbean, Ireland, China, and elsewhere. The cultural backgrounds of Bonny and her shipmates are not entirely established in the historical record; the past I created for Bonny represents the tenor of the times, as well as the guidance of the voice I heard as I wrote the book.

  Q: In what way do these characters’ lives reflect the stories of the people who lived in the eighteenth century West Indies? Are they typical of their time or were their lives extraordinary?

  A: The pirate tales I tell in this book are true ones. Port Royal was once a pirate capital that was swallowed by an earthquake. Lawrence DeGraff was a pirate of African descent whom the press falsely portrayed as European-looking. There really was a Grace O’Malley who ruled in Ireland as kind of a pirate queen. And African pirates did play a role in the early history of Ireland.

  Q: Were these characters extraordinary or typical?

  A: Extraordinary people are often deemed so beca
use they are representative. They carry, in the stories of their lives and the thrust of their actions, the spirit of their age. Bonn, Read, and Calico performed some amazing exploits, but there were others who did similiar things, although they did not shine quite so brightly.

  Q: You write very passionately about both slavery and piracy in the West Indies. In what ways do you think those “trades” ultimately shaped the culture of the Caribbean, both in the 1700s and in the present day?

  A: Slavery helped enrich Europeans and European-Americans while it simultaneously devastated the economies of African nations and native communities in the Americas. The shock waves of slavery continued to impair the economy of post-colonial governments in the West Indies long after emancipation. Slavery also, of course, took a toll in blood and bodies. Bob Marley, the reggae poet of the Caribbean, on his very first major label release, featured the song “Slave Driver,” a track whose lyrics provided his album with its title, Catch a Fire. The legacy of slavery is a real one for Caribbean singers, poets, novelists, and others. But, in many ways, rather than weakening the culture of Jamaica, all of this has made the soul of the region stronger and more resilient. It helped stir the embers of a fighting spirit. Revolutionaries and provocateurs of all sorts, from Marcus Garvey to Claude McKay to Kool Herc (one of the fathers of hip-hop) were natives of Jamaica.

  Q: When you were working on this novel, how did you— a Jamaican-American male author of the twenty-first century— find the voice of an eighteenth-century Irish girl? In what ways was it easy— or difficult— to imagine her life and capture her voice?

  A: I had to search for Anne’s voice— I looked in museums and libraries; I paged through history books and memoirs. I finally found it when I returned to Jamaica. I left Jamaica when I was a baby and became an American citizen when I was a teenager, but I do return to Jamaica whenever I get a chance, which is quite often. My connection to the island is familial and intimate— my grandparents and my mother are from Jamaica. I have other relatives that live there. And one of my brothers, Jonathan, who is a Harvard- and Oxford-trained mathematician, accepted a post to teach at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica. Because there is so much mystery about the real Anne, I spent years researching the established facts, using them as the skeleton of my story, and then used my imagination, guided by my study, to fill out the rest of my tale. It is perhaps impossible, I think, to create a fully alive fictional character solely with one’s conscious mind. It seemed when I was first writing this book that I was part of an elaborate masquerade: a man passing himself off in his fiction as a woman who is passing herself off as a man. I did not start writing the book until, after all my investigation, I felt Anne herself was telling the tale through me. I was on a beach in Kingston when I thought I heard her voice. I was not far away from where some of her shipmates may have been hanged. The first sentence of Kingston by Starlight came to me as if it had been whispered in my ear: “I believe I will begin at the end.” So my novel is, in some sense, a ghost story.

  Kingston by Starlight

  by Christopher John Farley

  Reading Group Guide

  In an adventure story rich with the salt of the high seas and the mystery of hidden identities, Kingston by Starlight’s spirited narrator tells of a life lived always on the outside. Abandoned by her father, Anne Bonny seeks her fortune in colonial Nassau, where a bold deception lands her aboard the pirate ship William. Dressed as a man, she discovers that she fits in rather well at first. Anne Bonny’s male alter-ego “Bonn” is a bold, adventuresome lad who enjoys the seafaring life. But Anne is, of course, a woman coming of age, and even as she becomes an accomplished sailor, she finds herself drawn to two men, the witty and cynical captain of the William, Jack Rackam, and the tough, athletic Read, both of whom are harboring secrets as shocking as Bonn’s. When the three men and their crew are arrested and taken to Jamaica for trial, Bonn’s life takes a stunning turn when her past comes back to haunt her in a way she’d never imagined, and one last secret is revealed— a revelation that will forever change her life. Christopher John Farley’s sweeping tale touches on gender roles, race, religion, history, forgiveness, and revenge with an almost Shakespearean intensity. This guide is designed to help direct your reading group’s discussion of Kingston by Starlight.

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. The narrator notes that though real names are rarely if ever used on the William, the assumed names by which her crewmates are known are more expressive of their various characters. She herself changes the name she uses for the captain throughout the book; at times he is “the captain,” at others Calico, Rackam, or John. What does this say about the character of their relationship at these times? The name “Anne Bonny” is only revealed near the end of the book. Do you think this is the narrator’s real name?

  2. It is clear that much of society disapproves of Anne’s father’s marriage, her mother’s position, and her own appearance and background. How does Anne herself feel about these things?

  3. How does Anne’s experience on the slave ship affect her? When her father rejects her, does she fully understand why?

  4. Anne’s reluctance to enter into prostitution to earn a living is understandable— but she doesn’t appear to regard murder as a similar breach of “virtue.” Why do you think this is? When faced with a choice essentially between piracy and prostitution, what is it about piracy that appeals to her?

  5. What role does spirituality play in the story? Discuss Bishop’s biblical “quotes,” Zayd’s prayerful meditation, the “Praying Mantises” on the slave ship, and Read’s growing superstition as examples of the role of faith in the characters. What opinion does the narrator have of religion?

  6. From time to time, the storyteller seems to interact in a very real way with her audience— in requesting and then sharing refreshment, for example— but at the end of the book it is less clear that her audience is a living person. To whom is she relating her narrative?

  7. Is Read and Bonn’s relationship more like the friendship of two women or of two men? Their mutual affection is largely a result of the extraordinary experience they have in common, but how much do they actually share— in terms of character, experience, and gender identity? By the end of the novel, have their personalities become more alike or more unalike?

  8. Discuss Anne’s relationship with Calico Jack Rackam. What attracts her to him, and vice versa? What do you think of her reaction to the story of his alleged affair with the Governor’s daughter? Is her lack of jealousy a sign of faltering affection, or merely a world-wise acceptance? How long do you think their relationship might have endured if they had lived peacefully in their new home instead of setting out again?

  9. What is the nature of Anne’s passion for men? Does it have at its root a search for a father figure? Or is it merely the romantic feelings of a young woman? What else do you think might be at work in her desire not only to learn about men, but to live as a man among men?

  10. Is the revelation that Zed is Anne’s true father a surprising one? Others have clearly known or suspected all along— has Anne truly been blind to the fact that she has African blood? How does her experience contrast with the much-repeated story about the pirate De Graff and Zayd’s revelation of De Graff’s true identity?

  11. What does the narrator learn through the course of her story? Is she wise at the end of it, or merely experienced?

  Also by Christopher John Farley

  My Favorite War

  Copyright © 2005 by Christopher John Farley

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  THREE RIVERS PRESS is a registered trademark and the Three Rivers Press colo
phon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Farley, Christopher John.

  Kingston by starlight: a novel / by Christopher John Farley.

  1. Bonny, Anne, b. 1700— Fiction. 2. Irish— Caribbean Area— Fiction. 3. Kingston (Jamaica)— Fiction. 4. Passing (Identity)— Fiction. 5. Caribbean Area— Fiction. 6. Women pirates— Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3556.A7165K56 2005

  813'.54— dc22 2004020110

  eISBN 0-307-23840-7

  “View from a Fern-Tree Walk, Jamaica” (1887), by Martin Johnson Heade, on title-page spread and part openers courtesy of Manoogian Collection.

  v1.0