A new book Pirate Queens: The Lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read is a history of female piracy in the Caribbean and the Atlantic.
Dr Rebecca Simon's charts the rise and fall of pirates From ancient times to a "golden era" spanning the 16th and 17th centuries,
Anne Bonny and Mary Read were infamous pirates who swore and fought with pistols and cutlasses at a time when few women rose above servitude and wifely duties.
Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Photo: Bianchetti/ Leemage via AFP
The 1600s and 1700s are known as the ‘golden era’ for piracy because European and American forces used pirates to compete for colonial power, Simon told Kathryn Ryan.
“Many pirates would actually be employed by various governments as privateers, meaning that they were legally sanctioned to attack and rob enemy ships so many pirates did this. But when the wars were over, then they would be out of work and they would just continue and become pirates.”
But in fact, pirates hardly came across treasures like jewels or valuables or buried their stash as portrayed in popular culture, she says.
It was Captain Kidd’s infamous incident along with Treasure Island in 1883 which came to shape these ideas about pirates and spawned the romantic Captain Jack Sparrow-eque image, she says.
“There was one pirated named Captain William Kidd who was executed in 1701 in London for piracy in the East Indies. He was rumoured to have buried a whole bunch of what we would call treasure off the coast of New York.
“This ended up not being true, he didn’t bury anything, he may have tried to send some of his cash home to his wife, but it never got there.
“But people kind of got word of this and it was blown up out of proportion and people are still looking for his treasure today, even Wikipedia says he buried treasure but it’s actually incorrect.
“Pirates had no reason to do so because they needed to sell their goods and they were always in such a hurry to go from place to place that it wasn’t feasible really to return to a hidden location.”
We rarely hear about women being seafarers because it was believed that they were not capable of doing the ship work, and even banned by Captain Blackbeard for fear of being a distraction, she says.
“We had some throughout history really major influential women who were married to powerful people such as Grace O’Malley, the Irish pirate in the 1500s, who was married to a very powerful clan chieftain or Sayyida al-Hurra of Morocco in the 1500s, who was married to a very powerful governor.”
But the only known women pirates from the working class are Anne Bonny and Mary Read, she says, although there were probably more we don’t know about.
Bonny was brought onboard after getting married to pirate Captain John ‘Jack’ Rackham, while for Read, it’s commonly thought she disguised herself as a man to join the crew.
“The reality is there were women who did disguise themselves on ships and this probably happened a lot more than we think, we just don’t know about it because they probably did it very well or it just wasn’t seen as worth mentioning.”
They only sailed for two months but were “fiercer than any of the other men”, she says.
Their case was often viewed with fascination and sometimes revulsion too, because Anne and Mary were pushing past the boundaries of what was seen as a woman’s role in society, she says.
They weren't alone though. Further afield, in the South China Sea, female pirate leader Ching Shih presided over a fleet of some 80,000 men.
“She came from very humble origins. We believe that she initially was a prostitute before she became this pirate captain’s wife, we’re not sure how she became his wife but she was a co-captain with her husband and they commanded a fleet of 1000 ships and had hundreds of thousands of men in their employ.”
By contrast, Captain Blackbeard had a crew of 300. Both he and other notorious pirates make cameo appearances in Simon’s book.
“After her [Ching Shih’s] husband died, she with her son became captain of this whole fleet, but she ran the show, she allowed women to be on the ship. She had very strict rules for conduct, especially in regards to the women’s safety.
“She was so powerful in her actions as a pirate in the South China Seas that eventually the Chinese government had to basically pay her to retire and she ultimately decided to do so.”
