Anne Bonny and Mary Read

The case

The best description of Anne Bonny and Mary Read comes from a woman they robbed. Dorothy Thomas, stopped and robbed on the Jamaican coast in the autumn of 1720, told the court at Spanish Town that the two wore men's jackets, long trousers and handkerchiefs tied round their heads, carried a machete and a pistol each, and swore at the men to kill her so she could not testify. She knew they were women, she said, from the shape of their bodies.

That testimony, the printed trial record and a handful of official documents are almost all that is firmly known. The vivid life stories most people have read, Bonny as the illegitimate daughter of an Irish lawyer who ran off to Nassau, Read as a girl raised in boy's clothes who served as a soldier in Flanders, come from Captain Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates of 1724, written to sell. None of it has been confirmed, and some has been shown to be unlikely. Later writers added names, red hair and a romance between the two women, none of which appear in the contemporary record.

The story the documents tell begins on 22 August 1720, when a small company led by John Rackham, a minor figure who later picked up the nickname Calico Jack, stole the sloop William from her owner John Ham in Nassau harbour. Bonny and Read were among them, with about a dozen men. On 5 September Woodes Rogers, governor of the Bahamas, issued a proclamation naming the crew as pirates. It listed both women openly, Bonny under the name Ann Fulford alias Bonny, which makes the old tale of Read's sex being a secret from her shipmates hard to credit.

Their piracy was small in scale. Over about two months they took fishing boats, a schooner and canoes around Hispaniola and the north coast of Jamaica, the kind of raids that brought in tackle, fish and a little cloth rather than treasure. In mid-October a former privateer named Jonathan Barnet, sailing a trading sloop, went looking for them.

He found the William at anchor off Negril Point, at the western tip of Jamaica, on the night of 22 October 1720. Rackham's crew had been drinking with a party of turtle fishermen they had invited aboard. When Barnet hailed, the answer came back as John Rackham from Cuba. A swivel gun was fired at Barnet's sloop and missed; his broadside brought down the William's boom, and the crew called for quarter. No one was killed. Johnson's version, in which the two women fought on deck while the men cowered below, is not supported by the trial testimony.

Rackham and the men were tried at Spanish Town on 16 November and hanged over the following days at Port Royal and Kingston. The women were tried separately on 28 November before a vice-admiralty court presided over by Governor Nicholas Lawes. Four witnesses gave evidence against them: Thomas Dillon, master of a sloop the crew had plundered; John Besneck and Peter Cornelian, two Frenchmen taken while hunting hogs on Hispaniola and forced aboard, who said the women were active and willing; and Dorothy Thomas. Both women were convicted of piracy and sentenced to hang.

They then declared that they were pregnant. Under English law a pregnant woman could not be executed, and their sentences were stayed. Whether either was in fact expecting a child is not known. Mary Read died in custody in the spring of 1721; the parish register of St Catherine records the burial of Mary Read, pirate, on 28 April. There is no record of Anne Bonny's release or execution.