Short Stuff: Women Pirates

The Golden Age of Pirates didn’t have just men floating on the high seas. Some women became very successful pirates and today you’ll learn about two of them.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is short stuff,
uh ahoy, which is pretty appropriate, Chuck, even though you
always say it not always most of the time it's
not very appropriate. This time it fits very well. That's right,
because we're talking about pirates with a Y, Pirates with

(00:26):
the Y, and also pirates with two X chromosomes. That's right.
Have you ever seen the TV show Our Flag Means Death?
I did. I watched the first few and I just
kind of fell out of it. But yeah, it's a
very very cute show. Yeah, okay, did you watch Have
you watched all of them? Yeah? Yeah, I like it
a lot, but it kind of got me wondering because

(00:48):
a big you know, it's kind of known as the
most queer positive show on television and the show about pirates,
so you might if you haven't seen it, you might think, well,
that's odd. But on the show there as a female
character who was masquerading as a man pirate, and then
there I don't want to spoil anything, but there's also

(01:09):
a budding relationship of the same sex, which is a
very kind of fun reveal. On the show, and I
was just kind of wondering if that's all made up
for this show. And it turns out it looks like
piracy and pirate ships were kind of a haven sometimes
for gay women or now what we probably would know

(01:31):
as trans people, because you could hide out and you know,
I think as long as you did your work, there
wasn't a lot of uh well, I mean, who knows
how they were really treated, but it seemed to be
like a place that people could go in the queer
community and the whatever sixteen hundreds, And I don't I
don't think Chuck, um, you had to necessarily just identify

(01:54):
as a different gender, um like you could you were
if you were a woman in were out of the
high seas, you were probably dressing like a man one
way or another. Largely because ships, um it was considered
bad luck to have a woman on a ship. But
the two women that we're going to talk about, uh
and Bonnie and Mary Reid, they were such b A's

(02:18):
as pirates with a y or and I it doesn't
matter that they were openly women. Um who did still
dress his men, but everyone on their ship knew they
were women, and they were reputed to have been the
um the toughest, most ready to fight pirates on on
the ship, including the captain. That's right, and they were

(02:39):
doing it in the middle of We love our Golden ages,
and they were certainly active in the golden age of
piracy from the mid seventeenth century to like the first
quarter of the eighteen Uh. And we need to think
a few people Britannica. We should just always think Britannica. Yeah,
the s s Britannica and Mark Mancini from how Stuff

(03:01):
Works dot com because they point out a very sort
of truism, which is, Uh, there were books about pirates
and stuff back then. One very notable one. Uh. The
long title is a General History of the Robberies and
Murders of the most Notorious Pirates with a y uh
and or as it's generally known, a general History of

(03:22):
the Pirates. And these books back then were hot sellers,
so they were fun, but you couldn't count on them
to be historically accurate necessarily. Uh. It seems like they
kind of went with lore when they didn't know if
it was fact or not, and they wanted to tell
the good story and sell books. Yeah. So it's the

(03:42):
same as true crime, as it's always been basically, well,
I think it's a little better now, right, I'm sure
it's much better. But there there is a that book,
in particular, the General History of the Pirates UM, It's
it's it. It provides a conundrum for historians piracy, especially
the Golden Age of piracy, because that's really what it covers. UM,

(04:05):
because there's a lot of stuff in there that probably
is true. There's a lot of stuff in there that's
probably embellishment, and if you read, you know, the actual text,
it's really hard to differentiate one from the other. So
you have to read the book basically as a historian
and go through and find documentary evidence to back up
this claim or or the other. And UM, in particular

(04:28):
with Mary Reid and a Bonnie, they've had a really
hard time to do that. So I have my hat
off to Mark Mancini from How Stuff Works, because he
didn't fall for any of it. And there stuff in
the Britannica Encyclopedia entries that has been proven to have
been made up by novelists as late as the nineteen sixties,
and it's being touted as fact. And it's not just

(04:50):
Britannica Wikipedia. There's a ton of like reputable sources that
that have just kind of fallen for these um, these
inaccuracies that have been did as flourishes over the years.
I wonder if Mark Mancini read the book and said, hey,
wait a minute, I think everywhere it's italicized, it's still
will be its. There's a lot of italics in there too, giveaway. Yeah.

(05:14):
So the book itself is written by a guy named
Captain Charles Johnson, who did not exist. That's a pen name,
And I've seen it attributed typically to Daniel Defoe, the
author of Robinson Crusoe, and then alternatively there was a
publisher named Nathaniel Missed, and they think that it was
probably one of those two guys who wrote it. Yeah,

(05:34):
apparently Defoe worked for Missed. So I think it's just
one of those things where their professors and people in
the literature community that like to pull up their sleeves
and battle it out on that when the rest of
us don't really care. But the point is the general
history or a general history of pirates with a Y
has some stuff that we should go over either way.

(05:57):
I agree, And Bonnie, should we take a break first? Uh? Yeah, Well,
we'll take a break, and we'll come back and introduce
the world to Anne, Bonnie and Mary. Read alright, what
a great cliffhanger, as I was saying. And Bonnie Uh

(06:39):
born in Ireland near Cork, Ireland and apparently had a
pretty rough childhood, as I bet a lot of kids
back then had, and was the illegitimate daughter of an
attorney who was married. But this was the baby he
had with his maid servant lady, and supposedly he would

(07:01):
dress her as a boy as a kid to sort
of deflect from the fact that she was illegitimate and
just say no, this is my my boy servant who's
going to be my assistant training at this point. Um.
And eventually the the scandal got out, the whole thing
was was known to the county, and um the guy
lost his practice. Her father, who's sometimes identified as William Cormack,

(07:25):
James Cormack, and a bunch of other names. But the
upshot is her her lawyer father basically lost his practice
because of the scandal, and so he moved his daughter
Uh and and um the servant made her and mother
to Carolina and probably to Charlestown, which is now known
as Charlestown is if they moved to Carolina at any

(07:45):
point from Europe, that's probably where they settled. Yeah, like
Bill Murray exactly, anybody who's anybody ends up in Charlestown. Uh,
so they end up And this was he said Carolina.
This is before there was a North and South Carolina,
and A think they just said that we shall be
Carolina in one day there would be an NFL team
that represents us both. That's right, although I think they're

(08:08):
more The Panthers are definitely North Carolina, so that's where
they're base. But I think they did that in a
bid to get South Carolina people to root for them too, Yeah,
and to cough up some money, like the New England
Patriots are like just all of New England should root
for us exactly or well green Bay Packers is like
the opposite of that. Why because it's specifically in Green Bay. Yeah,

(08:28):
they said no one else in Wisconsin root for us exactly.
It's specifically in a very small town and it's I
think the team is owned by the town too. Yeah.
I gotta go to a game there. I bought my
friend Adam one share of Green Bay Packers stock last year.
That's a great Christmas present. It is, but it's meaningless apparently.
Uh so where are we here? Um, they moved to Charlestown.

(08:50):
That's right, they moved to Charlestown. Historical records are very fuzzy,
but it may have been born and full Ford with
the alias of Bonnie and supposedly got that name from
being married to another pirate, uh named James Bonnie, but
then went and married and I don't know about Mary,

(09:11):
but at least went off with a pirate named John
Rackham who she definitely worked with. Like, we have records
that prove that she worked for John, and I think
I don't know if this is a speculation or not
that they were kissing and stuff. Yes that I think
that's pretty much proven. But yes, documentary evidence shows that
she was a pirate with John Calico Jack Rackham. It

(09:34):
is a great name. So um again, it was weird
that Rackham would have a woman on board with him
is considered extremely bad luck. But Rackham had not just one,
but two women on board with him because in addition
to an Bonnie, he had another woman pirate named Mary Reid,
who also had a kind of a strange um early
life as well. That that landed her on the high seas. Eventually,

(09:57):
I wonder if it was like one is bad luck
and two a party. Yeah, well that was one thing.
So Mary Read in particular, Um she was, so I
read the Ambonnie was not Um as chased as Mary
Read was. But Mary Reid would fall in love really
easily and be like, let's get married, and so she

(10:18):
did that a few times. But there was one man
who tried to have his way with Mary Read, and
according to the history of the Pirates Um, she beat
him nearly to death. So she she she could definitely
handle herself for sure from an early age. Yeah. And
there was also this story that they both were aboard
UM dressed as men, and this almost certainly seems like

(10:42):
it's probably made up, but both dressed as men, and
Bonnie crushed on Reid as a woman masquerading as a man,
thinking it was another man. And then it sounds like
straight out of a TV show. They go into a
side room and both I guess, like pull off their
fake mustache at the same time. Yeah, and the ace
bandages exactly uh and went ah, we're both women. But

(11:07):
that that definitely sounds like it's in italics, right, for sure.
I also saw though, that there was a book as
recently or as early as like the seventeen fifties that
that supposed that they were actually lovers. Okay, well, that
sounds like overactive imagination of a male writer to me, right.
So the upshot is, though, that we do know from

(11:27):
the scant documentary evidence that Mary reid And and Bonnie
were both pirates with Calico Jack Rackham on the ships
that Rackham stole, and they engaged in piracy. Witnesses at
their trial spoiler alert, they were, and they ended up
caught and tried said like these women would curse and
spit at the men. There was one person who said

(11:49):
that the men were hiding below decks, and Mary reid
And and Bonnie were above deck fighting and the men
wouldn't come out, so and Bonnie shot into the into
the lower decks and actual one guy because she considered
them being cowards like they were. They were definitely known
to have fought as pirates. They weren't captured, they weren't
there against their will. They were swash buckling with the

(12:12):
best of them. They were there for the booty. They
were uh so they were collecting booty all over the place,
and eventually a um, I guess you would call it
sort of a most wanted sort of declaration was put
out naming them as pirates and enemies to the Crown
of Great Britain. And this was in September of seventeen

(12:33):
and this is because well they were pirating everywhere, but
a few weeks before, in August of that year, they
stole a ship named the William and really sort of
went to town, uh, basically through October, so they had
a nice run through the fall. And then in late
October seventeen twenty, Uh, they were entertaining some gentlemen, not

(12:57):
just the ladies, like the whole crew. I think they
were what like five or six of them total. I
saw a dozen, Okay, let's say a dozen. Then uh,
and they were entertaining some guys, uh, mariners from the
Port Royal and apparently he got a little out of hand,
turned into a big fight and drew some attention, and
a pirate hunter named Jonathan Barnett snagged them into custody

(13:21):
and that was it. They had actually slipped if you
read the pirate history, Uh, they'd slipped through the hands
of other pirate hunters. A few times and some really
amazing daring dues. If they're true, even if they're not true,
it's still worth reading. Yes, exactly, Chuck, thank you, Williams Sapphire. Um,

(13:41):
they they this time though, they were caught and they
were tried in Spanish Town, Jamaica, and apparently every single
person ended up being found guilty. They had a couple
of different trials. A couple of guys really were abducted. Um.
They were French like hunters on an island and they
were abducted and full worst into this and they were
still tried and um convicted and every single male crewman

(14:05):
was hanged. Right. But there's a good final twist another
TV scene moment. Uh. In court as they were being
I guess uh read their verdict, Marian Anne looked at
each other and winked and at the same time said
threw their arms up and said we're pregnant. Uh. And

(14:28):
apparently that was the deal they were not. It was
called pleading the belly, which will get you out of
being put to death at least and being hanged. But
they were not making it up. They were uh, you know,
inspected I guess I hope by a doctor and found
to be really pregnant, and so they avoided the gallows. Yeah. Um,
they were probably in their second trimester. Later historians said

(14:52):
um Mary Reid died fairly shortly after the following April,
and some historians have said that probably coincide with childbirth,
so she might have died in childbirth. Her grave is
in St. Catherine, Jamaica. You can go visit it. And
um and Bonnie though she became more obscure according to

(15:12):
the history Captain Johnson's history. Um, she was let go
at some point. Uh, and we don't know where she went.
But all only this we know that she was not executed.
What a great ending. Yeah, I also saw that after that.
Some people suppose that she went back to Charleston, married
another man, had eight kids. And it would be possible

(15:35):
then that there are descendants of Ambonnie out there running
around on the Isle of Palms. Perhaps probably maybe they'll
find my tooth. It's that's some booty right there. That
some boy. I'll give you some other booty. Short stuff
is out. Stuff you should know is a production of

(15:56):
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