Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Women Pirates

Episode Date: January 18, 2023

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too and this is short stuff 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.

It's with 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. Oh, okay. Did you watch, have you watched all of them?

Yeah, yeah, I like a lot, but it kind of got me wondering because a big, you know, it's kind of known as the most queer positive show on television and it's a show about pirates. So you might just, if you haven't seen it, you might think, well, that's odd. But on the show, there is a female character who is masquerading as a man pirate. And then there are, I don't want to spoil anything, but there's also 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 the 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 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, 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, 1600s. But I don't think Chuck, you had to necessarily just identify as a different gender. Like you could, if you were a woman and you were out on the high seas, you were probably dressing like a man one way or another, largely because ships, it was considered bad luck to have a woman on a ship.

But the two women that we're going to talk about, Anne Bonney and Mary Reed, they were such BAs as pirates with a Y or an I, it doesn't matter, that they were openly women who did still dress as men, but everyone on their ship knew they were women and they were reputed to have been the toughest, most ready to fight pirates on the ship, including the captain. That's right. And they were 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 17th century to like the first quarter, the 18th.

And we need to thank a few people, Britannica. We should just always think Britannica, the SS Britannica and Mark Mancini from howstuffworks.com because they point out a very sort of truism, which is there were books about pirates and stuff back then, one very notable one. The long title is a general history of the robberies and murders of the most notorious pirates with a Y, or as is generally known, a general history of 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.

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 a good story and sell books. Yeah, so it's the 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 is a, that book in particular, the general history of the pirates, it provides a conundrum for historians of piracy, especially the golden age of piracy, because that's really what it covers. 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 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 the other. And in particular, with Mary Reed and Anne Bonney, 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's stuff in the Britannica encyclopedia entries that has been proven to have been made up by novelists as late as the 1960s, and it's being touted as fact. And it's not just Britannica, Wikipedia, there's a ton of reputable sources that have just kind of fallen for these inaccuracies that have been added 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 total BS. Yeah, there's a lot of italics in there too. It's a dead giveaway.

Yeah. Yeah, so the book itself is written by a guy named Captain Charles Johnson who did not exist. It's a pen name. And I've seen it attributed typically to Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Caruso. And then alternatively, there was a publisher named Nathaniel Mist. And they think that it was probably one of those two guys who wrote it. Yeah, apparently Defoe worked for Mist.

So I think it's just one of those things where there are 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. I agree. Anne Bonney, should we take a break first? Yeah, we'll take a break and we'll come back and introduce the world to Anne Bonney and

Mary Reed. All right, what a great cliffhanger. As I was saying, Anne Bonney. 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 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 boy servant who's going to be my

assistant and training at this point. Right. And eventually the scandal got out. The whole thing was known to the county and the guy lost his practice, her father, who's sometimes identified as William Cormac, James Cormac, and a bunch of other names. But the upshot is her lawyer father basically lost his practice because of the scandal. And so he moved his daughter, Anne, and the servant maid, Anne's mother, to Carolina and probably to Charlestown, which is now known as Charleston.

If they moved to Carolina at any point from Europe, that's probably where they settled. Yeah. Like Bill Murray. Exactly. Anybody who's anybody ends up in Charleston. So they end up, and this was, you said Carolina, this is before there was a North and South Carolina. And I think they just said, we shall be Carolina.

And one day there will be an NFL team that represents us both. That's right. Although I think they're more, the Panthers are definitely North Carolina, because that's where they're based. 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.

They're like, just all of New England should root for us. Exactly. Well, Green Bay Packers is like the opposite of that. Why? Because it's specifically in Green Bay? Yeah. And they said no one else in Wisconsin root for us? Exactly.

It's specifically in a very small town. And I think the team is owned by the town too. Yeah. I got to go to a game there. I bought my friend Adam, one share of Green Bay Packers stock for Christmas last year. That's a great Christmas present. It is, but it's meaningless apparently. So where are we here?

They moved to Charleston. That's right. Charleston, historical records are very fuzzy, but may have been born in Folford with the alias of Bonnie. And supposedly got that name from being married to another pirate named James Bonnie. But then went and married, I don't know about Mary, 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 speculation or not, that they were kissing and stuff. Yes. I think that's pretty much proven. But yes, documentary evidence shows that she was a pirate with John Calico Jack Rackham. Great name. It is a great name. So again, it was weird that Rackham would have a woman on board with him, considered extremely bad luck.

But Rackham had not just one, but two women on board with him. Because in addition to Ann Bonny, he had another woman pirate named Mary Reed, who also had a kind of a strange early life as well that landed her on the high seas eventually. I wonder if it was like one as bad luck and two as a party. Yeah. Well, that was one thing. So Mary Reed in particular, she was, so I read that Ann Bonny was not as chaste as Mary Reed was.

Okay. So Mary Reed would fall in love really easily and be like, let's get married. And so she did that a few times. But there was one man who tried to have his way with Mary Reed. And according to the history of the pirates, she beat him nearly to death. So she could definitely handle herself for sure from an early age. Yeah. And there was also this story that they both were aboard dressed as men.

And this almost certainly seems like it's probably made up. But both dressed as men and Bonny crushed on Reed 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. Yeah, exactly.

And went, oh, we're both women. But that definitely sounds like it's in italics. Right, for sure. But I also saw, though, that there was a book as recently or as early as like the 1750s that supposed that they were actually lovers. Okay. Well, that sounds like an overactive imagination of a male writer to me. Right.

So the upshot is, though, that we do know from the scant documentary evidence that Mary Reed and Anne Bonny 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 ended up caught and tried, said like these women would curse and spit at the men. There was one person who said that the men were hiding below decks and Mary Reed and Anne Bonny were above deck fighting and the men wouldn't come out. So Anne Bonny shot into the lower decks and actually killed one guy because she considered them being cowards.

Like they were definitely known to have fought as pirates. They weren't captured, they weren't there against their will. They were swashbuckling with the best of them. They were there for the booty. They were. So they were collecting booty all over the place and eventually a, 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 1720.

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 basically through October. So they had a nice run through the fall and then in late October 1720, they were entertaining some gentlemen, not just the ladies, like the whole crew. I think there were like five or six of them total. I saw a dozen. Okay.

Let's say a dozen then. And they were entertaining some guys, 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. Yep. And that was it. They actually slipped, if you read the pirate history, they'd slipped through the hands of other pirate hunters a few times in some really amazing daring dues.

If they're true, even if they're not true, it's still worth reading. Daring stew? Yes. Exactly, Chuck. Thank you, William Sapphire. 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. They were French like hunters on an island and they were abducted and forced into this and they were still tried and convicted and every single male crewman was hanged. Right. But there's a good final twist. Another TV scene moment in court as they were being, I guess, read their verdict, Marion and looked at each other and winked and at the same time said, threw their arms up and said, we're pregnant.

Yep. And 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 inspected, I guess, I hope, by a doctor and found to be really pregnant. And so they avoided the gallows. Yeah, they were probably in their second trimester later historian said, Mary Reed died fairly shortly after the following April and some historians have said that probably coincides

with childbirth. So she might have died in childbirth. Yeah, that's what it sounds like. Her grave is in St. Catherine, Jamaica. You can go visit it. And Anne Bonney, though, she became more obscure. According to the history, Captain Johnson's history, she was let go at some point. And we don't know where she went, but only this we know that she was not executed.

What a great ending. Yeah. I also saw that after that, some people supposed that she went back to Charleston, married another man, had eight kids, and it would be possible then that there are descendants of Anne Bonney out there running around. On the Isle of Palms, perhaps. Probably. Maybe they'll find my tooth.

That's some booty right there. That is some booty. I'll give you some other booty short stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts to my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. All podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.