April 25, 2023 • 35 mins
Author Ben Thompson and professor of history Dr. Pat Larash discuss two of the most notorious pirate women in history, Anne Bonny and Mary Read terrorized the Caribbean aboard the warship Revenge -- but their lives and adventures go far beyond just the high-seas infamy for which they are now known.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
We're on a ship in the Caribbean, blanketed by the
spray of ocean water, the stench of gunpowder, and of course,
the blood curdling.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Screams of pirates.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
The deck is slick with blood, and our ears are
filled with the snaps of musket fire and the clanging
of cutlasses banging off one another in.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
A heat of battle.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Into this chaotic fray, one figure darts through the smoke
of cannon and shot, screaming into battle, at the head
of the pirate forces that swarm over the deck of
the Spanish galleony. Wielding a flint lock in each hand,
with three more strapped on, a bandolier across her chest
and a gleaming cutlass at her hip, she barks orders
to the ferocious array of demons that follow her every command.
(00:48):
She is a vision of Hell, the embodiment of the
furies of antiquity.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
She is the notorious and bond, and she will not
be denied.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
Hey, then, how's it going today?
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Well?
Speaker 2 (01:15):
As usual, I am recording on the floor of my
closet because I don't have a studio setup yet.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
So you know, about as comfortable as it can be.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
I mean, isn't that the canonical way to do it
these days?
Speaker 2 (01:26):
It's the only room in my house that doesn't have
like a million windows, and I live like right by
the freeway. Yeah, there's always emergency vehicles running outside.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
How's moving going, by the way.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
It's okay.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
I was supposed to move on Tuesday, and then we're
having some issue where like now we can't. We couldn't
move on Tuesday. So we might be moving tomorrow, or
we might be moving next week, or the whole thing
might be falling apart.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
So who knows. I don't think the whole thing is
falling apart.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
I very much hope to not be recording in a
closet next week, but I'll have to see.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Yeah, where will you be recording?
Speaker 2 (01:56):
Like on horseback or horseback? Yeah, the badass way to
do it from a jet fighter. Probably have some probably
have some background noise issues.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Well, you might have a cat giving birth to kittens.
Did you see that. It's in North Carolina the Hickory
Aviation Museum. We have these airplanes on display, and there
was a cat who just was looking for a place
to give birth. To her kittens and somehow managed to
get into the plane, and the people who work at
the museum is like, wait, what's going on here, Oh kittens, Okay,
we're not going to interfere at the moment. And I
(02:28):
think they're trying to adopt the kittens out now, and
they've named them after different types of planes. Anyway, that
would make things even more interesting if you decided to,
you know, record from.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
A plane with kittens being born around me. It's the
ultimate dichotomy of badass, right, like the jet fighter and
the cute kittens.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
Yeah, it's easy to forget that these little like seven
pound beings are actually fierce. Predator is just fun sized.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Yeah, they're extremely cute, and they're also like one of
the only creatures on Earth that like kills for fun. Right,
It's like humans, dolphins and cats are like.
Speaker 4 (03:05):
The only way dolphins kill for fun.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
Dolphins will kill something for fun.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
I didn't know that.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Yeah, yeah, they'll kill something and not eat it. So
like that there's only like three or four creatures in
the world that do that.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Because I thought dolphins were all like, you know, peace
and love and sunshine.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
No, there's they're they're they're kind of like murderous maniaccs.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
Alrighty then, okay.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
All there's the all thing with dolphins.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
I mean I have to say, like, you know, I
any creature that seems intelligent, you know that, I tend
to want to like.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Yeah, but intelligence breeds that, like I wonder what happened
if I did this, right?
Speaker 1 (03:43):
You get like too smart for your own good level, yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Or too smart for the good of the beings around
you or whatever.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Well, I don't know, I guess speaking of predators, yeah, pretors,
I guess.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
Well, yeah, so you know, one of the Latin world Okay, sorry,
this is me putting on my you know, latinist hat.
One of the words for pirate in Latin's prido, which
is where we get the word predator from.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Really yeah, they have the same route.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
Yeah yeah, so yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
I guess that makes sense, right. They prey on shipping
or whatever. That's a phrase you hear a lot in
reference to pirates.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
Yeah, someone who goes after loot.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Hmm. Yeah, it's really cool. I didn't know it.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Fun fact, I was really struggling on how we were
going to turn my kitty Cat into a pirate story.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
But here we go.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
I'm really excited about this week because we're going to
talk about one of my favorite badasses ever. I've been
doing this for a long time, for fifteen ish years,
probably closer to twenty than fifteen now. A Bonnie is
a character I wrote about. She was an original, like
very early on badass on the website, and I'm very
excited to talk about her this week. Yes, she is
(04:52):
a woman who was a pirate at the height of
the Golden Age of piracy in the Caribbean.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
She's not the most successful female pirate of all time, right.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
You have, yeah, but here we are talking about her,
so yeah, yeah, yeah. So who would you consider the
most successful?
Speaker 2 (05:07):
There were a few like female pirates who were like
very successful. Probably the most successful one was a Chinese
woman named ching Shi. She commanded like a fleet of pirates.
She had kind of come from nothing and then became
like the wife of a pirate king or the concubine
of a pirate king, and then he died and she
took over, and then she just like ruled with an
iron fist. She committed like a fleet of ships. Like
(05:30):
the Chinese Imperial Navy tried to attack her and she
defeated them in battle, like she collects this huge bounty
of gold and treasure and then she retires. There was
a woman named Jean de Clisson. She was a frenchwoman
who pirated in the English Channel during the Hundred Years War.
I guess like the English had killed her husband, I think,
is the story, and she would like capture English ships
(05:52):
and kill everybody on board. She was extremely violent but
very successful. And there was another there was an Irish
woman named Grace Mall who's another very famous female pirate.
We'll probably talk about all three of these at some
point on the show.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
At some point.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Yeah, but yeah, the one that.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
For me always kind of the one that I think
for most of like popular culture and like popular history stuff,
like Anne Bonnie is kind of the go to, like
for like badass pirate woman of the Caribbean. She's got
the most exciting stories. She's operating in the right place
at the right time, you know, with the right people.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
She's meeting all of the main.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Characters you talk about when you talk about piracy, right, Yeah,
you have so much good pirate stories happening in China
and off the coast of Africa. But when people think
of pirates, they think pirates of the Caribbean and of those,
An Bonnie is kind of the story that everybody wants
to talk about, and.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
We're really excited to talk about it.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
We're excited to talk about not just Ane Bonnie, but
also Mary Reid, yes, the other woman that was on
this crew.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
And so we've got this ship which has not one
but two badass female pirates on it.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
And they were more badass than any of the male
pirates on that ship apparently. And we'll get into why
that is.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Yep. So stick with us.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
We'll be right back after these messages. Welcome back, and
we are going to get into talking about Anne Bonnie,
who is a personal favorite of mine. And this is
a really fun story about a very cool and interesting
(07:24):
and exciting and to be honest, like pretty angry person.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
And to be honest, angry people are interesting sometimes It's
very true anyway, So tell us about Anne Bonnie.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Anne Bonnie was originally born Anne Cormack. She was born
in Cook County, Ireland around the turn of the seventeenth century.
She was born to a wealthy lawyer named William Cormac
and his maid, a woman named Mary Brennan.
Speaker 5 (07:52):
Made as in a person who worked at the household,
not actually the wife.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Not missus Cormac, Missus Cormack is. Yeah, Missus Cormack was
not happy about this. She was pretty upset about it,
and she made mister Cormack's life hard. In Cook County, Ireland,
Ireland is very Catholic at the time and still is today.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
There's a and also she's just allowed to be mad
because she's allowed to be mad. You know, she's allowed
to be cranky.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Hey, look, if I was missus Cormack, I'd be pretty mad.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
There's a lot going on there.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Yeah, but this kind of informs Anne Bonnie pretty early
on in that she's unwanted from minute one, and her
life is hard and it becomes harder, and she responds
to it in a variety of unhealthy ways.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
Yeah, unhealthy but understandable. We get where she's coming from.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
Right exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
So she's there and mister Cormack tries to kind of
raise her as his own as best he can, but
it's hard, right, and he decides eventually, like, you know what,
I'm gonna move.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
I got to start over.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
And he decides he's going to relocate to Charleston, South Carolina.
So he picks up Ann and he takes off. He
gets a big plot of land in outside Charleston, South Carolina,
and he moves there to kind of start over again,
go somewhere where nobody knows who he is or cares,
and is mostly raised there. I imagine she probably doesn't
remember much of Ireland except that I think she maintained
(09:23):
the reddish hair, and that's about all she really got
from Ireland. And Charleston at this point is a pretty
exciting place to be.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
It is.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
It's a hub of what's known as the Triangle trade,
which is a little bit of a sticky thing to
talk about because it is it's problematic.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
I mean, let's just put it out there. It's problematic.
It's you know, what are the three points of the triangle.
You know, you've got sugar, you've got rum, and you've
also got human beings being traded as possessions. Because this
was the age of slavery across.
Speaker 4 (10:00):
The Atlantic exactly.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
This is the background against which Anne Bonnie does her.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Stuff, right, and so that's going on, and Charleston is
a big hub for that. So it's one of the
points of the triangle, and there are ships coming in
and out there's all kinds of like people in trade
and movement, and it's an exciting place to be if
you're Anne Bonnie, because the entire Atlantic trade is all
kind of running through this port at Charleston. So there's
(10:28):
a lot happening for her, and she's kind of growing
up in this kind of exciting environment. She goes down
to the docks a lot and hangs out there, and
you know, she's drinking at fifteen, and she's partying, and she's,
you know.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
Living life to the fullest in her own way exactly.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
She's doing teenager things down at the docks. Right.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Note to my students, doctor Larish does not endorse drinking
at age fifteen. Continue.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
And so Ann gets into trouble for the first time
at the age of four when she gets into an
argument with one of the housekeepers at the estate and
she ends up pulling a steak knife and stabbing that
woman in the stomach with it.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
Whoo at age fourteen.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
Yeah, I'm not saying that, like stabbing your maid in
the stomach with a steak knife is badass, but like
this just kind of gives you insight into the character
of Anne Bonnie. She is a fiery, angry person who
doesn't take shit from anybody, and yeah, this will surf
her well in her career as a pirate.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
But she has trouble for mister Cormack.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
About a year later, she's down at the docks drinking
at a bar and some guy is a little too
handsy with her, so she hospitalizes him. She beats him
senseless and leaves him in a ditch, which.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Okay, I mean, you know, self defense. You know, she's
enforcing boundaries.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Very clear about her boundaries. This guy was pushed it
a little too far and she put him in the
hospital for what appears to be months.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Whoa, Yeah, okay, she.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Really messes this guy out. She's not a person to
be messed with, so mister Kormack, she's a little bit
of a headache for mister Kormack. And mister Kormack decides,
you know what we can do.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
We need to.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Marry sweet Anne off to a nice boy, and she'll
be happy once she settles down with a nice.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
Man, right, because that'll work.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Go figure.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
But she doesn't want to date any of these guys,
and she doesn't like any of the high society dudes
that her dad tries to set her up with. So
what she ends up doing to kind of escape this
life is at the age of sixteen, she runs off
and marries.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
A pirate as one does.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
As you do, you go down to the document a pirate.
She meets a guy named James Bonnie. That's where the
Anne Bonnie comes from, and he takes her to Nasau,
which is the capital of the Bahamas. It's always very
interesting because Nasau is like this beautiful, like exotic, you know,
Caribbean beaches and turquoise water kind of thing. But whenever
I think of Nasau in my head and in the
(12:51):
seventeen hundred's, I picture that scene from Pirates of the
Caribbee and where the dudes are like swinging ale out
of flagons and like swing from the swinging from the
light fixtures in the bar, and it's just anarchy and craziness.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
And we can picture Anne Bonnie doing this.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Absolutely She's in the middle of all of this. An
Bonnie liked to party.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
A Bonnie was definitely always down for a bar fight
or a drinking competition or any type of thing like that.
So you put her in mas Eisley Spaceport and she
is just gonna like make friends immediately or get into
a fight or both. So Ann Bonnie is doing her
(13:32):
thing in NASA.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
She likes it.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
It's much better than anything she'd had in Charleston, but
she does occasionally get sucked into this high society thing.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
She can't escape it.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
She ends up going to a party at the house
of the sister in law of the governor of Jamaica.
So the governor of Jamaica at this time is a
guy named what is Rogers, who if we're looking at
the grand scheme of the Golden age of piracy in
the Caribbean, we are reaching the end of it. Is
Rogers is kind of the guy who ends the Golden
(14:02):
Age of piracy. He's a British officer who shows up
and kind of cracks down on everything, and he offers
a pirate amnesty, so like, hey, you know, I'll forgive
you for whatever your crimes were if you tell rat
out your friends for me, and then everybody who's left
after that, he sends the British Navy after them. He's
very badass, but he's not particularly relevant to the story.
That just places Ann kind of at the end of
(14:24):
this golden age. Yeah, she is at a party at
what is Rogers's sister in law's house, So his brother's wife,
she is there, and she is talking to the sister
in law apparently what is Roger's sister in law make
some comment that Anne Bonnie doesn't like. Uh oh, an
Bonnie hauls off and slugs her in the face and
knocks out two of her teeth.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Oh my, okay, that seems like a very unexpected way
to respond to a slight in high society.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
You know, no matter how much she was brought up
in the high society life, she never really got the
hang of it. And so yeah, I would love to
see this in like a movie, right of just like
Downton Abbey, kind of like subtle digs, you know, the
like needling little comments and snarky things, right, and then
to just have like this like Redhead pirate.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Chick just be like, oh yeah, damn, you know, I
enjoy this. I enjoy that. I enjoy thinking about it.
It makes me happy.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
I'm sure that this woman probably didn't deserve to be
punch in the face, but like I'm sure that like
any of us in and Bonnie's situation here, would have
wanted to do that and not had the balls to
do it.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
Yeah, yeah, talking with her fists, you.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Know, I talk about what does Rogers offered this pirate amnesty?
So James Bonnie ends up taking what is Rogers up
on it, right, And James Bonnie really can't fault him
too much for this because his options are rat out
your fellow pirates and get an amnesty, or don't and
be arrested and or killed. James Bond is pretty small time, right,
(16:00):
He's not like a pirate captain. He's not a main guy.
He's kind of a wannabe. And Anne is furious when
she finds out. She is not happy. She likes the pirates,
she does not like the high society dudes, and she
decides she is going to leave him for a real pirate.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
Oh wait, a real pirate. Ooh, we're throwing shade.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
So she meets up with the dude, a guy named
Jack Rackham. And Jack Rackham is known as Calico Jack
because he dresses in crazy like colorful clothes like a
calico cat. So Jack Rackham is like, he's not a
very successful pirate. He's not very good pirate. He doesn't
have a lot of records to his name, he hasn't
(16:42):
taken a lot of enemy ships. But they meet at
a party and he likes Anne, and they decide they're
going to get out of here and they're going to
go sailing around and pirrating on a beautiful career in
nautical terrorism.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
So it's a romantic love story, yes, with pirates.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
So they sail off on his ship, which is called
the Revenge, which so many pirate ships have.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Real wait a minute, that's that's that's the name of
the ship, the Revenge.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
The name of the ship is the Revenge, which is
what Anne wants anyway, And she goes out and starts
to set down with these pirates. And one thing that
you probably know it was it was considered bad luck
for any sailor to have a woman on board the ship. Yes,
they weren't working the ship, they weren't fighting, they weren't
they were passengers typically, and for whatever reason it became
(17:29):
a thing bad luck to have a woman on the ship.
Speaker 4 (17:31):
Yet, Yeah, so.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
What does Anbonni do?
Speaker 4 (17:34):
She Yeah, what would you do?
Speaker 3 (17:35):
Would you just say, oh, whoops, sorry and then just
quietly excuse yourself out. I suspect that is not what
she did.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
That does not sound like Ann Bonnie noes and Caligo
Jack wasn't exactly like here's my girlfriend, guys, what do
you think you know? Like, so she dressed as a man,
and she has one does her hair up, and she
wore a hat, and she dressed as a man and.
Speaker 4 (17:55):
She wore pants.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
She worked as a pirate, and the revenge starts to
take a you enemy ships, and.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
The pirate crew starts to really like this this Bonnie
character who is the most violent and the most bloody
and the hard is working and the toughest of all
of these pirates. Ann is really making a name for herself,
not just as a great fighter and like a person
manning the ship, but also she was a fantastic swearer.
(18:21):
She could she could swear with the best of them,
which I can really appreciate that because I rely on
that quite a bit in my day to day life.
I'm trying to mitigate my swearing now that I have
a baby who can repeat me, but generally I can
appreciate it a good a good swear word.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
Yeah, it's an art form.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
So eventually it came out somebody noticed that she was
actually a woman, but by that point nobody cared she
would wear men's clothing during battle and on shore and
all those things. But when she was just hanging out
on the ship, she could wear women's clothing if she
felt like it. You know, we do encounter throughout this
time period of history, sixteen hundred and seventeen hundred women
(19:04):
dressing as men and fighting as men. Right, it's a
fairly common story. But for Anne Bonnie, one thing she
was able to do that was a little different was
they knew she was a woman and they didn't care.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Yeah, which is different, right.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
They were like, you're contributing to the team.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
Yes, And so they are having adventures, they're traveling around
and this is the most Like Calgo Jack was a
pretty low level guy, and then once he take Brinsley,
brings on Anne Bonnie, he starts to become like successful.
He's taking ships, he's making a name for himself. Is
more than just like the dude in like the Bright
Red Jackets. He's now like the commander of the Revenge, right,
(19:41):
the most feared pirate ship off the coast of.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Nassau and the Bahamas.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
And he's making gold, he's making plunder, he's making a
name for himself, and he brings on a new pirate,
which happens to be, as we've mentioned in the beginning,
another woman, and when we come back we're going to
talk about her, so so stick with us.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
So, hey, welcome back from the break.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Just to kind of get back to what we're talking about.
At some point during Anne Bonnie in Caligo Jack's career
and it's not a very long career either, may be
pirrating for a.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
Year or two, but what are years. It's a pretty
eventful year or two.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
And they pick up a new passenger and pat, why
don't you yeah, tell us about yeah, this person.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
So yeah, So at some point, this guy named Mark
Reid shows up at the ship and says, hey, can
I join you? And they're like, okay, yeah, but who
is Mark Reid. Mark Reid is actually Mary Reid, and
Mary Reid was born in England in sixteen eighty five.
Just as Anne Bonnie had kind of like an interesting,
(21:00):
you're kind of like unorthodox sort of entry into the world,
so too did Mary Reid. Mary Read's mom had been
married to a guy who was a sailor and she
had a son with that husband.
Speaker 5 (21:13):
The sailor. Her husband didn't come back from one of
his sailing voyages. So Mama Reid takes up with another
another guy and gets pregnant. Now here's the thing, there's
an inheritance at stake. Here, here's the problem. The son,
(21:35):
this kid dies too because you know, yeah, you know.
Speaker 4 (21:38):
You know babies, because that's that's a thing.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
Yeah, exactly, Yeah, there's there's a there's a high mortality
rate among young humans. At this point, however, Mama Reid
gives birth to a kid. The kid happens to be
a daughter. Okay, Mama Reid manages to pass the daughter
off as the deceased son to get the inheritance, to
(22:04):
get the yeah, totally yeah, to get the inheritance. And
so Mary Reid, who the rest of the world knews
Mark Read is kind of raised as a boy in
the sense that if anyone asks, this kid is a boy.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
It's a it's like asurance scam.
Speaker 3 (22:21):
Yeah, okay, apparently this is a thing that people did
in those days. It makes a difference if you are
a male child, a male heir, or a female offspring.
So Mary or quote unquote mark Read grows up. She
kept passing as a man, and she enlisted in the army.
She fights for the Flemish England was supporting the Dutch
(22:42):
in at that time, there were allies. So she gets
to meet all these you know, cool Flemish soldiers, falls
in love with one of them. He falls in love
with her, you know, as you do, and they get
married and they live in the Netherlands and for a
bit what happens is buy an inn and they run
the inn.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Now so she must have revealed herself to him at
some she.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Must have, yes, oh, yeah, she must have.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Yeah, because they met in the army, right, which is
not that common of a meeting situation for people in
seventeen ten, right, yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
Yeah. Her husband died relatively young. Now this makes Mary
a widow, so she puts back on her male clothing
and re enlists. But there were no actual wars going
on at the time.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
So so she's a mercenary with nobody to pay her.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So she hops on a ship
headed to the Caribbean, and this ship is captured by
pirates because that's a thing that happens in those days.
And if you can't beat him, join him, or like
maybe she doesn't even try to beat him, and she's like, oh,
this is cooler than the thing I'm currently on, and
she joins up with our friends Kalico Jack and Anne Bonnie,
(23:55):
and they at this point they think she's a man.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
I read a lot about women from history, and one
of the comments I get a lot when I'm doing
the books and the website is like, oh, you need
to write about more women, And I'm like, you know,
it's hard, right, because I wonder how many Mark reads
we're on privateers ships in the Caribbean at this time
that we'll never hear about. I wonder how many famous
(24:17):
men from history maybe weren't, you know, it's an interesting
thing to think about.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
Yeah, so you know, we've got you know, this like
kind of group with two women whom we know are
women who are pirates. And we know this because we
have an account from someone called Charles Johnson, who may
or may not be a pseudonym for Daniel Dafoe, the
guy who wrote Robinson Grusso. But anyway, this is a source,
maybe a kind of sensationalized, slightly fictionalized, very fictionalized source.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
Yeah, Charles Johnson is an interesting one, like this history
of the most notorious pirates, Like that's the main source
of information for this stuff. Oh yeah, for the a
Bonnie and Mary read stories. But Charles Johnson is not
a reliable narrator generally speaking.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
No, but it's all we have, so it's what we
got to go.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
Yeah, and he knows how to tell a good story.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Oh and it's great. Yeah, I definitely recommend read.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
Yeah. So yeah, anyway, so Charles Johnson quotes one of
their victims named Dorothy Thomas, Mary Reader. The person we
know is Mary Reid and Anne Bonnie quote wore men's
jackets and long trousers, and each of them had a
machete and a pistol. So that's what's going on during
working hours, but off duty, what's going on. So Anne
(25:26):
Bonnie and Jack Rackham Calico Jack are lovers, and so
presumably this means that Jack knows that Anne is a
woman who just happens to be wearing pants at this
particular point in time, hopefully, I mean, you know, I mean,
but one day, you know, Anne dressed as a man
and Mary also dressed as a man, you know, carrying
(25:47):
out and they're like, yeah, yeah, that was a good
that was a good yeah, good plundering session there, right, yeah. Yeah,
And Bonnie confesses to read, I am no man, and
read whom we know as Mary read says well, I
have something to confess too, Actually, I am no man.
And the two of them were spotted in each other's
(26:09):
company a lot on board. There would definitely BFFs. And
you know, many historians do interpret this as a lesbian
or maybe bisexual relationship because remember that Anne Bonnie was
also involved with Kaliko Jack, and Kaliko Jack apparently is
jealous I.
Speaker 5 (26:27):
Mean quote Charles Johnson here. This intimacy so disturbed Captain Rackham,
who was the lover and gallant of Anne Bonnie, that
he grew furiously jealous, so that he told Anne Bonnie
he would cut her new lover's throat. Therefore, to quiet him,
she and Bonnie let him into the secret. Also because
apparently Calico Jack is okay with his girlfriend two timing
(26:49):
him provided the side piece is a woman, and no
one died. No one died from this little encounter.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
When I read the book, I have a little sidebit
in there about like, you know, some people think that
Mary Reid and Anne Bonnie were lovers and not just
like comrades at arms. And I was like, these people,
these historians need to stop reading so much porn. But
then the way you describe it, I'm like, that sounds
like the beginning of a porn Honestly, turns out she's
actually a girl. Oh So, there's one story that I
(27:20):
really like about Mary Reid that I came across not
too long ago, and that I can't verify anywhere else
except for this one source. But it was that Mary
Reid falls in love with the ship's navigator on the Revenge.
He's younger than her, and he's cute, and she likes him,
and they become lovers. And then one of the pirates
(27:42):
on the Revenge is trying to bully this navigator. Dude
challenges him too a duel, wants to fight him, wants
to kick his ass right to prove how tough he
is or whatever. He challenges this navigator to a duel
and wants to fight him to the death, and Mary
Reid just starts insulting this to the point where it's like, no,
(28:02):
I'm going to duel you right now because I don't
have any faith in up.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
So she's like, because the.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
Navigator has no chance against this pirate, and she's like,
I think I could take this guy in the story,
the ship pulls over to an island and they get
off the ship and they fight on land.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
Oh, and she like swords him to death.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
She kills him with a sword and then they get
back on the boat and they leave his dead body
there to be eating my animals or whatever the moment.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
But that's a that's a Mary Reid story. That that
kind of that I that I like a lot.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
Note to self, do not insult Mary Reid's boyfriend.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Yeah, not a good idea. Not a good idea to
insult it. Not a good idea across either of these women.
Because you know, we know how these pirate stories end, right, Like,
as much as we love to romanticize piracy and the
Caribbean at this time period, but in reality, they're thieves
and murderers and they have violent ends and that's how
this goes, and that's how it goes for the crew
(28:54):
of the Revenge as well. Yeah, in October of seventeen twenty,
the Revenge has just taken a Spanish galleon. There's gold
and it's also got a bunch of rum on it,
and all the pirates start partying and drinking.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
Yo, He've honed a bottle of rum, and you know.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Right exactly, everybody's partying. They got gold, they got rum.
They're having a good time. And they pull off onto
one of these islands and they're having a party. And
then this British ship pulls up. What is Rogers is there?
He's continuing his quest to in limited Yeah, I remember
when he knock my Remember when you knocked my brother's
twice's teeth out?
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Yeah, guess who? So he pulls up.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
The crew of the Revenge is very drunk and they're
outnumbered and they're taken by surprise, and there's only two
crew members of the Revenge who have the guts to
fight back against the Royal Navy.
Speaker 4 (29:46):
As they board the ship, and who are those two members?
Speaker 2 (29:50):
Those are crew and Buying CREWM and Reid. They they
do not want to go back to their old life.
They do not want to deal with any of this.
They are going to fight to the end. They attack
the Marines with the swords and with guns. They are
captured and as they're being hauled away to the prison
(30:10):
or whatever, to the brig they're so angry with the
rest of the crew of the Revenge for not fighting
that Anne Bonnie pulls her guns and fires the last
two shots, one in each hand, at her own crew
members for being cowards and not helping her fight the British.
I got two shots left. I'm not even going to
use them on these two dudes who are dragging me away.
I'm just gonna shoot at you guys, because.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Go to hell.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
Okay, that's one heck of a performance review. Okay, so
she's used all of her bullets, she's being hauled off.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
What happens next, Well, as you do, they're all sentenced
to death by hanging for being pirates.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
But there's a but there's a wrench in the.
Speaker 3 (30:49):
There's a twist.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
There's a twist.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
It turns out that both Anne Bonnie and Mary Reid
claimed that they are pregnant and.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
What does what does that do for them? I mean
that sounds like a complict things.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Or well, the life that Anne Bonnie and Mary Reid
would be like came from was not as exciting as
their piracy life. Like it is still a culture that
is not really cool with hanging a pregnant woman. So
they are released from prison because you can't in prison
and hang a pregnant woman.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
That's just against the rules. Nobody's cool with that. You
can go.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
Yeah, are we one hundred percent sure they were pregnant
or were they just a little bit pregnant.
Speaker 4 (31:26):
Or we don't know the crazygnant Okay.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
We don't know if there was. We don't know if
they had to prove it. We don't know how they
would do that. We don't know what it was. That's
what they said. They it's called pleading the belly. They
pled the belly, cleading the belly, They pled the belly. Yeah,
Mary Reid dies in prison before she gets released, possibly
through a wound she sustained. Yeah, she was pregnant and
that didn't go well for her.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
We don't know why she died, but she dies before
she gets released. People just drop dead in seventeen twenty
for no reason. And it's the reason why you would
never want a time travel back in time just teen twenty,
because these things just happen.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
Oh goodness.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Yeah, So we don't know the story on why Mary
read dies, but she dies and Bonnie does not. She
leaves and she walks out, and on her way out
the door, she stops by Calico Jack Rackham's cell and
she looks at him, and he's like, oh, you got
to get me out of here. And she says to him,
I'm sorry, Jack, but if you had fought like a man,
you would not now be about to die like a dog.
Speaker 4 (32:25):
Oh snap, And she leaves.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
Yeah, and she disappears from history forever and we have
no idea what happened to her.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
That's it.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
She walks out the door of that prison and has
never heard from again. Calico Jack is hanged a couple
days later and dies, And that's the story. They cut
a very unique figure the time, that is very romanticized
by our culture, in a career that was exciting and
bloody and dangerous. And so yeah, if you want to
(32:54):
read more about him, like you said, Charles Johnson, A
General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most
Notorious Pirates is the name of the book.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
I like it. I like it.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
I like it too.
Speaker 3 (33:06):
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the
Most notice Pirates.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
Yeah, it's a really fun read.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
It's not exactly fantastic historically accurate, but it's fun worth it.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Yeah, But if you want something a little more historical,
what would we do? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (33:21):
Yeah, so I really like Under the Black Flag by
David Cordingly. It's one of my favorite books on pirates.
Republic of Pirates by Colin Woodward is amazing. For this
we I used as a great Smithsonian article by Karen Abbott.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
It's called if There's a Man Among You, which I like.
Speaker 3 (33:39):
That's a great title.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
Yeah. Yeah, it talked about both Mary read and and
Bonnie and I.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Just bought a book.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
I I just ordered a book called Pirate Queen's by
Rebecca Alexandra Simon off Amazon, but I haven't had a
chance to read it, but it deals with both of
them as well, so I'm looking forward to that.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
Yeah, Okay, so until next time.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
Yeah, we'll see you guys next one. Thanks so much
for listening.
Speaker 5 (34:03):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content.
Speaker 3 (34:09):
Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Me, Pat Larish, and.
Speaker 5 (34:13):
My co host Ben Thompson. Writing is by me and Ben.
Story editing is by Ian Jacobs, Brandon Phibbs, and Allie Lamer.
Mixing and music and sound design is by Jude Brewer.
Consulting by Michael May. Special thanks to Noel Brown at
iHeart Badass of the Week is based on the website
(34:33):
Badass of Theweek dot com, where you can read all
sorts of stories about other badasses. If you want to
reach out with questions ideas, you can email us at
Badass Podcast at badass oftheweek dot com. If you like
the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen, and tell your friends and
your enemies if you want as We'll be back next
(34:55):
week with another one. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the art heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or where
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
We're on a ship in the Caribbean, blanketed by the
spray of ocean water, the stench of gunpowder, and of course,
the blood curdling.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Screams of pirates.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
The deck is slick with blood, and our ears are
filled with the snaps of musket fire and the clanging
of cutlasses banging off one another in.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
A heat of battle.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Into this chaotic fray, one figure darts through the smoke
of cannon and shot, screaming into battle, at the head
of the pirate forces that swarm over the deck of
the Spanish galleony. Wielding a flint lock in each hand,
with three more strapped on, a bandolier across her chest
and a gleaming cutlass at her hip, she barks orders
to the ferocious array of demons that follow her every command.
(00:48):
She is a vision of Hell, the embodiment of the
furies of antiquity.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
She is the notorious and bond, and she will not
be denied.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
Hey, then, how's it going today?
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Well?
Speaker 2 (01:15):
As usual, I am recording on the floor of my
closet because I don't have a studio setup yet.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
So you know, about as comfortable as it can be.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
I mean, isn't that the canonical way to do it
these days?
Speaker 2 (01:26):
It's the only room in my house that doesn't have
like a million windows, and I live like right by
the freeway. Yeah, there's always emergency vehicles running outside.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
How's moving going, by the way.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
It's okay.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
I was supposed to move on Tuesday, and then we're
having some issue where like now we can't. We couldn't
move on Tuesday. So we might be moving tomorrow, or
we might be moving next week, or the whole thing
might be falling apart.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
So who knows. I don't think the whole thing is
falling apart.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
I very much hope to not be recording in a
closet next week, but I'll have to see.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Yeah, where will you be recording?
Speaker 2 (01:56):
Like on horseback or horseback? Yeah, the badass way to
do it from a jet fighter. Probably have some probably
have some background noise issues.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Well, you might have a cat giving birth to kittens.
Did you see that. It's in North Carolina the Hickory
Aviation Museum. We have these airplanes on display, and there
was a cat who just was looking for a place
to give birth. To her kittens and somehow managed to
get into the plane, and the people who work at
the museum is like, wait, what's going on here, Oh kittens, Okay,
we're not going to interfere at the moment. And I
(02:28):
think they're trying to adopt the kittens out now, and
they've named them after different types of planes. Anyway, that
would make things even more interesting if you decided to,
you know, record from.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
A plane with kittens being born around me. It's the
ultimate dichotomy of badass, right, like the jet fighter and
the cute kittens.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
Yeah, it's easy to forget that these little like seven
pound beings are actually fierce. Predator is just fun sized.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Yeah, they're extremely cute, and they're also like one of
the only creatures on Earth that like kills for fun. Right,
It's like humans, dolphins and cats are like.
Speaker 4 (03:05):
The only way dolphins kill for fun.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
Dolphins will kill something for fun.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
I didn't know that.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Yeah, yeah, they'll kill something and not eat it. So
like that there's only like three or four creatures in
the world that do that.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Because I thought dolphins were all like, you know, peace
and love and sunshine.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
No, there's they're they're they're kind of like murderous maniaccs.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
Alrighty then, okay.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
All there's the all thing with dolphins.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
I mean I have to say, like, you know, I
any creature that seems intelligent, you know that, I tend
to want to like.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Yeah, but intelligence breeds that, like I wonder what happened
if I did this, right?
Speaker 1 (03:43):
You get like too smart for your own good level, yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Or too smart for the good of the beings around
you or whatever.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Well, I don't know, I guess speaking of predators, yeah, pretors,
I guess.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
Well, yeah, so you know, one of the Latin world Okay, sorry,
this is me putting on my you know, latinist hat.
One of the words for pirate in Latin's prido, which
is where we get the word predator from.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Really yeah, they have the same route.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
Yeah yeah, so yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
I guess that makes sense, right. They prey on shipping
or whatever. That's a phrase you hear a lot in
reference to pirates.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
Yeah, someone who goes after loot.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Hmm. Yeah, it's really cool. I didn't know it.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Fun fact, I was really struggling on how we were
going to turn my kitty Cat into a pirate story.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
But here we go.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
I'm really excited about this week because we're going to
talk about one of my favorite badasses ever. I've been
doing this for a long time, for fifteen ish years,
probably closer to twenty than fifteen now. A Bonnie is
a character I wrote about. She was an original, like
very early on badass on the website, and I'm very
excited to talk about her this week. Yes, she is
(04:52):
a woman who was a pirate at the height of
the Golden Age of piracy in the Caribbean.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
She's not the most successful female pirate of all time, right.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
You have, yeah, but here we are talking about her,
so yeah, yeah, yeah. So who would you consider the
most successful?
Speaker 2 (05:07):
There were a few like female pirates who were like
very successful. Probably the most successful one was a Chinese
woman named ching Shi. She commanded like a fleet of pirates.
She had kind of come from nothing and then became
like the wife of a pirate king or the concubine
of a pirate king, and then he died and she
took over, and then she just like ruled with an
iron fist. She committed like a fleet of ships. Like
(05:30):
the Chinese Imperial Navy tried to attack her and she
defeated them in battle, like she collects this huge bounty
of gold and treasure and then she retires. There was
a woman named Jean de Clisson. She was a frenchwoman
who pirated in the English Channel during the Hundred Years War.
I guess like the English had killed her husband, I think,
is the story, and she would like capture English ships
(05:52):
and kill everybody on board. She was extremely violent but
very successful. And there was another there was an Irish
woman named Grace Mall who's another very famous female pirate.
We'll probably talk about all three of these at some
point on the show.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
At some point.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Yeah, but yeah, the one that.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
For me always kind of the one that I think
for most of like popular culture and like popular history stuff,
like Anne Bonnie is kind of the go to, like
for like badass pirate woman of the Caribbean. She's got
the most exciting stories. She's operating in the right place
at the right time, you know, with the right people.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
She's meeting all of the main.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Characters you talk about when you talk about piracy, right, Yeah,
you have so much good pirate stories happening in China
and off the coast of Africa. But when people think
of pirates, they think pirates of the Caribbean and of those,
An Bonnie is kind of the story that everybody wants
to talk about, and.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
We're really excited to talk about it.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
We're excited to talk about not just Ane Bonnie, but
also Mary Reid, yes, the other woman that was on
this crew.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
And so we've got this ship which has not one
but two badass female pirates on it.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
And they were more badass than any of the male
pirates on that ship apparently. And we'll get into why
that is.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Yep. So stick with us.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
We'll be right back after these messages. Welcome back, and
we are going to get into talking about Anne Bonnie,
who is a personal favorite of mine. And this is
a really fun story about a very cool and interesting
(07:24):
and exciting and to be honest, like pretty angry person.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
And to be honest, angry people are interesting sometimes It's
very true anyway, So tell us about Anne Bonnie.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Anne Bonnie was originally born Anne Cormack. She was born
in Cook County, Ireland around the turn of the seventeenth century.
She was born to a wealthy lawyer named William Cormac
and his maid, a woman named Mary Brennan.
Speaker 5 (07:52):
Made as in a person who worked at the household,
not actually the wife.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Not missus Cormac, Missus Cormack is. Yeah, Missus Cormack was
not happy about this. She was pretty upset about it,
and she made mister Cormack's life hard. In Cook County, Ireland,
Ireland is very Catholic at the time and still is today.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
There's a and also she's just allowed to be mad
because she's allowed to be mad. You know, she's allowed
to be cranky.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Hey, look, if I was missus Cormack, I'd be pretty mad.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
There's a lot going on there.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Yeah, but this kind of informs Anne Bonnie pretty early
on in that she's unwanted from minute one, and her
life is hard and it becomes harder, and she responds
to it in a variety of unhealthy ways.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
Yeah, unhealthy but understandable. We get where she's coming from.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
Right exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
So she's there and mister Cormack tries to kind of
raise her as his own as best he can, but
it's hard, right, and he decides eventually, like, you know what,
I'm gonna move.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
I got to start over.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
And he decides he's going to relocate to Charleston, South Carolina.
So he picks up Ann and he takes off. He
gets a big plot of land in outside Charleston, South Carolina,
and he moves there to kind of start over again,
go somewhere where nobody knows who he is or cares,
and is mostly raised there. I imagine she probably doesn't
remember much of Ireland except that I think she maintained
(09:23):
the reddish hair, and that's about all she really got
from Ireland. And Charleston at this point is a pretty
exciting place to be.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
It is.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
It's a hub of what's known as the Triangle trade,
which is a little bit of a sticky thing to
talk about because it is it's problematic.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
I mean, let's just put it out there. It's problematic.
It's you know, what are the three points of the triangle.
You know, you've got sugar, you've got rum, and you've
also got human beings being traded as possessions. Because this
was the age of slavery across.
Speaker 4 (10:00):
The Atlantic exactly.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
This is the background against which Anne Bonnie does her.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Stuff, right, and so that's going on, and Charleston is
a big hub for that. So it's one of the
points of the triangle, and there are ships coming in
and out there's all kinds of like people in trade
and movement, and it's an exciting place to be if
you're Anne Bonnie, because the entire Atlantic trade is all
kind of running through this port at Charleston. So there's
(10:28):
a lot happening for her, and she's kind of growing
up in this kind of exciting environment. She goes down
to the docks a lot and hangs out there, and
you know, she's drinking at fifteen, and she's partying, and she's,
you know.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
Living life to the fullest in her own way exactly.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
She's doing teenager things down at the docks. Right.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Note to my students, doctor Larish does not endorse drinking
at age fifteen. Continue.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
And so Ann gets into trouble for the first time
at the age of four when she gets into an
argument with one of the housekeepers at the estate and
she ends up pulling a steak knife and stabbing that
woman in the stomach with it.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
Whoo at age fourteen.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
Yeah, I'm not saying that, like stabbing your maid in
the stomach with a steak knife is badass, but like
this just kind of gives you insight into the character
of Anne Bonnie. She is a fiery, angry person who
doesn't take shit from anybody, and yeah, this will surf
her well in her career as a pirate.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
But she has trouble for mister Cormack.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
About a year later, she's down at the docks drinking
at a bar and some guy is a little too
handsy with her, so she hospitalizes him. She beats him
senseless and leaves him in a ditch, which.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Okay, I mean, you know, self defense. You know, she's
enforcing boundaries.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Very clear about her boundaries. This guy was pushed it
a little too far and she put him in the
hospital for what appears to be months.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Whoa, Yeah, okay, she.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Really messes this guy out. She's not a person to
be messed with, so mister Kormack, she's a little bit
of a headache for mister Kormack. And mister Kormack decides,
you know what we can do.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
We need to.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Marry sweet Anne off to a nice boy, and she'll
be happy once she settles down with a nice.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
Man, right, because that'll work.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Go figure.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
But she doesn't want to date any of these guys,
and she doesn't like any of the high society dudes
that her dad tries to set her up with. So
what she ends up doing to kind of escape this
life is at the age of sixteen, she runs off
and marries.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
A pirate as one does.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
As you do, you go down to the document a pirate.
She meets a guy named James Bonnie. That's where the
Anne Bonnie comes from, and he takes her to Nasau,
which is the capital of the Bahamas. It's always very
interesting because Nasau is like this beautiful, like exotic, you know,
Caribbean beaches and turquoise water kind of thing. But whenever
I think of Nasau in my head and in the
(12:51):
seventeen hundred's, I picture that scene from Pirates of the
Caribbee and where the dudes are like swinging ale out
of flagons and like swing from the swinging from the
light fixtures in the bar, and it's just anarchy and craziness.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
And we can picture Anne Bonnie doing this.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Absolutely She's in the middle of all of this. An
Bonnie liked to party.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
A Bonnie was definitely always down for a bar fight
or a drinking competition or any type of thing like that.
So you put her in mas Eisley Spaceport and she
is just gonna like make friends immediately or get into
a fight or both. So Ann Bonnie is doing her
(13:32):
thing in NASA.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
She likes it.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
It's much better than anything she'd had in Charleston, but
she does occasionally get sucked into this high society thing.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
She can't escape it.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
She ends up going to a party at the house
of the sister in law of the governor of Jamaica.
So the governor of Jamaica at this time is a
guy named what is Rogers, who if we're looking at
the grand scheme of the Golden age of piracy in
the Caribbean, we are reaching the end of it. Is
Rogers is kind of the guy who ends the Golden
(14:02):
Age of piracy. He's a British officer who shows up
and kind of cracks down on everything, and he offers
a pirate amnesty, so like, hey, you know, I'll forgive
you for whatever your crimes were if you tell rat
out your friends for me, and then everybody who's left
after that, he sends the British Navy after them. He's
very badass, but he's not particularly relevant to the story.
That just places Ann kind of at the end of
(14:24):
this golden age. Yeah, she is at a party at
what is Rogers's sister in law's house, So his brother's wife,
she is there, and she is talking to the sister
in law apparently what is Roger's sister in law make
some comment that Anne Bonnie doesn't like. Uh oh, an
Bonnie hauls off and slugs her in the face and
knocks out two of her teeth.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Oh my, okay, that seems like a very unexpected way
to respond to a slight in high society.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
You know, no matter how much she was brought up
in the high society life, she never really got the
hang of it. And so yeah, I would love to
see this in like a movie, right of just like
Downton Abbey, kind of like subtle digs, you know, the
like needling little comments and snarky things, right, and then
to just have like this like Redhead pirate.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Chick just be like, oh yeah, damn, you know, I
enjoy this. I enjoy that. I enjoy thinking about it.
It makes me happy.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
I'm sure that this woman probably didn't deserve to be
punch in the face, but like I'm sure that like
any of us in and Bonnie's situation here, would have
wanted to do that and not had the balls to
do it.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
Yeah, yeah, talking with her fists, you.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Know, I talk about what does Rogers offered this pirate amnesty?
So James Bonnie ends up taking what is Rogers up
on it, right, And James Bonnie really can't fault him
too much for this because his options are rat out
your fellow pirates and get an amnesty, or don't and
be arrested and or killed. James Bond is pretty small time, right,
(16:00):
He's not like a pirate captain. He's not a main guy.
He's kind of a wannabe. And Anne is furious when
she finds out. She is not happy. She likes the pirates,
she does not like the high society dudes, and she
decides she is going to leave him for a real pirate.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
Oh wait, a real pirate. Ooh, we're throwing shade.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
So she meets up with the dude, a guy named
Jack Rackham. And Jack Rackham is known as Calico Jack
because he dresses in crazy like colorful clothes like a
calico cat. So Jack Rackham is like, he's not a
very successful pirate. He's not very good pirate. He doesn't
have a lot of records to his name, he hasn't
(16:42):
taken a lot of enemy ships. But they meet at
a party and he likes Anne, and they decide they're
going to get out of here and they're going to
go sailing around and pirrating on a beautiful career in
nautical terrorism.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
So it's a romantic love story, yes, with pirates.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
So they sail off on his ship, which is called
the Revenge, which so many pirate ships have.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Real wait a minute, that's that's that's the name of
the ship, the Revenge.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
The name of the ship is the Revenge, which is
what Anne wants anyway, And she goes out and starts
to set down with these pirates. And one thing that
you probably know it was it was considered bad luck
for any sailor to have a woman on board the ship. Yes,
they weren't working the ship, they weren't fighting, they weren't
they were passengers typically, and for whatever reason it became
(17:29):
a thing bad luck to have a woman on the ship.
Speaker 4 (17:31):
Yet, Yeah, so.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
What does Anbonni do?
Speaker 4 (17:34):
She Yeah, what would you do?
Speaker 3 (17:35):
Would you just say, oh, whoops, sorry and then just
quietly excuse yourself out. I suspect that is not what
she did.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
That does not sound like Ann Bonnie noes and Caligo
Jack wasn't exactly like here's my girlfriend, guys, what do
you think you know? Like, so she dressed as a man,
and she has one does her hair up, and she
wore a hat, and she dressed as a man and.
Speaker 4 (17:55):
She wore pants.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
She worked as a pirate, and the revenge starts to
take a you enemy ships, and.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
The pirate crew starts to really like this this Bonnie
character who is the most violent and the most bloody
and the hard is working and the toughest of all
of these pirates. Ann is really making a name for herself,
not just as a great fighter and like a person
manning the ship, but also she was a fantastic swearer.
(18:21):
She could she could swear with the best of them,
which I can really appreciate that because I rely on
that quite a bit in my day to day life.
I'm trying to mitigate my swearing now that I have
a baby who can repeat me, but generally I can
appreciate it a good a good swear word.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
Yeah, it's an art form.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
So eventually it came out somebody noticed that she was
actually a woman, but by that point nobody cared she
would wear men's clothing during battle and on shore and
all those things. But when she was just hanging out
on the ship, she could wear women's clothing if she
felt like it. You know, we do encounter throughout this
time period of history, sixteen hundred and seventeen hundred women
(19:04):
dressing as men and fighting as men. Right, it's a
fairly common story. But for Anne Bonnie, one thing she
was able to do that was a little different was
they knew she was a woman and they didn't care.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Yeah, which is different, right.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
They were like, you're contributing to the team.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
Yes, And so they are having adventures, they're traveling around
and this is the most Like Calgo Jack was a
pretty low level guy, and then once he take Brinsley,
brings on Anne Bonnie, he starts to become like successful.
He's taking ships, he's making a name for himself. Is
more than just like the dude in like the Bright
Red Jackets. He's now like the commander of the Revenge, right,
(19:41):
the most feared pirate ship off the coast of.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Nassau and the Bahamas.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
And he's making gold, he's making plunder, he's making a
name for himself, and he brings on a new pirate,
which happens to be, as we've mentioned in the beginning,
another woman, and when we come back we're going to
talk about her, so so stick with us.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
So, hey, welcome back from the break.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Just to kind of get back to what we're talking about.
At some point during Anne Bonnie in Caligo Jack's career
and it's not a very long career either, may be
pirrating for a.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
Year or two, but what are years. It's a pretty
eventful year or two.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
And they pick up a new passenger and pat, why
don't you yeah, tell us about yeah, this person.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
So yeah, So at some point, this guy named Mark
Reid shows up at the ship and says, hey, can
I join you? And they're like, okay, yeah, but who
is Mark Reid. Mark Reid is actually Mary Reid, and
Mary Reid was born in England in sixteen eighty five.
Just as Anne Bonnie had kind of like an interesting,
(21:00):
you're kind of like unorthodox sort of entry into the world,
so too did Mary Reid. Mary Read's mom had been
married to a guy who was a sailor and she
had a son with that husband.
Speaker 5 (21:13):
The sailor. Her husband didn't come back from one of
his sailing voyages. So Mama Reid takes up with another
another guy and gets pregnant. Now here's the thing, there's
an inheritance at stake. Here, here's the problem. The son,
(21:35):
this kid dies too because you know, yeah, you know.
Speaker 4 (21:38):
You know babies, because that's that's a thing.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
Yeah, exactly, Yeah, there's there's a there's a high mortality
rate among young humans. At this point, however, Mama Reid
gives birth to a kid. The kid happens to be
a daughter. Okay, Mama Reid manages to pass the daughter
off as the deceased son to get the inheritance, to
(22:04):
get the yeah, totally yeah, to get the inheritance. And
so Mary Reid, who the rest of the world knews
Mark Read is kind of raised as a boy in
the sense that if anyone asks, this kid is a boy.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
It's a it's like asurance scam.
Speaker 3 (22:21):
Yeah, okay, apparently this is a thing that people did
in those days. It makes a difference if you are
a male child, a male heir, or a female offspring.
So Mary or quote unquote mark Read grows up. She
kept passing as a man, and she enlisted in the army.
She fights for the Flemish England was supporting the Dutch
(22:42):
in at that time, there were allies. So she gets
to meet all these you know, cool Flemish soldiers, falls
in love with one of them. He falls in love
with her, you know, as you do, and they get
married and they live in the Netherlands and for a
bit what happens is buy an inn and they run
the inn.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Now so she must have revealed herself to him at
some she.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Must have, yes, oh, yeah, she must have.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Yeah, because they met in the army, right, which is
not that common of a meeting situation for people in
seventeen ten, right, yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
Yeah. Her husband died relatively young. Now this makes Mary
a widow, so she puts back on her male clothing
and re enlists. But there were no actual wars going
on at the time.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
So so she's a mercenary with nobody to pay her.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So she hops on a ship
headed to the Caribbean, and this ship is captured by
pirates because that's a thing that happens in those days.
And if you can't beat him, join him, or like
maybe she doesn't even try to beat him, and she's like, oh,
this is cooler than the thing I'm currently on, and
she joins up with our friends Kalico Jack and Anne Bonnie,
(23:55):
and they at this point they think she's a man.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
I read a lot about women from history, and one
of the comments I get a lot when I'm doing
the books and the website is like, oh, you need
to write about more women, And I'm like, you know,
it's hard, right, because I wonder how many Mark reads
we're on privateers ships in the Caribbean at this time
that we'll never hear about. I wonder how many famous
(24:17):
men from history maybe weren't, you know, it's an interesting
thing to think about.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
Yeah, so you know, we've got you know, this like
kind of group with two women whom we know are
women who are pirates. And we know this because we
have an account from someone called Charles Johnson, who may
or may not be a pseudonym for Daniel Dafoe, the
guy who wrote Robinson Grusso. But anyway, this is a source,
maybe a kind of sensationalized, slightly fictionalized, very fictionalized source.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
Yeah, Charles Johnson is an interesting one, like this history
of the most notorious pirates, Like that's the main source
of information for this stuff. Oh yeah, for the a
Bonnie and Mary read stories. But Charles Johnson is not
a reliable narrator generally speaking.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
No, but it's all we have, so it's what we
got to go.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
Yeah, and he knows how to tell a good story.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Oh and it's great. Yeah, I definitely recommend read.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
Yeah. So yeah, anyway, so Charles Johnson quotes one of
their victims named Dorothy Thomas, Mary Reader. The person we
know is Mary Reid and Anne Bonnie quote wore men's
jackets and long trousers, and each of them had a
machete and a pistol. So that's what's going on during
working hours, but off duty, what's going on. So Anne
(25:26):
Bonnie and Jack Rackham Calico Jack are lovers, and so
presumably this means that Jack knows that Anne is a
woman who just happens to be wearing pants at this
particular point in time, hopefully, I mean, you know, I mean,
but one day, you know, Anne dressed as a man
and Mary also dressed as a man, you know, carrying
(25:47):
out and they're like, yeah, yeah, that was a good
that was a good yeah, good plundering session there, right, yeah. Yeah,
And Bonnie confesses to read, I am no man, and
read whom we know as Mary read says well, I
have something to confess too, Actually, I am no man.
And the two of them were spotted in each other's
(26:09):
company a lot on board. There would definitely BFFs. And
you know, many historians do interpret this as a lesbian
or maybe bisexual relationship because remember that Anne Bonnie was
also involved with Kaliko Jack, and Kaliko Jack apparently is
jealous I.
Speaker 5 (26:27):
Mean quote Charles Johnson here. This intimacy so disturbed Captain Rackham,
who was the lover and gallant of Anne Bonnie, that
he grew furiously jealous, so that he told Anne Bonnie
he would cut her new lover's throat. Therefore, to quiet him,
she and Bonnie let him into the secret. Also because
apparently Calico Jack is okay with his girlfriend two timing
(26:49):
him provided the side piece is a woman, and no
one died. No one died from this little encounter.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
When I read the book, I have a little sidebit
in there about like, you know, some people think that
Mary Reid and Anne Bonnie were lovers and not just
like comrades at arms. And I was like, these people,
these historians need to stop reading so much porn. But
then the way you describe it, I'm like, that sounds
like the beginning of a porn Honestly, turns out she's
actually a girl. Oh So, there's one story that I
(27:20):
really like about Mary Reid that I came across not
too long ago, and that I can't verify anywhere else
except for this one source. But it was that Mary
Reid falls in love with the ship's navigator on the Revenge.
He's younger than her, and he's cute, and she likes him,
and they become lovers. And then one of the pirates
(27:42):
on the Revenge is trying to bully this navigator. Dude
challenges him too a duel, wants to fight him, wants
to kick his ass right to prove how tough he
is or whatever. He challenges this navigator to a duel
and wants to fight him to the death, and Mary
Reid just starts insulting this to the point where it's like, no,
(28:02):
I'm going to duel you right now because I don't
have any faith in up.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
So she's like, because the.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
Navigator has no chance against this pirate, and she's like,
I think I could take this guy in the story,
the ship pulls over to an island and they get
off the ship and they fight on land.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
Oh, and she like swords him to death.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
She kills him with a sword and then they get
back on the boat and they leave his dead body
there to be eating my animals or whatever the moment.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
But that's a that's a Mary Reid story. That that
kind of that I that I like a lot.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
Note to self, do not insult Mary Reid's boyfriend.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Yeah, not a good idea. Not a good idea to
insult it. Not a good idea across either of these women.
Because you know, we know how these pirate stories end, right, Like,
as much as we love to romanticize piracy and the
Caribbean at this time period, but in reality, they're thieves
and murderers and they have violent ends and that's how
this goes, and that's how it goes for the crew
(28:54):
of the Revenge as well. Yeah, in October of seventeen twenty,
the Revenge has just taken a Spanish galleon. There's gold
and it's also got a bunch of rum on it,
and all the pirates start partying and drinking.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
Yo, He've honed a bottle of rum, and you know.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Right exactly, everybody's partying. They got gold, they got rum.
They're having a good time. And they pull off onto
one of these islands and they're having a party. And
then this British ship pulls up. What is Rogers is there?
He's continuing his quest to in limited Yeah, I remember
when he knock my Remember when you knocked my brother's
twice's teeth out?
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Yeah, guess who? So he pulls up.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
The crew of the Revenge is very drunk and they're
outnumbered and they're taken by surprise, and there's only two
crew members of the Revenge who have the guts to
fight back against the Royal Navy.
Speaker 4 (29:46):
As they board the ship, and who are those two members?
Speaker 2 (29:50):
Those are crew and Buying CREWM and Reid. They they
do not want to go back to their old life.
They do not want to deal with any of this.
They are going to fight to the end. They attack
the Marines with the swords and with guns. They are
captured and as they're being hauled away to the prison
(30:10):
or whatever, to the brig they're so angry with the
rest of the crew of the Revenge for not fighting
that Anne Bonnie pulls her guns and fires the last
two shots, one in each hand, at her own crew
members for being cowards and not helping her fight the British.
I got two shots left. I'm not even going to
use them on these two dudes who are dragging me away.
I'm just gonna shoot at you guys, because.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Go to hell.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
Okay, that's one heck of a performance review. Okay, so
she's used all of her bullets, she's being hauled off.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
What happens next, Well, as you do, they're all sentenced
to death by hanging for being pirates.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
But there's a but there's a wrench in the.
Speaker 3 (30:49):
There's a twist.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
There's a twist.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
It turns out that both Anne Bonnie and Mary Reid
claimed that they are pregnant and.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
What does what does that do for them? I mean
that sounds like a complict things.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Or well, the life that Anne Bonnie and Mary Reid
would be like came from was not as exciting as
their piracy life. Like it is still a culture that
is not really cool with hanging a pregnant woman. So
they are released from prison because you can't in prison
and hang a pregnant woman.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
That's just against the rules. Nobody's cool with that. You
can go.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
Yeah, are we one hundred percent sure they were pregnant
or were they just a little bit pregnant.
Speaker 4 (31:26):
Or we don't know the crazygnant Okay.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
We don't know if there was. We don't know if
they had to prove it. We don't know how they
would do that. We don't know what it was. That's
what they said. They it's called pleading the belly. They
pled the belly, cleading the belly, They pled the belly. Yeah,
Mary Reid dies in prison before she gets released, possibly
through a wound she sustained. Yeah, she was pregnant and
that didn't go well for her.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
We don't know why she died, but she dies before
she gets released. People just drop dead in seventeen twenty
for no reason. And it's the reason why you would
never want a time travel back in time just teen twenty,
because these things just happen.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
Oh goodness.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Yeah, So we don't know the story on why Mary
read dies, but she dies and Bonnie does not. She
leaves and she walks out, and on her way out
the door, she stops by Calico Jack Rackham's cell and
she looks at him, and he's like, oh, you got
to get me out of here. And she says to him,
I'm sorry, Jack, but if you had fought like a man,
you would not now be about to die like a dog.
Speaker 4 (32:25):
Oh snap, And she leaves.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
Yeah, and she disappears from history forever and we have
no idea what happened to her.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
That's it.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
She walks out the door of that prison and has
never heard from again. Calico Jack is hanged a couple
days later and dies, And that's the story. They cut
a very unique figure the time, that is very romanticized
by our culture, in a career that was exciting and
bloody and dangerous. And so yeah, if you want to
(32:54):
read more about him, like you said, Charles Johnson, A
General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most
Notorious Pirates is the name of the book.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
I like it. I like it.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
I like it too.
Speaker 3 (33:06):
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the
Most notice Pirates.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
Yeah, it's a really fun read.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
It's not exactly fantastic historically accurate, but it's fun worth it.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Yeah, But if you want something a little more historical,
what would we do? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (33:21):
Yeah, so I really like Under the Black Flag by
David Cordingly. It's one of my favorite books on pirates.
Republic of Pirates by Colin Woodward is amazing. For this
we I used as a great Smithsonian article by Karen Abbott.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
It's called if There's a Man Among You, which I like.
Speaker 3 (33:39):
That's a great title.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
Yeah. Yeah, it talked about both Mary read and and
Bonnie and I.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Just bought a book.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
I I just ordered a book called Pirate Queen's by
Rebecca Alexandra Simon off Amazon, but I haven't had a
chance to read it, but it deals with both of
them as well, so I'm looking forward to that.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
Yeah, Okay, so until next time.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
Yeah, we'll see you guys next one. Thanks so much
for listening.
Speaker 5 (34:03):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content.
Speaker 3 (34:09):
Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Me, Pat Larish, and.
Speaker 5 (34:13):
My co host Ben Thompson. Writing is by me and Ben.
Story editing is by Ian Jacobs, Brandon Phibbs, and Allie Lamer.
Mixing and music and sound design is by Jude Brewer.
Consulting by Michael May. Special thanks to Noel Brown at
iHeart Badass of the Week is based on the website
(34:33):
Badass of Theweek dot com, where you can read all
sorts of stories about other badasses. If you want to
reach out with questions ideas, you can email us at
Badass Podcast at badass oftheweek dot com. If you like
the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen, and tell your friends and
your enemies if you want as We'll be back next
(34:55):
week with another one. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
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