Raiders and Rebels

by Frank Sherry

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  But Anne was never one to surrender to Authority—not even to the formidable Woodes Rogers. She absolutely refused to return to Bonny. Instead, she called on Calico Jack to carry her away with him. Together they would go pirating and defy the world. The lustful Rackam agreed.

  Now Anne and Calico Jack, in their first piracy as a team, executed a clever scheme to seize, for their own use, a swift merchant sloop that happened to be anchored in the harbor of Nassau. First, Anne used her charms to get aboard the sloop. She was able to estimate the number of crewmen guarding the ship, and to discover the hour at which the watch changed. She then managed to slip away again, probably leaving several disappointed sailors behind her.

  In the middle of the night, Anne, Calico Jack, and some of his old crewmen crept aboard their intended victim. Anne, wearing an ordinary seaman’s garb and carrying a sword in one hand and a pistol in the other, sneaked up behind the two men on watch aboard the sloop. Showing them her weapons, she whispered that she would blow their brains out if they uttered a sound or tried to stop the takeover of their ship.

  The astonished sailors on watch did as they were told. (They were later put ashore.) Because most of the officers and crew of the sloop were enjoying themselves in town, the rest was easy. Rackam’s old crewmen quickly cast off from the ship’s moorings. The sloop slid silently out of the harbor, past the quiet shapes of other ships rocking at their cables, toward the open sea. Once beyond the bar, Rackam set her sails, and the speedy sloop took the wind.

  By sunrise they stood far out to sea. Anne Bonny and Calico Jack Rackam were now well embarked on a voyage that would be fraught with destiny for both of them.

  For the next six months Anne and Calico Jack cruised the Carribbean, taking and plundering a number of small prizes, and even raiding some shore installations. During all this time Anne dressed in men’s clothing and fought in the ship’s combats like other members of the crew. Apparently she and Calico Jack had decided to keep Anne’s sex a secret, probably because Calico Jack feared the presence of a woman aboard would upset his crew. Keeping Anne’s secret was probably not as difficult as it might seem. There were always a number of powder monkeys in pirate crews. Anne might have passed for one of these boys. Given the confusion and the chaotic lack of discipline that prevailed, it might have been relatively easy for Anne to maintain this disguise indefinitely. (On the other hand, it is equally possible that the crewmen knew that Anne was a woman, but knew also that she was their captain’s woman, and not to be touched.)

  Living a life of adventure aboard the pirate ship of her lover, it must have seemed to Anne Bonny that she had finally found the wild sweet life she had longed for.

  Then the idyll of Anne Bonny and Calico Jack Rackam took another bizarre twist. Rackam’s ship had captured a Dutch merchantman. Needing hands for his own vessel, Calico Jack had recruited several strong young sailors from among the crew of the Dutch ship. One of these Dutch volunteers was a handsome young man, blue-eyed and flaxen-haired.

  Anne, never able to resist her passions, immediately fell in love with the youthful Dutch sailor.

  At the first opportunity, Anne, despite her professed love for Calico Jack, contrived to be alone with the youth. Perhaps this encounter took place one quiet night when the two were assigned to stand watch together. In any case, Anne revealed herself to the boy, possibly by baring her breasts. In her own way she also made it clear that she felt a strong attraction to the young man.

  She was amazed, however, when the object of her desire revealed his secret: “He” was neither Dutch, nor a man, but a twenty-seven-year-old Englishwoman named Mary Read.

  It must have been an appalling moment—and a comic one, too—as the two women discovered each other aboard a pirate ship crewed by some of the toughest and the roughest sea brigands of the day.

  Like Anne Bonny herself, Mary Read had been passing as an ordinary sailor. No one aboard the Dutch ship, she told Anne, had penetrated her disguise—and she begged Anne to keep her secret now. Anne quickly agreed, and the two women pledged undying friendship to each other.

  In the weeks that followed, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, maintaining their disguises as powder monkeys, became inseparable friends. They fought side by side in all the ship’s actions, as fiercely as any of the men. They could curse with the best of them, and neither of them ever hesitated to use their weapons to defend themselves. As Defoe put it, none among Calico Jack’s crew “were more resolute or ready to Board or undertake any Thing that was hazardous as Mary Read and Anne Bonny.”

  Eventually, Mary Read must have begun to tell her life’s story to her friend. It was a story that sounded like the most romantic of novels, and perhaps Mary herself had made up some of it. In any case the tale she told to Anne, and to others in later days, began with her illegitimate birth in England sometime around 1693.

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  According to Mary’s story, her mother conceived her after her lawful husband had gone to sea. For this reason she felt it necessary to conceal the fact of Mary’s birth from both her own relatives and from her in-laws. To accomplish this, she dressed Mary in the clothes of a recently deceased legitimate baby—a son—whose death she had not revealed to anyone. The trick worked. Mary Read was thereafter raised as a boy. After a time, the deception became second nature to her.

  When she was about eleven or twelve, she served as a “foot-boy” aboard a Royal Navy man-of-war. Later, still in her teens, she became a cadet in an infantry regiment. During the War of the Spanish Succession she served as a cavalry soldier in Flanders. Although a brave soldier, Mary’s enthusiasm for military life began to fade when she fell in love with a handsome young soldier with whom she shared her tent. According to Mary’s account, the young man was overjoyed when she revealed her sex to him, apparently under the impression that Mary intended to become his mistress on campaign. But Mary resisted all his advances until he married her.

  Now Mary at last put on woman’s clothing in order to take her marriage vows. The marriage itself created a sensation. Officers and men alike took great delight in this case of “two troopers marrying each other.” Good-naturedly the men of Mary’s former regiment contributed money for Mary and her new husband to set up a tavern near Breda, in Holland. The tavern, known as The Three Horseshoes, prospered, and Mary and her husband were as happy as any newlyweds could be. But then tragedy struck. A mysterious fever killed her husband. The Three Horseshoes failed. Mary was devastated. But despite her grief, Mary could not endure playing the role of a young widow. She decided that she preferred to seek her fortune as a man rather than as a wife. Once again she put on male clothing and went boldly into the world.

  After another interval of service as a foot soldier, Mary disguised herself as a sailor and shipped out aboard a Dutch merchantman bound for the West Indies. When that vessel ran afoul of Calico Jack Rackam, she decided to take a flyer on the pirate life—and her friendship with Anne Bonny had flowered from that decision.

  The shipboard friendship of Anne and Mary inevitably came to Calico Jack’s notice. Jealously he observed that his love, Anne, was spending far more time than was necessary in the company of the handsome young Dutch sailor he had taken aboard some weeks earlier.

  Convinced that his passionate spitfire was cheating on him, Rackam confronted her and her supposed lover one night as the two women were relaxing together on deck. In a jealous rage, Calico Jack threatened to kill his “rival.” To protect her friend, Anne revealed Mary’s true identity.

  Calico Jack went along with Mary’s secret—until love once again played its tricks. Mary Read fell in love.

  The object of her desire was a young English sailor whom Calico Jack had forced into his crew from a prize taken off Jamaica. This reluctant pirate, Tom Deane by name, is described as a good-looking, honest fellow with an engaging manner. Mary, always direct, let the young man see that she was a woman “by carelessly showing her breasts, which were very
white.” Mary and Tom Deane became lovers.

  Sometime later Deane, who was not a good hand with weapons, became embroiled in an argument with another member of the crew, one of Calico Jack’s veteran cutthroats. According to pirate law, Deane and his adversary were slated to settle their differences by a duel onshore at the first opportunity. Mary, realizing that her lover would most likely be killed in the duel, provoked her own quarrel with the pirate who had challenged her man. She then insisted that her duel with their common antagonist take place in advance of her lover’s. It was agreed.

  Following the usual procedure, Mary and her enemy were taken ashore to settle their quarrel as soon as a suitable uninhabited island could be found. The duelists, observing strict pirate ritual, first fired pistols at each other—and missed. Then they fell to with cutlasses. Mary, knowing that it was her lover’s life as well as her own that hung in the balance, slashed savagely at her opponent, forcing him to retreat under her onslaught. Now her years of service as a soldier proved their value. When her foe gave her an opening, Mary thrust home—and killed him.

  After her victory Mary abandoned the disguise she had worn for so long and consorted openly with young Deane as a woman. Anne Bonny also acknowledged her true sex. Although the two women now donned female clothing, they continued to function as members of the crew. They also continued to take part in all the ship’s combats. But during such actions, according to one account, they still “dressed in men’s jackets, and long trousers, and handkerchiefs tied about their heads.”

  This romantic spell of passion, friendship, and battle was interrupted sometime around the New Year of 1720, when Calico Jack took Anne, who was in the last few weeks of pregnancy, to Cuba to bear their child. There is no record of this child’s fate. Perhaps, like many infants born in that era, it died soon after birth. Perhaps Anne gave it to another woman to raise. Whatever happened to Anne’s child, the record shows that by the early months of 1720, Anne was back with Calico Jack Rackam and her friend Mary Read, cruising the Caribbean for prey.

  Meanwhile, back at Nassau, the indomitable Woodes Rogers had finally completed work on the harbor’s fortress. In January 1720, the last of the bastion’s fifty guns was put into place. To serve these guns and man the parapets of his stronghold, however, Rogers still had only a handful of soldiers and his unreliable pirate militia. Neverthless, despite the small number of quality troops available to him, he was sure that his fifty cannon, firing from behind now-impregnable walls, would be more than a match for any attacking force. Rogers now waited confidently for the long-anticipated Spanish invasion to materialize.

  He did not have to wait long.

  On February 24, 1720, a Spanish assault force that included four men-of-war, a number of auxiliary vessels and transports—and thirteen hundred soldiers—appeared off Nassau harbor. But the Spaniards did not attack. Clearly surprised and dismayed to find the former pirate base now strongly defended by powerful new fortifications, the Spanish stood off the harbor, out of range of the guns of Nassau, to consider how to proceed.

  Apparently deciding that direct assault on the island—which would have to be carried out under bombardment by fifty cannon—would be suicide, the Spanish decided to attempt a surprise landing under cover of darkness. On the night of February 25, a force of Spanish soldiers, transported in small boats, attempted to come ashore in the dead of night. But they were spotted by sentries—who blazed away at them in the blackness. The Spaniards fled back to their ships in ignominous disarray.

  After this failed nighttime thrust at Nassau, the would-be invaders cruised aimlessly in Bahamian waters for some time, as if unwilling to acknowledge the miscarriage of their plan. Finally the frustrated Spanish sailed away.

  Woodes Rogers had won. But it was not only the Spanish he had defeated. He had also defeated piracy.

  Nassau, once the most notorious of pirate havens, was now defended on land by fortifications over which flew the British flag, and protected at sea by loyal ex-pirates such as Ben Hornigold and Thomas Burgess, who now flew not the Jolly Roger but the flag of St. George. Nassau—and all the Bahamas—was finished forever as a base for the outlaw nation.

  By the midsummer of 1720 most of the pirates of the West Indies had abandoned their old haunts—and were searching for a new theater of operations. Only a handful of diehard brigands continued to follow the sweet trade in the Caribbean, and they were for the most part confined to the waters around Jamaica and Hispaniola.

  One of that dwindling number was Calico Jack Rackam. For Calico Jack and his crew—which still included Anne Bonny and Mary Read—the hunting had been poor all that summer. They had taken a few fishing boats off Hispaniola. They had raided a few plantations for supplies. And they had captured a couple of trading sloops of no great value.

  By October Rackam was operating off the north coast of Jamaica where his luck improved somewhat: He took a schooner and one or two small trading vessels.

  But Calico Jack’s luck was about to turn bad forever.

  The governor of Jamaica, determined to put an end to piracy off his coasts, sent a fast sloop, under the command of a Captain Barnet, to hunt down Calico Jack.

  Barnet caught Rackam at a place called Dry Harbor Bay. Calico Jack had anchored in this sheltered cove to allow his men to recover from their labors by drinking themselves into oblivion. Thus the pirates were far gone in drink when they finally spotted Barnet standing toward them. With his men sodden with rum and clearly in no condition for a battle, Calico Jack tried to escape. His besotted crew managed somehow to weigh anchor and raise sail. But it was no use. Barnet was soon alongside the pirate sloop. A moment later his men swung aboard. Calico Jack’s drunken pirates fought poorly. Most of them stumbled away from the fight and tried to hide in the ship’s hold. But Anne Bonny and Mary Read, attired in male clothing, fought like hellions. Firing pistols with furious rapidity and slashing wildly with their cutlasses, the two women held off Barnet’s boarding party while the male crewmen cowered below.

  But the odds against them were too great. The women had to give ground. When Mary Read saw that she and Anne could no longer contain their attackers, she ran to the hatch and screamed at her drunken mates to “come up and fight like men.” But the craven crewmen ignored her call. Enraged, she then fired her pistols down into the cringing throng, killing one man and wounding several others. The battle, however, ended a moment later when Anne and Mary were overwhelmed.

  Captain Barnet put the surviving pirates in chains and took them to St. Iago de la Vega (now Spanish Town), Jamaica, to stand trial.

  It was another month before Calico Jack and his crew came before a judge. During this time, Anne and Mary continued to wear male clothing, apparently convincing their jailers and other officials that they were ordinary sailors like their fellows. At the trial, however, the truth came out, for they were identified in court records as “Mary Read, and Anne Bonny, late of the Island of Providence, Spinsters,” and charged with “Piracies, Roberries, and Felonies.”

  At the trial Mary Read’s young lover won acquittal when he was able to prove that Calico Jack had forced him to join the pirate crew. Although there is no record of it, Mary must have rejoiced to see her lover escape the noose. As for herself, she had often disclaimed any fear of the hangman. According to Defoe, she had on one occasion opined to Calico Jack “that as to hanging, she thought it no great Hardship, for, were it not for that, every cowardly Fellow would turn Pirate, and so infest the Seas, that Men of Courage must starve, and no Merchant would venture out; so that the Trade, in a little Time, would not be worth following.”

  In the end Mary was sentenced to be hanged—along with Anne, Calico Jack himself, and eight other crewmen. But when the judge inquired of the condemned if they had anything to say that might cause him to mitigate their sentences, Anne Bonny and Mary Read replied: “Milord, we plead our bellies.”

  Both women, it now turned out, were pregnant. The judge in the case then granted stays of execut
ion to the mothers-to-be, since English law prohibited the killing of an unborn child, whatever the guilt of the mother. For Mary Read, however, the reprieve from the gallows was reduced to a grim irony when she caught a fever in prison and, after a few days of suffering, died—and her unborn child with her.

  Anne Bonny was luckier. A number of Jamaican planters who had done business in the Carolina colony and knew and esteemed Anne’s father interceded with local authorities on Anne’s behalf. Thanks to their efforts she escaped execution.

  No one interceded for Calico Jack Rackam, however. He went to the gallows early in December 1720. On the day that he was to hang, Calico Jack asked for, and received, special permission to pay a final visit to Anne. It was apparently Rackam’s purpose to express his eternal devotion to his fiery mistress. But Anne, as tempestuous as ever, gave only cold comfort to her pirate lover, saying, according to Defoe, that she was “sorry to see him there, but if he had fought like a Man, he need not have been hang’d like a Dog.”

  With these unkind words ringing in his ears, Calico Jack Rackam climbed the scaffold to keep his date with the hangman.

  Anne Bonny, it is said, returned to her father’s house in South Carolina. Whatever her eventual fate there, it is certain that she never again went pirating. It is difficult, however, to imagine that her turbulent spirit ever found fulfillment in domestic life.

  With the hanging of Calico Jack Rackam in Jamaica, piracy in the Caribbean virtually ceased.