Anne Bonny

Anne Bonny was born in County Cork around 1697, the illegitimate daughter of a lawyer and his maidservant. The family emigrated to the Province of Carolina, where her father established a plantation. As a young woman, Anne reportedly stabbed a servant girl with a table knife and beat a would-be suitor so badly he was bedridden for weeks. She married a small-time sailor named James Bonny and left with him for the pirate haven of Nassau.

Calico Jack

In Nassau she met John "Calico Jack" Rackham, a pirate captain of moderate ambition and considerable style. By 1719 she had abandoned her husband and joined Rackham's crew aboard the sloop William. She sailed with him through the Caribbean, taking small prizes off Jamaica and the Bahamas. Aboard ship she wore men's clothes, fought with cutlass and pistol, and was — by Captain Charles Johnson's later account — fiercer than most of the men.

Mary Read

While at sea Bonny befriended another woman disguised as a sailor: Mary Read, an English ex-soldier who had also turned pirate. The two became inseparable. Whether their bond was romantic or sisterly, the pirate world's most famous female pair sailed and fought side by side.

Capture

In October 1720, the pirate hunter Jonathan Barnet ran the William down off Negril Point, Jamaica. Most of Rackham's crew were drunk in the hold. Bonny and Read fought on deck, reportedly shouting at the men to come up and fight like men. They were taken alive.

After the trial

At Spanish Town, Jamaica, all the pirates were sentenced to hang. Bonny and Read both "pleaded their bellies" — both were pregnant — and their executions were stayed. Read died of fever in prison in April 1721. Anne Bonny vanishes from the official record. The most credible later account, recorded by descendants in Charleston, holds that her father ransomed her, she returned to South Carolina, married a respectable man named Joseph Burleigh, and died in 1782 at the age of eighty-four.

Related: Mary Read · Calico Jack