Hannah Snell went to sea in 1745 to look for her husband, a Dutch sailor called James Summs who had abandoned her when she was six months pregnant. She served for a time on the British sloop HMS Swallow, commanded by Captain Rosier, and took part in the siege of Pondicherry in 1748. Marianne Rebecca Johnson served four years in a British collier Mayflower without her sex being detected, and her mother spent seven years in the Royal Navy before being mortally wounded at the Battle of Copenhagen.
These and other women were able to survive in a man’s world by proving themselves as capable as the men in battle and in their duties as seamen. Mary Anne Arnold worked as an able seaman on the ship Robert Small until she was unmasked by Captain Scott, who became suspicious of her during the ritual shaving ceremony when crossing the line. He later declared that she was the best sailor on his ship and wrote, “I have seen Miss Arnold among the first aloft to reef the mizen-top-gallant sail during a heavy gale in the Bay of Biscay.”20 Whenever Hannah Snell was challenged for not being sufficiently masculine, she always retaliated by offering to beat her challenger at any shipboard task. Mary Anne Talbot adopted male habits and in later life was accused of having “masculine propensities more than became a female such as smoking, drinking grog, etc.”21
But how did these women manage to disguise their physical appearance and prevent their shipmates’ discovering their sex? Clearly the determination and ingenuity of the women who succeeded in fooling their shipmates was extraordinary. There was little privacy on board ship in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though there were many dark corners in the badly lit areas belowdecks where a woman might have hidden her nakedness when necessary. Conditions on a ship in those days were very different from those on a modern vessel. Most people who travel on ships today expect them to be clean and shiny, with stainless steel fittings, running water in the taps, flush toilets, and comfortable bunk beds. An oceangoing merchantman in the eighteenth century was almost entirely constructed of wood, and was a confusing jumble of tarred rope, mildewed sails, spare masts and spars, muddy anchor cable, hen coops, hammocks, seamen’s chests, wooden crates of various sizes, and numerous barrels containing water, beer, salt pork, and gunpowder. In order to provide fresh meat and milk during the voyage, an assorted collection of cows, goats, ducks, geese, and chickens were kept in pens belowdecks.22 In fine weather the goats were often allowed to wander around on deck. Many of the seamen kept pets: dogs and cats were common, and so were parrots and monkeys.
In addition to the domestic animals and pets, merchant ships and naval ships often had a number of small boys on board who had been sent to sea to learn the ropes, and many of the most active members of the crew were boys in their teens. Dressed in the loose trousers, loose shirts, and jackets of the seamen, with a scarf or handkerchief around her neck, a strong young woman with a good head for heights would not have found it difficult to pass as a teenage boy when working on deck or up among the rigging. Belowdecks, amid the cargo and the animals and the smells of bilge water, manure, decaying wood, and tarred hemp, it would have been more difficult but not impossible for a woman to hide her sex, although she would have had to use some ingenuity to cope with the toilet facilities, which on most ships were extremely primitive.23 The seamen either climbed onto the leeward channels (platforms along the ship’s side for spreading the rigging) and urinated into the sea, or went forward to the beakhead or “heads.” On the wooden structure overhanging the bows of the ship would be two or three boxes with holes in them. The seamen sat on the boxes, or “seats of easement” as they were called, and defecated through the hole into the water below. On smaller ships without a beakhead, the heads were inboard and the waste was discharged through a pipe in the ship’s side.
Life on a pirate ship was similar to life on a merchantman, partly because most pirate ships were former merchant ships with a few more guns added, and partly because the majority of pirates were former merchant seamen. Pirate ships usually had bigger crews and the men adopted a more relaxed regime, but their habits and prejudices were similar, and most pirates had the seaman’s traditional prejudice against taking women to sea. Article Three of the pirate code drawn up by Bartholomew Roberts and his crew stated that no boy or woman was to be allowed among them. “If any man were found seducing any of the latter sex, and carry’d her to sea, disguised, he was to suffer death.”24 Captain Johnson’s explanation of this rule was that it was to prevent divisions and quarrels among the crew.
Many pirate captains preferred to take on men who were unmarried. It is difficult to obtain hard evidence on the numbers of pirates who were married, but one study of the Anglo-American pirates active in the years 1716 to 1726 shows that 23 pirates out of a sample of 521 are known to have married.25 That is around 4 percent, a remarkably small proportion of the total until one remembers that most pirates were young men in their twenties and therefore had not reached an age when they wanted to settle down. When Sam Bellamy’s pirate ship and her consorts were wrecked on the coast of Cape Cod, there were eight survivors. They were interrogated on the orders of the Governor of Massachusetts in May 1717, and their confessions indicate that married men were not welcome on Bellamy’s ships. Thomas Baker said that when he and nine other men were taken by the pirates off Cape François, the other men “were sent away being married men.” Peter Hoof stated that “No married men were forced,” which means they were not compelled to sign the pirates’ articles and join the crew. Thomas South confirmed that when his ship was captured, “The pirates forced such as were unmarried, being four in number.”26
When Philip Ashton was captured by pirates in the harbor of Port Rossaway in June 1722, the first ordeal he had to face was an interrogation by Edward Low, the pirate captain. Brandishing a pistol, Low demanded to know whether Ashton, and the five men captured with him, were married men. None of them replied, which so enraged Low that he came up to Ashton, clapped a pistol to his head, and cried out, “You Dog! Why don’t you answer me?” and swore vehemently that he would shoot Ashton through the head if he did not tell him immediately whether he was married or not.27 When he learned that none of them were married, Low calmed down. Ashton subsequently learned that Low’s wife had died shortly before he became a pirate. She had left a young child in Boston that Low was so fond of that he would sometimes sit down and weep at the thought of it. It was Ashton’s conclusion that this was the reason why Low would only take unmarried men, “that he might have none with him under the influence of such powerful attractives as a wife and children, lest they should grow uneasy in his service, and have an inclination to desert him, and return home for the sake of their families.”28
Some pirates did abandon their roving lives and settle down. When Howell Davis visited the Cape Verde Islands to carry out repairs to his ship, he left five of his crew behind when he sailed because they were so charmed with the women of the place: “one of them, whose name was Charles Franklin, a Monmouthshire man, married and settled himself, and lives there to this day.”29 In the Public Record Office in London is a petition which was sent to Queen Anne in 1709 from the wives and other relations “of the Pirates and Buccaneers of Madagascar and elsewhere in the East and West Indies.”30 It is signed by forty-seven women and is a plea for a royal pardon for all the offenses committed by the pirates. The petition was brought to the attention of the Council of Trade and Plantations. Lord Morton and others were in favor of a royal pardon as the only effective way of breaking up the pirate settlements in Madagascar, but it was not till 1717 that the pardon, or “Act of Grace,” was issued, and by that time the pirate colony on Madagascar was in decline.
As far as can be gleaned from the meager information on the subject, very few of the pirate captains had wives and families. Henry Morgan was married but had no children. Captain Kidd had a wife and two daughters who lived in New York. Thomas Tew was married and also had two daughters. According to Captain Johnson, Blackbeard married a young girl of sixteen in North Carolina; she was reputed to be hi
s fourteenth wife and apparently it was his custom after he had lain with her all night “to invite five or six of his brutal companions to come ashore, and he would force her to prostitute herself to them all, one after another, before his face.”31 While this seems entirely in character, it might equally well be a flight of fancy on the part of Johnson. Reporting one of Blackbeard’s raids in January 1718, Governor Hamilton simply noted that “This Teach it’s said has a wife and children in London.”32 None of the other pirate captains mentioned in Johnson’s History are recorded as being married.
Although a surprising number of women seem to have gone to sea on merchant ships or joined the navy disguised as men, very few women became pirates. Apart from Mary Read and Anne Bonny, the only female pirates mentioned in any of the pirate histories are the Scandinavian pirate Alwilda, the Irishwoman Grace O’Malley, and the Chinese pirate leader Mrs. Cheng.
Very little is known about Alwilda.33 She was the daughter of a Scandinavian king in the fifth century A.D. Her father had arranged for her to marry Prince Alf, the son of Sygarus, the King of Denmark, but she was so opposed to the marriage that she and some of her female companions dressed up as men, found a suitable vessel, and sailed away. The story goes that they came across a company of pirates who were bemoaning the recent loss of their captain. The pirates were so impressed by the regal air of Alwilda that they unanimously elected her as their leader. Under her command the pirates became such a formidable force in the Baltic that Prince Alf was dispatched to hunt them down. Their ships met in the Gulf of Finland, and a fierce battle took place during which Prince Alf and his men boarded the pirate vessel, killed most of the crew, and took Alwilda prisoner. Full of admiration for the Prince’s fighting qualities, Alwilda changed her mind about him and was persuaded to accept his hand in marriage. They were married on board his ship, and she eventually became Queen of Denmark.
While the story of Alwilda has a legendary air about it, the history of Grace O’Malley is well documented. There are several references to her in the State Papers of Ireland, and recent research has uncovered the main events in her life and shown that behind the heroine of the Irish ballads was a commanding woman, “famous for her stoutness of courage and person, and for sundry exploits done by her at sea.”34 Grace O’Malley was born around 1530 in Connaught on the west coast of Ireland. Her father was a local chieftain and the descendant of an ancient Irish family which for centuries had ruled the area around Clew Bay. The O’Malleys had castles at Belclare and on Clare Island, and maintained a fleet of ships which were used for fishing, trading, and piratical raids on the surrounding territories. It seems likely that Grace went to sea as a girl, and it is said that she acquired her nickname “Granuaille” (which means “bald”) because she cut her hair short like the boys she sailed with.35 In 1546, when she was about sixteen, Grace was married to Donal O’Flaherty and moved to her husband’s castle at Bunowen some thirty miles south along the coast. All that is known about this phase of her life is that Grace had three children and that after a few years of marriage her husband died, possibly murdered in a revenge attack. Grace returned to her father’s domain and took command of the O’Malley fleet. She was by now beginning to build up a reputation as a bold and fearless sea captain. In 1566 she married Richard Burke, another local chieftain, and moved to Rockfleet Castle in County Mayo. This became the base for her seafaring operations and was her home for the remaining thirty-seven years of her life.
Rockfleet Castle still stands today on an inlet overlooking Clew Bay. It is a simple, square structure but is massively built of stone and stands four stories high above the surrounding moors. This wet and windswept stretch of the Irish coast makes a startling contrast with the pirate strongholds in the Bahamas. Both locations have beaches and bays and numerous offshore islands, but instead of palm trees rustling under the tropical sun, Rockfleet Castle stands among rolling hills covered with heather and bracken. While the heat of Nassau is cooled by fresh breezes in the evening, the gray waters of Galway and Connemara are swept by southwesterly gales blowing in from the Atlantic. But Clew Bay provided a secure anchorage for the O’Malley fleet, which in the time of Grace O’Malley consisted of around twenty vessels. All the documentary references indicate that several of these vessels were galleys, apparently the only vessels of this type on the Irish coast. Captain Plessington of HMS Tremontaney described an encounter with one of these vessels in 1601. “This galley comes out of Connaught, and belongs to Grany O’Malley,” he wrote. He noted that the vessel “rowed with thirty oars, and had on board, ready to defend her, 100 good shot, which entertained skirmish with my boat at most an hour.”36 Some years earlier Sir Henry Sydney, the Lord Deputy of Ireland, reported to Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s secretary: “There came to me also a most famous feminine sea captain called Grany Imallye, and offered her services unto me, wheresoever I would command her, with three galleys and 200 fighting men.”37 In theory an oared galley, a vessel developed to deal with the calms in the Mediterranean, was wholly unsuitable for the turbulent seas around the British Isles, and presumably the oars were only used in light winds or for raids in sheltered coastal waters. At other times the galleys, like the Viking longships, must have shipped their oars and relied on a single square sail for their motive power.
The nature of Grace O’Malley’s piracy was determined by local circumstances. Although all Ireland was then part of the British kingdom ruled by Queen Elizabeth I, the government of each province was in the hands of a Governor appointed by the Queen. These Governors were usually English aristocrats or soldiers, and in Connaught they exerted an oppressive regime which led to constant rebellions from the local chieftains. Sometimes Grace led punitive raids against other chieftains, and sometimes she attacked and plundered passing merchant ships. In the 1570s her attacks provoked a storm of protest from the merchants of Galway and compelled Sir Edward Fitton, the Governor, to send an expedition against her. In March 1574 a fleet led by Captain William Martin sailed into Clew Bay and laid siege to Rockfleet Castle. Grace marshaled her forces and within a few days turned the tables on Martin and forced him to beat a retreat. But in 1577, during a plundering raid on the lands of the Earl of Desmond, she was captured and imprisoned in Limerick jail for eighteen months. She was described by Lord Justice Drury as “a woman that hath … been a great spoiler, and chief commander and director of thieves and murderers at sea to spoil this province.”38
When Grace O’Malley’s husband died in 1583, she found herself in a precarious position. She was vulnerable to raids from neighboring chieftains, and in financial hardship because, according to Irish custom, a widow had no right to her husband’s lands. Believing that the best means of defense was attack, she launched a number of raids on the surrounding territories but incurred the hostility of Sir Richard Bingham, who had succeeded Fitton as Governor of the province. Bingham regarded her as a rebel and a traitor and sent a powerful force to Clew Bay which impounded her fleet. She felt her only recourse was to appeal to the Queen of England. In July 1593 a letter was received in London addressed to the Queen from “your loyal and faithful subject Grany Ne Mailly of Connaught in your Highness realm of Ireland.”39 Grace explained that she had been forced to conduct a warlike campaign on land and sea to defend her territory from aggressive neighbors. She asked the Queen “to grant her some reasonable maintenance for the little time she has to live” and promised that in return she would “invade with sword and fire all your highness enemies, wheresoever they are or shall be.” While the Queen’s advisers were looking into the matter, Grace O’Malley’s son was arrested by Bingham on charges of inciting rebellion. Grace decided that she must go to London and make a personal appeal to the Queen.
The Irish ballads have made much of her voyage across the Irish Sea and her audience with Queen Elizabeth:
’Twas not her garb that caught the gazer’s eye
Tho’ strange, ’twas rich, and after its fashion, good
But the wild grandeur of her
mien erect and high
Before the English Queen she dauntless stood
And none her bearing there could scorn as rude
She seemed well used to power, as one that hath
Dominion over men of savage mood
And dared the tempest in its midnight wrath
And thro’ opposing billows cleft her fearless path.40
In fact no details exist of the voyage or what was said at their meeting. All we know is that they met at Greenwich Palace in September 1593, and a few days later the Queen sent a letter to Sir Richard Bingham ordering him to sort out “some maintenance for the rest of her living of her old years.”41 Bingham released her son from prison but continued to detain her ships and to harass her territories. However, in 1597 Bingham was succeeded by Sir Conyers Clifford and the O’Malley fleet was able to put to sea again. Grace was now nearly seventy years old and seems to have left it to her sons to run her fleet and defend the O’Malley lands. She died around 1603 at Rockfleet. Her son Tibbot proved a loyal subject and carried out Grace’s promise to fight the Queen’s enemies. In 1627 he was created Viscount Mayo.
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