Blackbeard, Henry Every, William Kidd, Bartholomew Roberts…They were some of the most infamous pirates in history and they all had one thing in common – we’ve covered them all on Biographics. Okay, they had two things in common – they were also all men. There is no doubt that piracy was a man’s game, but exceptions did exist. In China, Ching Shih became one of the most successful pirates in history, and even here in local waters, we have Anne Bonny who gave up an easy life as the daughter of a rich plantation owner to follow her true calling, raise the black flag and sail the seven seas.
Early Years
We start off with the standard disclaimer for most of our pirate videos. Biographical accounts and official records on these scurvy sea dogs are pretty scarce and detailed information is hard to come by. Most of what we know about Anne Bonny comes from a single source. That would be A General History of the Pyrates by Captain Charles Johnson, which is a pen name for an author whose true identity we don’t even know. Some historians even believe he might have been Daniel Defoe. So keep in mind that whoever wrote it liked to embellish for dramatic effect now and then…Or, you know, simply make s**t up.
Taking Captain Johnson at his word, we can say that Anne Bonny was born in a small town near Cork, in the Kingdom of Ireland. Her birthdate is unknown, but considering the time she was active as a pirate, it would have been sometime during the late 1600s.
From the beginning, Anne’s life was like a soap opera. Although Johnson does not give her father’s name, only identifying him as an English lawyer, other sources say he was William Cormac. Anne’s mother, however, was not Mrs. Cormac. It was the housemaid, Mary Brennan, sometimes identified as Peg Brennan, but don’t put too much stock in these names. The wife suspected the affair and had it confirmed in dramatic fashion one night by sleeping in the maid’s room and waiting for her husband who arrived in the dead of night and made love to her in the dark, thinking it was Mary.
Afterward, the wife tried getting revenge on the maid by setting her up for the theft of some silver spoons and having her arrested. However, by the time of her trial, Mary Brennan was pregnant. That plus the lack of solid evidence gave her a “Get out of jail, free” card and, soon after, Anne Bonny was born into the world. Of course, she wasn’t named that at the time, but we’ll stick to Anne Bonny for simplicity’s sake.
At one point, the lawyer’s wife passed away, and he wanted to raise Anne as his child. However, everyone knew that the maid had a daughter, so, instead, he dressed Anne up as a boy and pretended she was the son of a relation. Of course, this did not stop the rumors from swirling, and the rumors turned into scandal when Cormac started living openly with Mary Brennan. Ultimately, the lawyer concluded that the only way to escape the vicious gossip was to build a new life elsewhere, so the whole family packed up and sailed across the Atlantic, relocating to the Province of Carolina.
There, the family settled in Charleston where the lawyer tried his hand at lawyering for a spell before concluding that being a merchant was more profitable. Anne’s mother died at some point in the years that followed and she became the new woman of the house. Anne turned into quite a tomboy with a fiery temper and an attitude to match. Captain Johnson mentions one occasion where, as he puts it delicately, “a young fellow would have lain with her against her will” and Anne beat him up so badly that he was bedridden for a considerable time.
William Cormac proved to be a skilled and successful merchant and he was able to afford a large plantation outside of town. He expected his daughter to marry well and have a nice, comfortable life in Charleston, but Anne had other plans. When she was 16, she married a two-bit pirate named James Bonny who “was not worth a Groat.” Furious with her decision, her father threw her out of the house and disowned her. With employment opportunities a bit thin on the ground in Charleston, James and Anne Bonny set sail for the Bahamas, to the pirate haven of New Providence.
Anne Meets Jack
The Bonnies arrived in the Bahamas sometime between 1714 and 1718. It was around the time that King George I of Great Britain issued the 1717 Proclamation for the Suppressing of Pirates, better known as the Act of Grace or the King’s Pardon. It was a one-time offer of complete clemency for all piratical acts to those who surrendered to the authorities before a deadline, plus a few extras for those who turned in or helped capture other pirates who refused to take the king’s pardon.
James Bonny took the governor up on the offer. Not only that, but he became an informant, something which Anne was not particularly happy about. She was all about the pirate life. You know what they say, once you raise the black, you never go back. But it didn’t really matter that much to her because Anne wasn’t enamored with James Bonny, anymore. She had found a new beau – Captain John Rackham, better known as Calico Jack.
Suffice it to say that Jack was a bit higher up on the pirate pecking order than James Bonny. Although he, too, had accepted the king’s pardon, he only did it so he could leisurely stroll around the Bahamas without fear of reprisals. He never intended to abandon life on the high seas. Once he had won the heart of Anne Bonny, he dressed her up as a man, took her aboard his ship, and went back to pirating. By the way, if you want an in-depth look at Calico Jack’s career, we already have an older bio on him ready to go. It includes the times when he usurped the captaincy of the Ranger from Charles Vane, another notorious pirate, and when he stole a sloop from under the nose of a Spanish warship. This all happened before he met Anne Bonny, so we’re not concerned with it here, but it’s there waiting if you’re interested.
Anyway, the two of them set sail in early 1719 aboard a small but fast sloop with a modest crew of 20 men. At first, Anne’s disguise worked well, but she soon became pregnant and there were some things that you just couldn’t hide. Calico Jack’s behavior in this situation was uncharacteristic for a supposed ruthless pirate captain and he showed great concern and compassion towards his pregnant lover. He knew that a pirate ship wasn’t the best place in the world to give birth to a child, so he arranged for a safe haven for Bonny in Cuba with some close associates of his who could be trusted to look after Anne and her baby.
Well, maybe “safe” isn’t the right word here. Anne Bonny was still a British pirate on a Spanish island. If she were to be discovered, she would have been executed, so after she gave birth in early 1720, she reunited with Calico Jack, once again dressed as a man. Strangely enough, she would not be the only woman in disguise aboard Rackham’s ship for long. After an encounter with another vessel, Calico Jack’s crew was supplemented by a privateer who was actually a woman named Mary Read passing herself off as a male pirate just like Bonny. Eventually, Anne discovered Mary Read’s secret and the two of them might have become lovers…maybe. And then Jack found out and the three of them might have also become lovers. This was a complicated love triangle and we don’t really know the exact details. We just know that, when they were eventually captured, both women claimed to be pregnant.
Anyhoo, as we mentioned, Calico Jack maintained a modest crew and was relatively small-time compared to some of his notorious contemporaries such as Blackbeard or Henry Every. He wasn’t going up against giant galleons, let’s just put it like that. Most of his prizes consisted of unguarded merchant ships. Probably his most audacious act during his time with Bonny was when they snuck into Nassau Harbor and stole a sleek and sexy 12-ton sloop named the William to use as his new flagship vessel.
This happened on August 22, 1720, on a dark and stormy night. Rackham and a gang of trusted sidekicks, Anne Bonny among them, sailed quietly into the harbor and boarded the William. They subdued the guards, raised the anchor, and set off, managing to escape Nassau before the soldiers inside the fort realized what had happened.
Now that they commanded a fast and dangerous ship like the William, Rackham and Bonny could become true terrors of the Caribbean Sea…for a couple of months, at least.
Capture and Consequences
At some point, Anne Bonny gave up her ruse of pretending to be a man. We don’t know if this was by choice or if she was discovered or whatever, but it made little difference. Calico Jack’s crew was so small that he could fill it with enough sailors who didn’t care whether women were aboard the ship or not, especially when those women proved their worth as pirates. Bonny still dressed like a man during the day, more for practical purposes than anything else, but at night she was free to don a dress or a skirt without worries.
Unfortunately, neither Bonny nor Jack were aware that stealing the William put them on the top of the hitlist of Bahamian Governor Woodes Rogers who issued a warrant for their arrest or death.
We’d like to end the story with some epic Master and Commander-style battle, but real life is seldom so accommodating. The truth is that the capture of the William was quite anticlimactic. At the end of October 1720, a pirate hunter named Jonathan Barnet investigated an area where an unidentified ship fired upon a passing vessel. Once Barnet realized that it was the crew of the William, he demanded their surrender. The pirates refused, of course, so Barnet opened fire with his broadside cannons, obliterating the William’s sails and rigging. Completely outmatched, outnumbered, and outgunned, the pirates were sitting ducks so they quickly reconsidered their position and surrendered.
The end for Calico Jack and his crew was swift and merciless. They were arrested and brought to Jamaica where they were all found guilty of piracy and hanged a few weeks later. Bonny hoped that being a woman, she could say that she was forced aboard Rackham’s crew against her will. People would have been inclined to believe her since the idea of a female pirate was still unbelievable and outrageous.
Whatever hopes she had were dashed, however, when one of her former victims, a woman named Dorothy Thomas, testified against her. Thomas claimed that Anne Bonny was just as much a pirate as any man and that she saw her fully armed and in pirate dress, wielding a machete and a flintlock pistol when Jack’s crew boarded the vessel that Thomas was on. Bonny was sentenced to death.
She had just one more chance – “pleading the belly” aka claiming to be pregnant. Both she and Mary Read did this and obtained a temporary stay of execution, although Read died in prison from a fever.
Bonny’s fate is far more mysterious and controversial. Many sources simply state that they have no idea what happened to her, but that she gave birth to her child and avoided execution. Others are convinced that Bonny’s father interfered and he somehow secured passage for his daughter to return to Charleston where she led a quiet and unassuming life, but this idea is based mainly on one iffy account written in the 1960s, so we can’t give it too much credence. We’re just going to play it safe and say that we don’t know. Like many other historical figures, the notorious female pirate Anne Bonny simply disappeared into the mists of history.
