Anne Bonny and Mary Read: Female Pirates and Maritime Women

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When the pirates saw Barnet’s sloop approach, they ran from the vessel that could pose a potential threat to the William. Rackham ordered the crew to weigh anchor and tried to get the Port Royal men to help. Though they refused at first, Rackham soon coerced them to assist in weigh anchor through violence, or at least through violent threats. Later, witnesses also noted some of these mariners helped the pirates row the sloop in their efforts to escape.

Some of the pirates and other mariners stayed on deck during the chase while others stayed below and continued drinking. Barnet fired a shot at the sloop from a distance and raised British colors, but the pirates continued to run. At 10 o’clock that night, Barnet sailed close enough to hail the pirates. Barnet heard the pirates respond, “John Rackam, from Cuba.”

Barnet demanded Rackham strike to British colors, which received the response of, “they would strike no Strikes.”[38] After this refusal, one or several people onboard the William fired a swivel gun, a carriage gun, small arms, or some combination of the three at Barnet’s sloop. Barnet responded in kind with a full broadside and volley of small arms fire, which caused all the Port Royal men on the pirate sloop to flee below decks.

The gunfire carried away the boom on the William’s main mast, making any further attempts at escape impossible and caused some of the people onboard the pirate sloop to call for quarter. Barnet’s sloop sailed alongside to capture the pirates on the William. After securing everyone on the pirate sloop and their former prize vessel, the Mary and Sarah,[39] Barnet sailed to Davis’s Cove, where he landed twenty-six men and two women. He turned the pirates and the former prisoners of the pirates over to militia officer Major Richard James and a guard detail he recruited to escort the pirates to imprisonment and trial in Spanish Town.[40]

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Over the course of three trials held between November 16, 1720 and January 24, 1721, the court found most of the men involved with Rackham’s pirate activities guilty and hanged them in public executions. Only the two Frenchmen, John Besneck and Peter Cornelian, who testified against the pirates, escaped any charges of piracy.

Sir Nicholas Lawes’s Court of Admiralty used loose evidence to convict the pirates and the Port Royal mariners who happened to be onboard that day. The court considered the presence of the pirates and Port Royal men onboard a pirate vessel as enough evidence to convict defendants of being a willing participants in piracy.[41]

This resulted in the court ignoring the pleas of innocence from both Rackham’s pirate crew and the nine Port Royal mariners. On November 18, Jamaican authorities hanged John Rackham, George Featherstone, Richard Corner, John Davies, and John Howell at Gallows Point in Port Royal. They took the bodies of Rackham, Featherstone, and Corner and gibbeted them in chains at Plumb Point, Bush Key, and Gun Key as warnings to pirates and others thinking of becoming pirates. On November 19, authorities hanged Noah Harwood, James Dobbin, Patrick Carty, and Thomas Earl in Kingston, Jamaica. The court executed some of the Port Royal mariners on February 17 and 18, 1721.[42]

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While the court found Anne Bonny and Mary Read guilty of piracy on November 28, both of them avoided immediate execution since their pregnancies, both in their second trimesters, allowed them to “plead their bellies,” since the court could not hang the innocent unborn.[43] The court never hanged either of the women pirates. A record of burials in St. Catherine, Jamaica, notes the death and burial of a Mary Read on April 28, 1721. It is highly probable that this Read is the female pirate of the same name. The date of the death came close to the time when Read’s child was due to be born. It is possible that she died of complications from childbirth.[44] No documents shows if Anne Bonny died in prison or if authorities released her. The historical record only shows a lack of documents demonstrating that Governor Lawes carried out Bonny’s execution.