The popular account of Mary Read and Anne Bonny is, by now, more or less a cinematic property — two fierce women in waistcoats and breeches, cutlasses raised, defying the gallows in the name of love and freedom. It is a good story. It has the small disadvantage of being mostly invented, and the considerable disadvantage of obscuring the much stranger, much sadder, and in places much more specific story that the surviving documents actually tell.

What I want to do in this essay is read the original sources — principally the printed pamphlet of the Jamaican trial, The Tryals of Captain John Rackam and Other Pirates, published at Jamaica in 1721 — without the lens of Captain Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates, which appeared three years later and which is responsible for almost everything anyone thinks they know about the case.

The arrest

On the night of the twenty-second of October, 1720, a sloop commanded by John Rackham was lying at anchor in a small bay on the northwestern coast of Jamaica, near Negril Point. Rackham — who would shortly be hanged under that name, though most of the popular accounts know him as "Calico Jack" — had with him roughly a dozen men, a quantity of plundered goods, and two women dressed in men's clothing whom the court would later identify as Mary Read and Anne Bonny.

The sloop was approached at night by an armed vessel commanded by Captain Jonathan Barnet, who had been commissioned by the Governor of Jamaica, Sir Nicholas Lawes, to hunt pirates. The capture, according to the surviving deposition of one of Barnet's officers, was almost completely without incident. The buccaneers were, in his phrase, "in a condition of drunkenness most pitiable to behold." Most of the male crew were below decks. Rackham was on the deck and made no attempt to resist. The two women, by all accounts, did.

The trial

The trial proper began on the sixteenth of November, 1720, at St. Jago de la Vega — the Spanish name still then in use for what would later be called Spanish Town. The pamphlet record covers two separate proceedings: the trial of Rackham and the men, on charges of piracy on the high seas; and a separate, later trial of Read and Bonny on the same charges.

The first trial was brief. Rackham and his ten male crew offered no serious defence. They had been captured on a stolen sloop with plundered goods aboard, in the presence of witnesses, after a series of acts of piracy along the Jamaican coast that had been reported in the Boston News-Letter three weeks earlier. They were convicted on the seventeenth of November and most were hanged within three days at Gallows Point, near Port Royal. The pamphlet records that Rackham, before being executed, was permitted a single visit from one of his fellow prisoners. The visitor was Anne Bonny. Their conversation was not recorded; the only line that survives, attributed to her, is the one that has been repeated ever since: that she was sorry to see him in that condition, but that if he had fought like a man, he need not have been hanged like a dog.

I should say, in the interest of honesty, that this line first appears in Johnson's General History, which is a notoriously unreliable source. The pamphlet itself simply records the fact of the visit. The line may be authentic. It may be invented. We do not, and probably will not, know.

The second trial

The trial of Read and Bonny began on the twenty-eighth of November. The transcript is partial, but enough survives to give the legal shape of the proceedings, which is the thing most often misunderstood.

The two women did not, contrary to popular belief, give a stirring defence speech. They appear to have spoken very little. The case against them was made primarily by witnesses — two former prisoners of Rackham's, a Dorothy Thomas and a married couple named Spenlow, who had been briefly held aboard Rackham's sloop and released. Their testimony is consistent and quietly devastating: that Read and Bonny were full participants in the piracies, that they bore arms, that they performed boarding duties, that they were addressed by the crew as comrades rather than as captives, and that — and this is the line that the court found impossible to discount — they had personally urged the male crew to "fire down into the hold and kill them" when the prize ship's crew refused to come up.

They confessed nothing. They were sober, and they were dressed in men's jackets, and long trousers, and handkerchiefs tied about their heads. The court could find no precedent for the matter before it; nevertheless they were convicted. — FROM THE JAMAICAN ADMIRALTY RECORDS, 28 NOVEMBER 1720

What followed is the part of the story that almost never gets told in the popular versions. After the conviction — after the death sentence had been passed — both women, separately, "pleaded their bellies". This was an established English common-law procedure: a pregnant woman could not be executed while she was carrying a child, and would be remanded until after the delivery, by which time, in practice, the sentence was usually commuted.

The plea was tested by a panel of matrons appointed by the court. Both women were found to be pregnant. Both were remanded. Mary Read died of fever, almost certainly contracted in the Jamaican prison, in April 1721. The burial register of St. Catherine's parish records her interment under the name "Mary Read, pyrate" on the twenty-eighth of that month. She had not been hanged. There is no record of the child surviving.

Anne Bonny's fate is unknown. There is no record of her execution and no record of her death in any Jamaican parish register. The popular tradition — that she was ransomed by her father, a wealthy planter in South Carolina, and lived to old age — has no documentary basis whatever. It is a guess. It may be correct. We do not know.

What the documents do not say

I want to end by emphasising what the surviving records do not contain. They do not contain a romance between Bonny and Read. They do not contain a love triangle with Rackham. They do not contain any of the dramatic speeches that have attached themselves to these women in the centuries since. What they contain, instead, is a quite ordinary criminal proceeding involving two women whose only legally remarkable feature was that they were women, conducted with the bureaucratic seriousness that the eighteenth-century Jamaican Vice-Admiralty Court applied to all such cases.

This is, in its way, a more striking story than the romance. Two women, by routes the documents do not explain, ended up on a small pirate sloop in 1720, fought and looted alongside their male crew, were captured, were tried, were convicted, and — through a combination of pregnancy, prison fever, and probably a quiet payment to the right official — escaped the immediate fate of their captain. The surviving sources tell us this much and almost nothing else. Everything else is invention, and most of it is rather less interesting than the silence.

A note on the sources

The trial pamphlet — The Tryals of Captain John Rackam and Other Pirates, Who Were All Condemn'd for Piracy, at the Town of St. Jago de la Vega in the Island of Jamaica, printed by Robert Baldwin at Jamaica, 1721 — is the indispensable document. A scanned copy of the British Library's holding is available through Eighteenth Century Collections Online; a print edition was prepared by Vance Roberts for the Naval Records Society in 1978 with useful annotations. The parish register of St. Catherine's, Spanish Town, is held at the Jamaica Archives. For an excellent recent scholarly treatment that takes the documentary problems seriously, Marcus Rediker's Villains of All Nations remains the best single starting point.