Chapter Seven: Bonny & ReadI had my fill of fine gentlemen in the sugar plantations....They can't ask a girl for what they want without simpering and playacting. And then along came Calico Jack like a great roaring stallion.
-- Anne Bonny, in the 1934 play Mary Read, by James Bridie
On a balmy tropic evening in November 1720, a privateer commanded by Captain Jonathan Barnet raised a black-hulled sloop lying dark and silent at Negril Point. This was buccaneer territory, off the extreme western end of the island of Jamaica, and Barnet -- like Kidd twenty-five years previously -- had a commission to hunt down pirates. The privateer coasted along slowly, studying this enigmatic stranger. Silence, save for the ripple of silky water along the run of the hull -- and then, the sudden sound of a gun. Barnet ordered a change of course to investigate. At the sight of his craft, the black ship hurriedly began to put on sail, looking more furtive than ever, so Barnet gave the order to make chase.
It is easy to recapture the stream of commands, from a stirring near-contemporary description. "Out with all your sails, a steady man at the helm, sit close to keep her steady...Ho, we gather on him." At ten, the stranger is in hailing distance. "Is all ready? Yea, yea. Every man to his charge. Dowse your sail, salute him for the sea. Hail him! Whence your ship?"
And the bold reply echoed back, "John Rackham, from Cuba!"
This enlivened Captain Barnet more than somewhat, "Calico Jack" Rackham being very high up on the pirates-wanted list. Not only had Rackham broken the terms of the amnesty he had accepted the previous year, but the twelve-ton sloop William he was sailing had been stolen from the harbor of Nassau in an act of barefaced insolence less than three months before. Barnet bawled out a demand to surrender, but the only reply was the firing of a swivel gun, along with a few shouts of defiance, some of them remarkably shrill.
Despite the darkness Captain Barnet immediately launched an attack. It lasted no more than a few moments, for the first broadside carried away the pirates' boom, effectively disabling the William. Then, when Barnet and his men boarded Rackham's sloop, the hand-to-hand combat was even briefer. While it would not have surprised Captain Barnet to find two women in the pirate crew -- Governor Woodes Rogers's pirates-wanted list including "Ann[e] Fulford alias Bonny, & Mary Read" -- it must have amazed him that the girls were the only ones who offered resistance. Anne and Mary were armed to the teeth with cutlasses and pistols, and their language, to say the very least, was unladylike, but they failed to rouse their shipmates, who were cowering cravenly down in the hold. According to legend, Mary was so furious at this that she fired her pistol down among her erstwhile comrades, wounding a few and killing one, but the fact of the matter is that the outcome of the battle was never in doubt.
While Bonny and Read certainly existed, their stories are even more murky than William Kidd's, simply because of all the speculation and embroidering ever since. Some of the earliest retelling of their yarns was included in a book that first came out in London in 1724, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates by Captain Charles Johnson, believed by many to be Daniel Defoe, the writer who took the real adventures of the self-marooned pirate Alexander Selkirk and turned them into the classic story of Robinson Crusoe. If it was Defoe who produced this early record of the two pirate girls, the details should be reliable, for he was famous for his painstaking research, but as it is, the stories are a little hard to credit. As the writer himself admits, "some may be tempted to think the whole Story no better than a Novel or Romance."
Anne Bonny's, in particular, reads like one of the more racy of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Anne was born in Ireland, in a town near Cork. While a certain lawyer was her real father, his wife was not her mother. The lawyer's wife, in fact, was not even at home at the time Anne was conceived, being at her mother-in-law's house. In the lawyer's house, instead, was "a handsome young Woman," a serving maid named Mary. Maid Mary had another swain, a young tanner who was fatally light-fingered, "whipping three Silver Spoons into his Pocket" one day when Mary's back was turned. When the maid noticed that the spoons were missing, she knew exactly whom to blame. The tanner denied it, but she threatened to go to a Justice of the Peace, so he surreptitiously returned the spoons, hiding them in the maid's own bed, imagining that she would discover them that night. But, strange to say, she did not.
Next, the Mistress came to hear of it. She returned home, and Mary reported the theft. The young tanner, keen to clear his name, went to the lawyer's wife privately to inform her that he had returned the spoons, telling her exactly where he had put them. Naturally, the "Mistress could scarce believe it." But, when she went to the maid's room and turned down the covers, there indeed lay the missing silverware. The deduction was obvious, but she decided to make certain. So, in a series of complicated maneuvers worthy of a modern French farce, she arranged it so that she slept in the maid's bed that night and the maid slept somewhere else.
After she had been in the maid's bed some time, "she heard some Body enter the Room." As the stealthy footsteps approached the bed she silently agitated about thieves, but "when she heard these Words, Mary, are you awake? She knew it to be her Husband's Voice." The Mistress said nothing, pretending to be asleep, and lo, her "Husband came to Bed, and that Night play'd the vigorous Lover." The knowledge that he thought she was someone else was more than a little mortifying, but she lay still "and bore it like a Christian."
As soon as the lawyer was sleeping deeply from his exertions, she stole out and told her mother-in-law about it. Then, to wreak revenge on the maid, she "sent for a Constable, and charged her with stealing the spoons." Mary was arrested and thrown into prison, and the lawyer flew into a rage. At that, his wife promptly left him, to take up residence with her mother-in-law again. In due course, both the maid and the Mistress were found to be pregnant (this last greatly surprising the lawyer, who was not aware that he had slept with his wife), Mary was released and delivered of a daughter whom she named Anne, and the wife was delivered of twins.
This string of events meant that the lawyer was very short of money, for he was dependent on his wife for an income. His wife, however, relented and made him an allowance -- until she found out that he had taken in his illegitimate daughter and was bringing the child up to be a lawyer's clerk, dressing her as a boy. So, she stopped the allowance. Driven onto his beam-ends, the lawyer sold up his business and embarked for Carolina with Maid Mary and little Anne.
All went happily there for a while, but first Mary died, and then Anne exhibited an extremely bad temper. There was gossip that she had killed a servant-maid with a "Case-Knife" (which Johnson declares to be untrue), and she half-killed a young man who tried to seduce her. Then, she infuriated her father by marrying a penniless seaman, James Bonny. Forthwith, he threw her out of the house.
Bonny, who had married Anne for her father's money, was naturally very disappointed. Making the best of a bad job, he took her to the Isle of New Providence, hoping to find employment there by informing on pirates, as an alternative to turning to piracy himself. It was contrary-natured Anne who became the buccaneer, after being seduced by the dashing Jack Rackham.
Donning men's clothes, she went to sea, but "beginning to grow big, Rackam landed her on the Island of Cuba," and there she had his child. According to some accounts, the infant died, but Johnson does not mention the child's fate. Whatever, as soon as she was up and about again, Anne rejoined Calico Jack on his ship. The amnesty interrupted their pirating career for a while, but as we have seen, they both fell back into their old piratical ways. And it is at this part of the drama that Mary Read arrives on the stage.
Mary Read's mother was a solo parent, a young woman who had borne a baby boy some months after her husband, a seaman, had gone off on a voyage. Though she was living with his family, she "met with an Accident" and found herself pregnant again, so she beat a strategic retreat into the countryside, taking the infant boy with her. The boy died, Mary was born, and about three or four years later the young mother ran out of money, though not out of ideas. The obvious ploy was to dress Mary in boy's clothes and pass her off to her mother-in-law as the deceased son, and that is exactly what Mary's mother did. There was a bit of a hitch when the old lady took a fancy to the "son" and wanted to keep him, "but the Mother pretended it would break her Heart to part with it; so it was agreed betwixt them, that the Child should live with the Mother, and the supposed Grandmother should allow a Crown a Week for its Maintenance."
Thus, Mary Read was raised as a boy and that so thoroughly that she became set in masculine ways. In her teens, she shipped on a man-of-war. Being of a restless temperament, she soon got tired of the sea, so joined the army in Flanders "and carry'd Arms in a Regiment of Foot, as a Cadet." As she was unable to purchase a commission, she tired of this, too, and joined the cavalry, at which point nature intruded, for she fell obsessively in love with a fellow soldier, a Fleming. It altered her whole character, for she followed him about like a lovesick pup. For a while the whole regiment thought she was mad, but then when she and the object of her passion were sharing a tent "she found a Way of letting him discover her Sex, without appearing that it was done with Design."
Naturally, he was surprised. Even more understandably, he was delighted, as...
