After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Pirate Queens: Mary Read & Anne Bonny

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

Mary Read and Anne Bonny are legendary female pirates from the golden age of piracy. Raised as boys, they sailed with captain Calico Jack and fought their enemies bare-breasted, if legends are to be believed. How much of it is true? How much piracy did they actually accomplish? And why do their breasts feature quite so often in this history?Anthony and Maddy are joined by Francesca de Tores author of a new book Saltblood which tells the story from Mary Read's perspective and is published by Bloomsbury in April.Edited by Ella Blaxill. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here.

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Avast, my hearties, and welcome aboard the pirate ship after dark. Today's episode we are taking to the high seas. We're talking piracy and we're talking pirate queens Mary Read and Anne Bonny. Usually you'll hear a little story from us at the start of episodes but today we've got something a little bit different because we are joined by Francesca de Torres who's a historian and an author and she's going to read from her new book Salt Blood which is published by Bloomsbury this April and what you're about to hear next is a little snippet of what you can expect from that book. Even if I were to give this man my story, how can I put into words this life of mine, its unruly sorrows and its pleasures more unruly still? Words cannot capture Anne Bonny nor Jack Rackham, nor the way we set out to make a republic of pirates and ended up making something altogether

different. How can I make in words the sea or the singing of the ships? What words could tell the truth of this? A word is the wrong tool for knowing, but it is all that I have. If this story is to be told in words, they shall be my own. 1685. I am born Mary, but not allowed to be her. I must be Mark, because Mark is is dead and I must take his place. Well, Francesca, welcome to After Dark. Thank you so much for joining us on today's episode. Thank you. It's a pleasure, though I should probably add a disclaimer. I'm a historical novelist, but by no means a historian. My PhD is in English literature, so I will leave the hard history to you two today, Maggie and Anthony. I love the concept of your new book, Saltblood, that it's written from the point of view of, I think it's fair to say, famous, if not infamous, pirate Mary Read.

How did you come up with this idea of writing from her point of view? I wish so much, particularly as a lapsed academic, I wish that I had some sort of credible sounding story that I was leafing through a dusty tome in an archive. The embarrassing truth is that I was doing a horrible histories puzzle with my young son and there was a passing reference to two pirates and it was just enough to get me to Google it on my phone. But from the minute I was halfway through the Wikipedia entry, I was completely done for because the story is so fascinating that I knew without any doubt that this was a novel.

And when you talk about that life as a historical novelist, and you're looking at historic fiction, to what extent do you stick to the history? And to what extent, and I'm guessing you have to, allow the fiction to take over in order to tell this story? Because as far as I'm aware with the history of both of these women, the historical fact can be quite patchy, can be difficult to get to the truth of. So how do you marry those two things together in your approach? Well, the fact that the historical record about Anne Bonny and Mary Read and Saltblood focuses in particular on Mary Read, the historical facts being so few and far between would probably be a nightmare if I were trying to write a historical monograph about this, but it's a gift to a novelist. So I felt that I had just enough to give myself a scaffolding and all the gaps in history, instead of seeing that as a shortcoming, it was just a delightful place for me to play.

And obviously you hope that if you've done your research thoroughly enough, everything that you imagine and speculate about will be informed by all your immersion in the period. But there was plenty of latitude to play because really the facts of what's known about Mary Read and Anne Bonny's life is so sketchy. And even the documents that we do have are in many cases, incredibly questionable. So there was plenty of room to imagine. Talking about interesting and unusual ways into this story before we get into the history and the fiction of these two women here on after dark we often begin with an image or an object that we describe Anthony I'm going to make you describe today's image first and then I would

like maybe Francesca to tell us a little something about it oh let, let me get my glasses. Okay, so I am slightly aware of what this is, just not fully, but I know it's outside a pub in Hayden in Norfolk. So you'll find this in a village, the village of Hayden, and it is believed to be a rendering of Mary Read from the 18th century mind, not from her own time. Now, what am I looking at? I'm looking at a wood carved figure. I am no art historian, so I'm going to be showing my lack of credentials here, but I'm looking at a wood-carved figure that is of a woman. She appears to be, although she's missing some of her elbow, she appears to have her hand placed on her hips. Her breasts are bare. She's wearing what you would look to as a stereotypical pirate's hat. It's a bit of a tricorn-y thing, although it looks a bit

battered and worn at this stage. She's quite confident looking in her stance, and I have run out of things to say. So Francesca, how much like the depiction of Mary is this in your book? Does this match up with the image that you had in your head when you were writing her? Well, my Mary is at pains to hide her boobs, because one of the most fascinating things about Mary Read is that she was raised as a boy for complicated financial reasons and then served as a man in both the Navy and the Army. So the statue that you're referring to is very characteristic of the way that history and popular culture has tried to grapple with both Bonnie and Reed, because it captures the two things that people are fascinated by and can't quite reconcile, which is the fact that she was this martial figure.

She's standing there boldly with her hand before it fell off on her hip and looking very piratical. But at the same time, the sculptor has sort of made this palatable by reasserting in this comically buoyant way these funny little boobs front and centre. And actually the boobs of Bonnie and Reed pop out time and time again in the historical documents because there's this desperate need, it seems, for the chroniclers of the time to, I guess, put their very nuanced and complex relationship with gender back in a neat box and to always draw it back to the sex of the body rather than allowing their much more nuanced experience of gender to exist. So there's time and time again that something queer will happen within the story, a possibility of a queer relationship will rise up.

Mary Read disguised as a man on a ship and Anne Bonny in the best- known story about them starts to fancy her and Mary Read is obliged to reveal her body and time and time again the fact of the female body is used to put that queer yearning back in its box and so time and time again there's a moment of queer possibility the boobs come out and it's neatly reconciled and it's given a neatly palatable heterosexual conclusion but in pictures not just that hilarious statue that you showed me but also in one of the engravings not far after the time of their lives and deaths the original engraving just shows them

looking swashbuckling and then the Dutch edition of the same book came out and suddenly their tits were out and again it's this idea to always show the sort of sensationalized, slightly sexy, slightly palatable version of these two really complex, fascinating criminals. Let's journey a little bit from the myth of that side of their queerness and their gender. And let's talk a little bit about what the archive might be able to tell us just in relation to what we're talking about, this myth building, these figures that are coming forward. One of the things I find fascinating about Mary's case in particular is that according to the myth and according to the legend, she is forced to live as a boy because her mother wants to continue getting an inheritance

that was originally assigned to her older son, if I'm not mistaken. And she is forced in that sense to live as a boy and then adopts a female persona and then goes back to a male persona to enter the military, I think. Now, what I find interesting about that, Francesca, I'm a historian of gender and sexuality, particularly in the 18th century, but there's some insights into this time period as well. It doesn't add up historically. So this is why this is really interesting. It doesn't add up to me that a grandmother would think that Mary was this older child Mark, because the time period would be all, I would go like, oh, why is Mark suddenly getting smaller and younger? It feels like it doesn't really add up archivally. And you know, you might say, well, they were a long time apart. They lived miles and miles apart. But it doesn't really stack up to historical scrutiny, that idea.

So this thing of gender switching and therefore sexuality and the queernesses that are coded into these female pirates is fascinating because it leads into the myth building more than it does into the history. And so it's interesting to see the tension there between the two. the myth building more than it does into the history. And so it's interesting to see the tension there between the two. Yeah, I mean, that story of her early childhood and the financial pressure that her mother forced her to impersonate her dead half-brother Mark because there was an allowance belonging to him comes from a fairly unreliable source,

though it's a cracking story, so of course I kept it in the book. So in terms of the bare facts of their life, we don't even know exactly when they were born. We have a trial transcript, which gives us a fantastic insight into the final cruise. We have a proclamation from the governor of Nassau, which names them amongst other pirates in the theft of this ship in 1720. And that's it. So everything else that belongs to the myth of Mary Read comes from this incredibly unreliable chronicler who wrote under a pen name of Captain Charles Johnson. Some people have tried to argue that it was Daniel Defoe, but I don't think that's an entirely convincing

argument. And he sort of went, oh, well, I'm going to give you Mary Read and Anne Bonny, the origin story. And it was much more detailed and often, I think, very far-fetched. You really do have to take it with a massive pinch of salt. And then it was so successful, this collection of stories about pirates, that it was the foundation of really everything that we believe about pirates. The modern myth of pirates all comes from Charles Johnson's stories. And it was so successful that in the second edition, he sexed up Bonny and Read's story even further and included more outrageous details. So it's from Charles Johnson that we have this idea of her impersonating her brother and then serving in the Navy and the army. The

timing suggests, although it's not entirely clear, but my best reckoning puts that at the War of Spanish Succession. What's interesting is that although we've got no documentation of her doing that, there are documented cases of at least one other woman in that same war, and indeed in the war before it as well. So there is this fabulous historical precedent for that, which was Christian or Kit Kavanagh, also known as Davis or Welsh, who served as a man in two wars. Her biological sex was only discovered after she was badly injured in the Battle of Ramelies. So we don't know that Mary Read did that, but I want so much to believe

that she did because it's such a fascinating story and we know that Kit Kavanagh did. So there is a historical precedent for people born female at birth taking on the persona of a man in order to serve in the military. Do you think that's something that people were particularly anxious about? Do you think it represented to the women who went and did that potentially, whether that was an opportunity for them to escape their own situation? I think the relatively few cases that we know of, there was probably a huge range of factors that pushed the women to do that. But I think given the incredibly constrained gender roles that were in practice at the time, it's not

a stretch at all to think that it might have seemed like a fantastic liberation to be able to go off and do this grand thing. I do think that the more I studied the reality of life in the Royal Navy and indeed in the Army, that there would have been a pretty unpleasant realisation because there was very little of glamour or nobility or fun in the experience of the Royal Navy. But I think certainly Mary Read, as I came to understand her, wanted a bigger life. She wanted to do something with

her life that got beyond the very narrow confines of her upbringing and her parent, who was at least in the version that seemed credible to me, a bit of a shocker. And she wanted to break boundaries and of her gender included. And she did that in fairly spectacular fashion. So we know that Mary is born in Plymouth in and around the beginning of the 18th century, I think 1701, something like that. And that she at some point potentially goes into the military disguised as a man. We then know that she runs a pub for a little bit. Is that right? And then she ends up as a pirate. Talk me through those career changes. That's some trajectory.

There are some significant gaps. If someone came to you with that CV, you would have some questions before you hired them about those gaps. So, again, we have to rely here largely on the deeply unreliable Charles Johnson. largely on the deeply unreliable Charles Johnston. But it's claimed in his version, A General History of the Pirates, that she falls in love with a Flemish soldier while she's serving in the War of Spanish Succession. She finds a way to reveal once again the boobs come out and they fall in love and are married and then leave the service

and run a pub in the Low Countries. Then he dies and it's a bit vague but it looks like she goes most likely into the Merchant Navy and then ends up on a pirate ship in the Bahamas some period later. It doesn't look like her pirating career was huge. I think describing them as pirate queens is probably more queens in the sense of a sort of yes, queen, get it, girl, rather than the sense of a sort of, yes, queen, get it, girl, rather than

the sense that they were historically significant in terms of the extent of the prizes they took or the longevity of their pirating careers. But that was on the pirate crew that she encounters Anne Bonny, who is the only other documented female pirate of this golden age of piracy. Isn't there a potential that actually she, and not just she, but the other pirates she was with, were actually kind of shit pirates? Because I think if I have the dates right in my head, it was like 1721 when she embarks on this career of piracy and then 1721 when she's taken up as well, or a very short amount of time. It wasn't quite that short, but it certainly wasn't long. I mean, the glamorous image of piracy is a really great PR job

because pirates were in the main not operating on the grand scale. You know, we think of them as taking on huge galleons and stealing gold and treasure. And in fact, they often operated small ships themselves and they were often, if you look at the trial transcript, some of the things that Bonnie and Reed's crew took were things like fishing tackle of a small fishing crew. So this is not glamorous, big piracy. They weren't bringing down galleons and men of war ships here.

So they joined the crew of Jack Rackham, who has a sort of outsized fame given the relative insignificance of his career. He was a charismatic figure by all accounts. He was known as Calico Jack because he wore these incredibly vibrant, colorful calico cotton patterns. And he was an off-sider to Charles Vane, who was a much more successful and longstanding pirate. And then he went off on his own after some kind of falling out. Pirates were forever backstabbing one another, mutineering against one another, and then they had a relatively short-lived pirating career.

It nonetheless is such an appealing story, even though it sounds depressingly mundane when we break it down like that because it was such a radical thing for two women to be doing that, even though the fact that their final cruise, they stole a ship called the William from Nassau in August of 1720, and they were sentenced to death a few months later, having been captured after a short cruise. Although it's arguable that they were pirating for some time before that final cruise. So yeah, I don't think you would claim that they were mistresses of the sea, but nonetheless,

there's something super appealing about the idea of them. Their stories are so captivating. And as you say, they're sort of irresistible. I'm very interested in what's coming out in our discussion, this distance between the historical record and the fictionalization. Of course, that's something that you yourself, Francesca, have played with in your own work. And I'm just thinking about the realities of Mary's life aboard a pirate ship. And we think of this golden age of piracy, there's a sort of classic pirate on the shoulder, a hook for a hand, romantic ideal, I suppose, and a sense that pirate ships represented these floating microcosmic worlds where outsiders could come together. Perhaps they were a more democratic form of society, especially in the Caribbean, you know, escaped slaves, criminals who had escaped persecution

in some way. And then there's Mary. What would the reality of life aboard a pirate ship have been like for a woman? Well, the reality of pirate crews was both more and less dangerous than I'd imagined. It was in some ways less dangerous for women in that I was incredibly surprised. Probably one of the most fascinating things I came across in my research was the existence for many, many pirate crews of what are called the ship's articles, which was a version of what you saw on Royal Navy ships, which is a sort of legal contractual document that the crews would sign. And it seems very foolhardy in hindsight, given that if such a document were to fall in the wrong hands, you'd all hang. But they're really legalistic and they have very strict policies, which include

things that we think of as distinctly unpiratical, like they were forbidden to drink or gamble on ship most of the time. They had to keep their weapons ready and polished. There were strict breakdowns of who would get which percentage of the loot that they won. But one of the things that's often stipulated in pirates articles was that if they were to take a prize that had a woman on board, that woman should not be molested and that no women should be allowed on board the boat because I think they saw it a bit like gambling, that it would cause nothing but trouble. So in some ways, it's a shock to discover that pirate crews were more tightly regulated than we might think, that it wasn't just this completely outlaw maverick space, and that the threats that we might think might present themselves to a woman alone,

or perhaps two women on such a crew, might not be as pressing. Of course, we don't know how strictly pirate crews necessarily adhered to these rules. But on the other hand, I think I discovered that pirate life was far more grubby and dangerous and prosaic than I had realized. So while the ships in some ways were tightly regulated, in other ways, pirates tended to live short, chaotic lives. They were basically low-level criminals. So they were far less glamorous than I think we would believe. It's tempting, I think, to think about pirate society and read it as this really exciting oppositional rebellious space that's kind of a thorn in the side of empire robbing the ships that are carrying slave money and sugar money from the colonies. And it's certainly true that

in some ways pirate society could be quite progressive. There are lots of stories of freed slaves working as pirates and joining pirate crews. I think there are some pirates that really believed in this idea of the Republic of Pirates as an ideal and saw it as something bigger than just low-level crime. But the sad truth is that many pirates, in fact, also sold slaves, would take slaves from a crew that they captured and simply enslave them on their own ships, and in some cases, drowned ships of slaves. So it's tempting to forget that in the large, these were violent criminal men who often behaved appallingly. And it's much more appealing to attach ourselves to that myth of the Republic

of Pirates as this exciting revolutionary space. I think there were elements of both. And I suppose we have these early 18th century romanticised accounts to thank for that. You can trace their legacy to modern Hollywood today. I'm thinking obviously of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and indeed the television show Black Sails, which is the way that I've encountered a lot of the characters that you're talking about who really existed. And now with Val Flagg Means Death as well which is another

and until recently cancelled I think really fun playful engagement perhaps in a more self-reflexive way with the ideas of pirates and that was a text that was queering the pirate record in a much more explicit way. Wendy's Small Frosty is the ultimate summer refreshment. And not because it's cool and creamy and made with fresh Canadian dairy. It's also refreshingly cheap. Just 99 cents until July 14th. It's a treat for you and your wallet.

Catherine of Aragon. Anne Boleyn. Jane Seymour. Anne of Cleves. Catherine Howard. Catherine Parr. Six wives, six lives. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb. And this month on Not Just the Tudors,

I'm joined by a host of experts to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII who shaped and changed England forever. Subscribe to and follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Let's talk a little bit about Nassau and the pirate community at the time. We know that Edwin Teach, who becomes Blackbeard, is existing in the same universe at the same time as these two women.

We have this idea of a pirate community, a pirate colony being built up. Is that true? It is and it isn't in that the nature of these men, and they were largely men, and their work means that any kind of social cohesion was very difficult because they were constantly backstabbing and fighting and getting drunk and so on. The rules about not drinking on ships certainly didn't apply on shore. So there had been a long period in which piracy had been a real presence, particularly in those areas. Pirates were seasonal.

Like fish will follow the krill, pirates would go. So, you know, at certain times of year they'd go further north and when the tobacco crops and the sugar crops and the associated money were coming through, they knew where to be. And so they'd flocked around this area for a long time. There previously had been another base at Port Royal, but a catastrophic earthquake had crushed that. So Nassau had become the base of the Pirate Kingdom. And that sounds quite grand. We think Pirate Kingdom, we think of something rather impressive. And in fact, it was a shithole. We're talking about ale tents and open sewers and rotting hulls of a mismatched collection

of stolen ships piled up. Nassau was by no means a glamorous place. It would have been dangerous and filthy, but in some ways it was also a place outside of law and sometimes explicitly against empire. So there were pirates who saw themselves as part of a cohesive movement at times. Charles Vane, in fact, who Calico Jack Rackham, Mary Ann's captain, had served under, had at various points declared himself to be the only true governor of the Republic of Pirates. So some had these grand ideas and sometimes it was tied to a political ideology. There were amongst them quite a number of Jacobites who were sort of ideologically

opposed to British empire and rules. So sometimes there was this cohesion and ideological basis, and other times it was just a group of drunk thugs robbing each other and trying not to get caught. The other thing to bear in mind is that not everyone who was a pirate necessarily made a decision to become a pirate. There was often a really slippery slope because the seas are absolutely full of privateers, which is essentially a pirate with a letter of mark, a sort of contract from the monarch that says, we give you permission to rob enemy ships because we're at war. So in times of war, you've got huge numbers of men essentially pirating under license. This was a legitimate act. Then the war of Spanish succession ends,

the Royal Navy's bankrupted. So you've got huge numbers of unemployed sailors. And suddenly, without a war, of course, you can have no privateers because we're no longer at war with the Spanish. So a lot of these men saw themselves as legitimate sailors, perhaps as privateers, respectable men who'd sort of slipped from privateering into piracy and didn't necessarily have any attachment to the notion of being great rebel maverick pirates against the empire. And when a pardon was offered, this great attempt to crack down on the golden age of piracy that said, if you fess up, you won't hang and we'll give you a pass and you're free and clear.

Lots of the pirates in Nassau seized that opportunity. Some were opposed to it. There was a lot of tension within the town at the time, but many thought, great, this is what we wanted. We didn't particularly want to be rebels and outlaws and at risk of hanging. Let's move on now and hear a little bit about Anne Bonny, a woman who is often associated with Mary. Her story is told alongside her. We're going to hear now from the next part of Francesca's wonderful book, Salt. She's not yet 20, younger than me by nearly 15 years. Her hair is dark red and when she twists it about her hand it is thick as an anchor cable.

She passes her time now in the taverns and ale tents and usually in the company of some young fellow or other. Their arms about her waist, their lips on her neck which is arched back very willing. But despite her fetching face and her bosom very much displayed to be admired, others amongst the men move warily about her. They keep a precise distance as though she is a keg of powder. She looks about her unsatisfied. She's ready to be mightily satisfied. Anne Bonny is full of about to and nearly.

It is a curiosity just to be near her for she has made it very clear that she's waiting for something to happen. She's making something happen. She is the thing that is happening. She is the thing that is happening. I love that. That's so enticing.

One of the things I love about this, Francesca, is often we as historians get blocked. And by that, I mean, we're not allowed to go places we really would like to in our work because the archive doesn't lead us there. But in something like this, I feel what you have done is fill in those gaps based on research, based on information, based on historical fact, but actually created the world that these people would have lived in, given us an idea of what they would have felt about them, how they would have felt themselves. But tell us a little bit about the Anne Bonny that you encountered in the documents and then the Anne Bonny that appears in your book.

Where does that meet and how is it different? Well, we have, as with Mary Read, not a great deal about Anne Bonny. We don't know her date of birth, though it's likely to be about 1690s, maybe very early 1700s. And she's born in Kinsale in Ireland. And as with Mary, Captain Charles Johnson gives us a fairly convoluted and spectacular reason as to why she was also raised as a boy. I mean, the extraordinary coincidence of these two women, each separately in different countries and for different reasons, being raised as boys and then ending up as the only two documented female pirates of this golden age of piracy is extraordinary and perhaps far-fetched. The short version of what is

a very complicated story involving servants and stolen spoons and all kinds of shenanigans and bed hopping is that her father was a respectable lawyer and married to a woman from a wealthier family. He was having an affair with a servant and when it was discovered that they had had a child, he got the child who was known to be a girl to dress up as a young boy and had her live with them on the pretense that she was a distant relative that was known to be a girl, to dress up as a young boy and had her live with them on the pretense that she was a distant relative that was coming to learn to be a law clerk under him so that his sort of semi-astrange wife would not know that in fact he was raising the child that he'd had illegitimately with his lover. And then of course she found out and they were forced

to flee the shame and disgrace and so her parents moved to the colonies where he apparently became a planter in America. The story that Johnson gives us is that she was incredibly wild and willful, didn't want to settle down and be a wealthy planter's daughter because her father succeeded in his second career. It's also worth noting that what Johnson doesn't mention in that story is that becoming a wealthy planter means profiting hugely off the work of enslaved people. That's the sort of unspoken element in that story. So she marries a kind of good for nothing wannabe pirate called James Bonney, who was possibly a small time pirate and a bit of an informant. And she moves with him to Nassau, which is the capital of the so-called Republic of Pirates. It's known as the Nest of Pirates, which I think is quite evocative.

She there set about ignoring her husband and building a fabulous reputation as the whore of New Providence, the island on which Nassau was. And my favourite line, I think, in all of Johnson's accounts is his description of Anne as not altogether so reserved in point of chastity, which is just a glorious line. So you're right, Anthony, that the history doesn't give us much. And the wonderful thing about being a historical novelist is that you then take those few scraps and you're able to run with them. So Anne Bonny, as she exists in Saltblood, is this force of nature, almost entirely amoral, highly sexualised, unbelievably driven. And when she and Mary meet, there are fireworks. Let's talk a little bit about the

sexualisation of Anne. There seems to me a tension in both Mary's story and Anne's story, this disguising of gender and using gender performance to change identity in some way. And yet their female bodies are so sexualized in the historical record. And that's obviously something that you play with. And here Anne's actual sexuality is coming into play as well. Do you see that as a tension in their stories? Or is it something that is in and of itself interestingly playful? Oh, I like to think that I've had fun with that in the novel, but I think it's a tremendous tension within all the texts. You can feel these figures of the time struggling to reconcile it. And I think the hyper-sexualization of the women in the text, although a lot of the boob stuff comes later

in the more salacious later texts, like the removal of their shirts in the subsequent edition of that Charles Johnson book. But there is always this tension between the specter of queerness and of female independence and of messing with the strict binary of gender. And then the desire to, well, Sally O'Driscoll's a theorist who's spoken very persuasively about the obsession with their bodies and their breasts in particular as a way of always dragging them back to their female sex, of tying gender very explicitly to their female sex, that they can't escape that. But the very fact that this specter of queerness rises up again and again

in the texts speaks to that unease and that blurring of boundaries that they did in so many realms. They blurred national boundaries, they blurred gender boundaries, they blurred legal boundaries. And the idea that they were in some way lovers only comes in in subsequent texts, but it's an idea that people, including me, have seized on because there's something so fascinating about it, about these two apparently unique women, but who in fact have so much in common. I use the term women. As I've said, I do think their relationship with gender was much more complex than that, but it's difficult to retrospectively apply contemporary understandings of gender and contemporary terminology. But if we call them women for now, they were so different

and yet had these uncanny similarities. So I think it's tremendously fun to imagine a world in which when the anecdote I told before that Anne started to fancy Mary and then Mary revealed her body and of course that was put to bed. And I've allowed myself to imagine in Salt Blood a scenario in which the revelation of Mary's body might not come as a disappointment. But in fact, they most likely were not passing as men during this later stage, the pirating stage of their lives. Even one of the witnesses in the trial transcript, which is arguably the most reliable source that we have, says that sometimes they dressed as women and at other times in men's clothes.

So I think it's probable that by that stage, I mean, Anne was married to one man on Nassau and was in a visible relationship with Jack Rackham and was known as the whore of New Providence. So it was clearly well known within the relatively small pirate society as a woman. And the most persuasive piece of evidence is that in the proclamation from Governor Woods Rogers in 1720 that lists those who made up the pirate crew that had stolen the William from Nassau Harbour, they're named as women. So clearly they were both known as women. But in Salt Blood, Mary makes the

argument that dressing as a man at that point in their lives was sometimes for her a choice, but also sometimes a very practical thing. Ships are dangerous and complicated places. You don't want to be trailing long skirts behind you. And a lot of pirating was also, pirates didn't particularly want to fight. The idea was to just scare the hell out of your prey. So you'd charge up on them. You'd have all your guns out. You'd raise the black flag. And ideally they would just surrender. Pirates weren't stupid. They didn't want to fight or kill if they could help it. I make the argument in Salt Blood that Mary sometimes dresses as a man because it scares the crews more and that men had not, as she says, learned to fear women as they should so that the figure of an extra man on the deck was more intimidating. This is tantalizing to me because I wonder to what extent you talked about their womanhood is constantly reimposed back onto them. But I also wonder in this myth-making how much their masculinity and manhood was imposed on them as well. Because it's really interesting to me that Anne, say, was raised as a boy, this illegitimate child raised

as a boy, because historically it wouldn't make sense to impose manhood on an illegitimate child because that child could have far more claim to property, to inheritance than a female child could. So it would make far more sense to leave her as a female. And so my thinking behind this is I wonder in the later telling that you've been telling us that the captain left these accounts, I wonder if they imposed a manhood on them to a certain extent where they said, actually, women don't get the wrong idea because your womanhood is a threat. We can't have women going about doing whatever they want to do, taking to the high seas. They needed to be covertly looked on as men. And actually, if you want to have this freedom, you're going to have to give up your womanhood. You're going to have to bind. You're going to have to dress in these clothes. You're going to look

ridiculous. And nobody wants to do that. So stay in your place, essentially. And then this actual archival thing in the trial of saying sometimes they dressed in men's clothes, I think it's exactly that. It doesn't say they're trying to pass as men or living as men. Dressing in men's clothes is a different thing. So this is really, really tantalizing for me to see that tension between gender performance, biological sex, and the way that's being fabricated around these two women. It's fascinating. being fabricated around these two women is fascinating. It is fascinating. And I don't think it's just something that's happening in the historical accounts. I think it's something that happens subsequently as we all become very attached to the myth, because it's such a fabulous story. This idea that they pulled this great hoax, that they managed to get away with it, to slip the noose of gender and become men to do things that they couldn't otherwise have done is a wonderful myth. And you almost feel disappointment when you read that proclamation from Governor Rogers and think, oh, well, they were known as women.

And it's sort of a letdown because the other version of the story is better that they could, even in this late period of their life when they were invisible, heterosexual relationships sometimes, also in relationships with men would be a better way of describing it because I think their sexuality, at least Mary's, was probably more complex than that. But it's such an incredible story to think that they could do this. Even in the trial transcript, one of the victims of their piracy, who was herself a woman, slightly unusually, insists that even though they were wearing men's clothes, she could tell they were women by the largeness of their breasts. So again, it's the breast as Shibboleth that always drags them back to the body. I think sometimes the story of them is probably better than the reality.

Because pirates were subjects of myth even in their own lifetime. I mean, Blackbeard, he put about several names and he consciously adopted this costume and so on. So they were quite self-conscious and aware about their myth-making. So I have a moment in Salt Blood where Mary begins to hear the stories about herself and Anne coming back to her, but she doesn't quite recognize that version of her life. So you can be quite self-reflexive about it in the novel, I think. I think it's time that we hear the end of Mary and Anne's stories. stories.

No quarter! I yell over at him. If they take us, we're dead for sure. Their grappling hooks are on our larboard side. I have a pistol in each hand, but through the moonlit smoke, it's hard to find my mark. I get off two shots, and the second is met by a cry and a murk. Most of our crew have retreated now below, but Anne is beside me again, a cask of powder in her hands.

I'll not hang, she says, wrenching open the cask so the powder scatters all about her. You understand? So this is the taking of Mary Read and Anne Bonny. So this is when their lives start to unravel a little bit. Now, don't give everything away because people are going to have to buy the book to get the actual ending ending. But tell us about how this starts to unravel slightly before we get to the very, very end. As with most stories of piracy, the story of their capture is less dramatic than you might think. It wasn't a case of taking on a great ship of their capture is less dramatic than you might think. It wasn't a case

of taking on a great ship of war or anything like that. They'd made a slightly poor decision about where they moored their boat and they'd chosen a cove in which it wasn't really possible to see ships coming from one direction and they were captured. But there was a bit of a fight, not much because almost everyone on the ship was blind drunk, but the story has it, and this is Charles Johnson, so again, not necessarily plausible, that while the men retreated below, it was Bonnie and Reed who fought courageously and that after their capture and the trial that Anne Bonny said to her lover, Jack Rackham, if you had fought like a man, you need not die like a dog.

We have that only from Charles Johnson, but we do also have some supporting evidence. We have the cumulative impression of their lives and the various bold and maverick things that they did. But we also have one of the witnesses in the trial transcript who says that they were clearly most active and willing to do anything in the commission of their crimes of piracy. So there is a very strong and legitimate sense that they were a really active part of the pirate crew. Mary's background in the Navy and Army would certainly support that.

So they have this great showdown in which they are really the only heroic figures. They are captured, the entire crew, and I'm not spoiling this entirely, the entire crew is sentenced to hang. And very tragically, 12 fishermen who they'd come upon not long before hadn't really raided because there wasn't much to be taken and said, come aboard, share a bowl of punch with us. And these 12 fishermen came aboard just before they were captured. And I think it's one of the saddest parts of the story to me, the most poignant, that these men all hanged as a result of their unfortunate bowl of punch with these pirates. The definition of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, that, isn't it? But Anne Bonny and Mary Read had one more trick up their

sleeve. And while I don't want to give away the ending, this is drawn directly from the historical record. They pulled something out of their sleeve and neither of them hang. We'll leave it at that because people need to buy the book. That's as simple as that. Go and buy this book. Talk about a ripping tale. And it's striking me, Francesca, as you're talking as well, that we've spoken about Arthurian myth before and how Arthurian myth doesn't know an end. And actually, it strikes me with Mary and Anne, there's an element of that too. And so you and your writing become part of that history and that legacy where, because so little is known, but we have tantalising glimpses in certain accounts, you can keep inventing these

people, you can keep drawing on some of the historical fact, you can then embellish it with some fiction that really brings the time and the people to life. And I think this has that longevity too, even if it's a shorter time we've been talking about these people, but there's an element of this never ending myth to it. There is, I agree, something so enduring about this story. It would be lovely for my publishers to be able to say that I'm the only person who's ever told this story. I'm not, and I'm sure that I won't be the last because there is something that draws us back to these fabulous historical figures and the things that they did. And when I first started

to write, a sort of shift in loyalties occurred during the process where at first my loyalty was to these documents, the fact. And at some point in the literally years of research and writing, something shifted and I realized that my ultimate loyalty was now to this voice of Mary Read that had begun to emerge. Another writer will come up with a different voice and a different story, but the facts that we have in the story that we do have is the most joyful, complex, wonderful and thrilling jumping-off point for any author. Saltblood will be right at the top of my to read pile. It's going right up there

immediately as soon as it's out. Francesca, thank you so much for joining us on After Dark. And thank you everyone for listening. You can listen along to our back catalogue of episodes and do leave us a review. It helps other people to find us. Thank you. Wendy's Small Frosty is the ultimate summer refreshment. And not because it's cool and creamy and made with fresh Canadian dairy. It's also refreshingly cheap. Just 99 cents until July 14th. It's a treat for you and your wallet.

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