Anne Bonny.

Another Irish woman who set sail upon the high seas and took to the life of a pirate was:

Anne Bonny.                                    

Like Gráinne Uí Mháille, Anne Bonny was a strong independent woman, way ahead of her time. Her exact date of birth is unknown but most historians put it to be around 1697 in Kinsale, County Cork, Ireland. She was born into a man’s world, a world where men made all the decisions, women had very few rights. It was a time when women didn’t join a ship’s crew, let alone become a respected pirate considered equal by her peers.

She was born the illegitimate daughter of a lawyer, William Cormac and a woman in his employ, Mary Brennan. William’s wife was not very happy when she found out about his adultery so she made it public, and this caused him to lose his reputation.  He and his new partner and child decided to leave Ireland to seek their fortune in the New World. They settled in Charleston, South Carolina and here William started a successful legal practice and eventually became a plantation owner.

By the time young Anne had become a teenager she had lost her mother and had to take over the running of the household and care of her father. Stories began to spread about Anne during her teenage years, there was even a suggestion made that she had murdered a servant girl, stabbing her to death. There was also a story that was told about a young man who attempted to force himself on her sexually; she put him in hospital for several weeks.

When she was only sixteen she fell in love with James Bonny, a pirate who wanted to gain control of her father’s estate. Her father despised Bonny and forbid the relationship, this was enough for the rebellious Anne, and against her father’s wishes she married him. William Cormac was livid; he had wanted her to marry a respectful man not a rogue like Bonny so he turned her out of his home, cutting her off from all financial aid.

James Bonny took his new wife to the pirate’s hideout in New Providence, he found it difficult to support her and in the end in order to make money he became a pirate informer for the governor, Woodes Rogers. When Anne found out about his betrayal she was extremely upset, most of her friends were pirates and so with the help of one of these friends, Pierre, a celebrated homosexual who ran a popular ladies establishment, Anne left her husband. She ran off with Calico Jack Rackam, he was a pirate captain and a great romantic. It was even said he offered to buy Anne from James Bonny, You see there you were thinking romance was dead. Calico Jack sounds a bit like Jack Sparrow.

Now Calico Jack was only a small time pirate and he plied his trade along the Caribbean coast attacking small merchant ships but was not really all that successful. However, he certainly knew how to spend money. He never made his relationship with Anne public knowledge but on board ship everyone knew she was “the captain’s woman”. When Calico Jack found out Anne was pregnant he left her on Cuba to deliver the baby. There’s no record of what happened to the baby, some say Anne abandoned the child, some say Calico Jack gave the child away to friends on Cuba and some even suggest that the child died at birth, but we’ll never know. After a few months Anne returned to Calico Jack’s ship. By now the infamous Mary Read was also on board and it did not take long for the two women to become very good friends, some suggest that their friendship was a lesbian relationship.

In October of 1720, Captain Barnet, an ex-pirate who now commanded a British Navy ship attacked Calico Jack’s ship (the “Revenge”) as it lay at anchor. Almost the entire crew was drunk at the time, celebrating the capture of a Spanish commercial ship, so the fight was a short one and although Mary and Anne resisted they were eventually overpowered and put in chains.

The crew of the “Revenge” were taken to Port Royal, there to stand trial. The trial was sensational and everyone was found guilty of the crime of piracy, a crime that carried the death sentence, but Anne and Mary were both spared because they both claimed to be pregnant and a pregnant woman could not be hanged, It’s recorded that Mary Read died in a Jamaican prison but the fate of Anne Bonny is unknown. One theory is that Anne Bonny’s father managed to pay a ransom for his daughter’s release and that he took her back to Charleston and that she married a Joseph Burleigh going on to have eight children. It’s also said that she died on April 25^th, 1782 in South Carolina.