The childhoods and early lives of Mary and Anne are taken from A General History. It is certainly true that the accuracy of Johnson’s account becomes more suspect the further back he goes. It is likely that Johnson (or Defoe) spoke to people with first or secondhand knowledge of the women’s pirate activity, and certainly witnessed their trial or read the transcripts. In regards to their childhoods, however, he was in all likelihood simply repeating common tales. But true or not, it is all we have.
One of the frustrating aspects of A General History is that Johnson does not integrate the stories of Jack, Mary, and Anne, but tells them in separate chapters and seems to purposely avoid any overlap. Thus in the chapter on Mary Read, when discussing her going to sea again after her husband’s death, he will say, “It happened that this Ship was taken by English Pyrates, and Mary Read was the only English Person on board, they kept her amongst them . . .” without ever saying if the pirate was Rackam. In the chapter concerning Jack he does not mention the women at all until the very end, so that he can give the story a sensational twist, with two of the pirates pleading their bellies.
The result of this is that it is very difficult to piece together a time line for the three: when they met and what parts of their stories happened before or after they were all together. Some historians, for instance, would argue that Anne went to Cuba and had her first baby before she met Mary. But I can find no evidence one way or the other, and so I went with what was best from a fiction standpoint, and put the women there together.
(Incidentally, the scene with the Cuban soldiers coming to arrest the pirates, and Mary’s subsequent dispatching of them, is the only major incident in the book that I boldly and shamelessly fabricated. Nothing like it ever happened.)
Just as the sources described above are used to assemble the facts of our pirates’ lives, they are also used to divine a sense of their personalities. Some readers already familiar with Anne, Mary, and Jack may well disagree with my characterization, and they are certainly welcome to do so. The personalities I have imbued these people with, however, are not purely my imagination, but based on evidence in their stories.
Jack sailed as quartermaster to Charles Vane, as vicious and effective a pirate as ever lived. By the end of his career, Jack was in command of a tiny crew taking fishing boats and the like, pretty small beer for any self-respecting buccaneer. Johnson tells us that when Barnet came for them, Jack and the others were below and would not come out and fight. Only Anne and Mary held their ground.
Johnson also tells us (though there is nothing in the trial transcript to verify this) that the most damning evidence against Mary came from Rackam’s deposition against her. In the parlance of the gangster movies, he ratted her out. These are all clues that lead us to an educated guess about Jack’s character.
Likewise with Anne, who ran away from a life of wealth with the penniless James Bonny. Johnson describes Anne as a woman “not altogether so reserved in Point of Chastity,” who sailed as a pirate and stood and faced all of Barnet’s men when the others had fled below. Her vicious parting line to Jack, “I am sorry to see you here, but if you had fought like a man, you need not hang like a dog,” comes from Johnson.
A General History also gives us insights into Mary’s character, the most telling perhaps being her riding out with her (unnamed) tentmate, whom she loved, to keep him from harm in battle, and her fighting a duel to protect her (also unnamed) lover when she sailed aboard Jack’s ship. Mary’s feelings about her marriage in conscience, and her never having committed adultery, are also from A General History.
The place where Calico Jack Rackam was hanged is known today as “Rackam’s Cay.” Mary Read died of fever in prison in the spring of 1721. It is not known for certain what became of Anne, but the general consensus is that she was paroled thanks to the influence of her father and returned to Charleston, South Carolina, where she lived the rest of her days in obscurity.
There are no major events in The Only Life That Mattered (save the aforementioned scene with the Cuban soldiers) that are not based on some primary source. For those who would like to examine the roots of this story, there are several editions of Johnson’s A General History of the Pirates (as it is generally called) that are currently in print and easily had. Some of these list Johnson as the author, some Defoe.
On the pages of A General History the reader will see the bare bones of the story, the “certain fixed points” which I have used as a skeleton for this book. With this outline I have done what the novelist can do and the historian cannot, fictionalized the historical events and, I hope, come somewhat close to the truth of these three remarkable people.
Only Life That Mattered Page 43