The 2 Notorious Female Pirates Who Fought Brutally, Ruthlessly, and Sometimes Topless

As the girlboss-commandeered adage goes, “well-behaved women seldom make history,” and March is as good a time as any to revel in the stories of our rule-bucking foremothers. But it’s also as good a time as any to celebrate Women’s History Month by spotlighting some of the worst-behaved women in history (which, honestly, is usually just women in male-dominated fields)—and so, we’re starting things off with the two most infamous female pirates of yore: Anne Bonny and Mary Read.  

You may have heard their names if you’ve watched HBO’s Our Flag Means Death (where they play lovers), if you’ve played Assassin’s Creed, or if you’ve ever browsed the art at a maritime history museum. Bonny and Read were, in short, textbook pirates. According to witness testimonies that eventually landed them at a courthouse in Jamaica in 1720, they were more ruthless and deadly than their male counterparts; they shot their rifles whenever they felt like it; and, in some cases, they fought topless. Please, I’m begging—no one tell Christopher Nolan about this.

Unfortunately, little is known about Bonny and Read’s early lives, and the patchworked historical accounts that do exist are largely uncorroborated. But they were most definitely pirates, and they were pirates during a century in which women were pretty much banned from any pirate vessels or crews. 

Bonny and Read were born at the end of the 17th century, and hailed from Ireland and England (respectively). According to some records, Bonny was the illegitimate child of Lord William Cormac and his house servant, and the three of them moved to modern-day South Carolina after Cormac’s wife caught wind of the affair. Read, meanwhile, never knew her father, and was born after her mother slept with a sailor she wasn’t married to. After Read’s half-brother died, she disguised herself to look like him so that she could receive financial support from her paternal grandmother. 

Bonny was known for her ill temper, allegedly beating up a sex pest so badly he had to be hospitalized, killing one girl with a pocket knife, and apparently almost burning down her father’s plantation when he tried to stop her from marrying a young sailor named James Bonny. But the two got married anyway, and they moved to a pirate-heavy area of the Bahamas when James decided to become a sell-out for the local government and help the governor as an informant. Around that time, Bonny was drinking at a pub when she met John “Calico Jack” Rackham—a pirate—and decided to… jump ship from her marriage. 

Bonny eventually became part of Rackham’s crew of a dozen others, who stole ships and vessels across Jamaica. Somewhere along the way, Read came onboard. Again, there’s varying accounts of how exactly this happened: that Read was a mercenary dressed as a man when she decided to join Calico Jack’s crew; that she was a bystander on a merchant ship that got seized; or—my personal favorite—that Bonny mistook her for a man and tried to seduce her before the two realized they were, in fact, in the same boat. In some versions of the tale, the two even fell in love. 

In October 1720, Rackham’s crew was ambushed by one of the governor’s king ships and most of the pirates—Rackham included—surrendered since they were outnumbered. But according to legend, Bonny and Read stood their ground, with the latter eventually telling her crewmates, “If there’s a man among ye, ye’ll come up and fight like the man ye are to be.” No one responded, so she fired her rifle into the cabin. 

The two were eventually captured and taken to court the following month, in a largely infamous trial (again, female pirates were pretty much unheard of). They were convicted of piracy in a unanimous vote and sentenced to death by hanging, but argued they were pregnant, and got the court to agree to let them give birth before they got the death sentence.

Again, it’s not clear what happened next. In some accounts, Read died of typhus in prison before she could give birth, and Bonny somehow got to live out the rest of her days in the Carolinas. But personally, I’d like to think that, however they died, they somehow still haunt the seas. 

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