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The Capture of John Rackham (1720)

The taking of the pirate sloop William, commanded by John "Calico Jack" Rackham, off Negril Point in late October 1720 by Captain Jonathan Barnet, and the trials at St Jago de la Vega that condemned Rackham, hanged at Port Royal, and reprieved Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

Also writtenThe taking of the sloop William off Negril Point; The capture of Calico Jack Rackham; Action of 20 October 1720 (the title later writers index it under; the day is not settled)

A small sloop was taken off the western end of Jamaica in the autumn of 1720 after a brief fight. The vessel was the William, commanded by John Rackham, called Calico Jack. The captor was Captain Jonathan Barnet, a former privateer. Nothing about the action was large. Its afterlife is out of all proportion, because two of the prisoners were women.1

The stolen sloop

Rackham is reported to have taken the King's pardon and then gone back to the trade. Through 1720 he worked a small sloop around Cuba, Hispaniola and the Jamaican coast, picking up fishing boats, small traders and coasters rather than large prizes. In August he and a few companions stole the William out of the harbour at Nassau. Woodes Rogers, governor of the Bahamas, answered on 5 September with a proclamation naming Rackham and his companions pirates and enemies of the Crown.2

Under whose commission

The trial record does not say who sent Barnet after him, and it does not say that anybody did. Its one witness to the taking, James Spatchears of Port Royal, deposed that Barnet was sailing in company with Captain Bonnevie towards Negril Point, bound on a trading voyage to the south keys of Cuba, when he gave chase; no commission from Rogers or from Jamaica is mentioned anywhere in the pamphlet. The statement that Rogers hired him rests on later writers alone. What the Jamaican government plainly did own was the water the sloop was taken in and the bench that tried her men, which sat under Sir Nicholas Lawes.3

Off Negril Point

The William was lying off the leeward coast near Negril Point when Barnet came up with her. He hailed and called on the sloop to surrender. The answer, in the accounts that describe it, was a refusal and a shot. Barnet's vessel replied with a broadside and a volley of small arms, the fire carried away the William's boom, and with the sloop crippled the pirates called for quarter. Little or no loss of life is recorded on either side. The whole company, and the others aboard that evening, was carried in.4

The day is harder than it looks. The printed proceedings of 1721 place the piracy charged "about one League from Negril-Point" and date the relevant act to "the 22d Day of October", and that is the date most often reprinted. Later writers index the action under 20 October. The record of the trials takes that 22 October as the day the Negril men joined Rackham rather than the day Barnet took him, and follows Governor Lawes's letter towards a capture around 30 October.1

The deck and the hold

The celebrated part of the story is absent from the court record. It comes from A General History of the Pyrates of 1724, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson. In Johnson's account, only a few of the company kept the deck at close quarters, Anne Bonny and Mary Read among them, while the rest went below: "none kept the Deck except Mary Read and Anne Bonny, and one more; upon which, she, Mary Read, called to those under Deck, to come up and fight like Men, and finding they did not stir, fired her Arms down the Hold amongst them, killing one, and wounding others". Johnson also supplies Bonny's reported parting words to Rackham, that if he had fought like a man he need not have been hanged like a dog. Johnson embellishes and sometimes invents. Nothing in the 1721 proceedings confirms either scene, and the court record carries no death below decks. Both are tradition from a literary source.5

St Jago de la Vega and Gallows Point

The prisoners were carried to St Jago de la Vega, the inland capital also called Spanish Town, and tried before the Court of Vice-Admiralty. Rackham and the men of his company were condemned on 16 and 17 November 1720. Rackham hanged on 18 November at the gallows on the approaches to Port Royal. His body was afterwards hung in irons on a small cay at the main entrance to the harbour, then known as Plumb Point, which by the middle of the eighteenth century had come to be called Rackham's Cay. Several of the company hanged with him or within days. Others were acquitted, and men who could show they had been forced or were merely visitors were dealt with separately.6

The two women

Bonny and Read were brought to the bar together on 28 November 1720, before the same court and under one set of articles. Dorothy Thomas testified that the company had taken her canoe and that the two women had been part of the attack. Both were convicted and sentenced to hang. Both then informed the court that they were quick with child, and their executions were respited.7

Read is reported not to have survived the gaol. She is said to have died in prison in Jamaica of a fever, her death put in April 1721 and a burial entered in the parish of Saint Catherine on 28 April 1721. Bonny simply stops. The trial record does not follow her past the reprieve, no execution of her is recorded, and the later stories of release and a long life ashore are tradition with no document beneath them.8

Why so small an action is remembered

The engagement was slight, an evening skirmish against a lightly armed sloop that called for quarter after a single exchange of fire. What it left behind is a document. Most pirate legends have no court under them; this one has the printed proceedings of 1721, The Tryals of Captain John Rackam and other Pirates, with names, dates, articles and verdicts, and it is the best documented case in the Golden Age in which women were tried and convicted as pirates. The taking of Rackham's company belongs to the wider clampdown across the western Caribbean around 1720 to 1722 that helped bring the Golden Age to a close.

Later retellings pull the other way. They enlarge the fight, romanticise Rackham and Bonny, and give Bonny an ending of their own. The nickname, the black flag with a skull over crossed cutlasses now attached to Rackham, and the fame of the two women owe more to eighteenth-century print and to twentieth and twenty-first century popular culture than to the surviving documentation.

What the sources cannot yet give is the day, the commission and the roster. The capture date sits between 20 October, 22 October and Governor Lawes's late-October report, and fixing it needs the 1721 Tryals read against the Jamaican Vice-Admiralty minutes and the Colonial Office correspondence at Kew, none of which was consulted here. The same papers would show under whose authority Barnet sailed. The list of those hanged, reprieved and acquitted, and the identity of the others found aboard when Barnet came up, should be taken from the pamphlet rather than from digests. Anne Bonny's fate after the reprieve rests on no document at all; parish, gaol and manumission records in Jamaica, or South Carolina records, would be needed to test the stories. Read's death date and the Saint Catherine burial entry given for her come from later accounts, the parish book itself not having been seen.

What the evidence does not settle

Barnet's commissioning authority

  • The capture and trial fell under Jamaican jurisdictionVery likely

Company roster and disposition

  • The exact list of hanged, reprieved and acquitted is unfixed
  • Turtlers or visitors found aboard remain unidentified

The deck fighting account

  • Only Bonny, Read and one other are said to have foughtPossible

Each line is one question with its own grade, taken from the register where a claim carries it. Nothing here is graded as a whole.

Sources for this record

Every statement above that rests on a checked claim carries a small number; the numbers lead here. Each entry gives what is claimed, how far the record supports it, and where it comes from.

  1. The pirate sloop William, commanded by John "Calico Jack" Rackham, was taken off Negril Point on the leeward coast of Jamaica by an armed sloop under Captain Jonathan Barnet in late October 1720; the 1721 printed Tryals date the act charged to "the 22d Day of October" and place it "about one League from Negril-Point", later writers index the action under 20 October, and Governor Nicholas Lawes's contemporary letter points towards a capture around 30 October, so the capture is certain and the day is not. Very likely Strong evidence, short of proof. Trial pamphlet: The Tryals of Captain John Rackam, and other Pirates... St. Jago de la Vega, Jamaica, printed by Robert Baldwin, 1721 (National Library of Jamaica; TNA Discovery C14075679); Governor Nicholas Lawes's contemporary correspondence as carried on the Archive's record of the Rackham trials
  2. Rackham is reported to have taken the King's Pardon and returned to piracy, working a small sloop around Cuba, Hispaniola and the Jamaican coast in 1720 and taking small fishing and trading craft rather than large prizes; in August 1720 he and a few companions stole the sloop William from the harbour at Nassau, New Providence, and on 5 September 1720 Woodes Rogers, Governor of the Bahamas, issued a proclamation naming Rackham and his companions pirates and enemies of the Crown. Likely More likely than not on the evidence we have. Period narrative: Library of Congress, In Custodia Legis law blog, "The Life and Trial of Anne Bonny" (2024); A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson (1724)
  3. The court that tried Rackham's company sat at the town of St Jago de la Vega in Jamaica in November 1720 before Sir Nicholas Lawes, the island's Captain-General, Governor in Chief, Chancellor and Vice-Admiral, as President, under the King's commission for the trying of pirates founded on the Act of 11 and 12 William III. Jonathan Barnet's authority for the capture is not stated in the trial record: the one witness to the taking, James Spatchears of Port Royal, deposed that Barnet was sailing in company with Captain Bonnevie towards Negril Point at the west end of Jamaica, bound on a trading voyage to the south keys of Cuba, when he gave chase, and no commission from Woodes Rogers or from Jamaica is mentioned anywhere in the pamphlet. The statement that Rogers hired Barnet rests on modern accounts alone. Very likely Strong evidence, short of proof. Printed trial: The Tryals of Captain John Rackam and other Pirates (Jamaica, 1721), the National Library of Jamaica copy read in the Internet Archive (archive.org/details/the-tryals-of-captain-john-rackham). The court: "A COURT of ADMIRALTY, HELD BEFORE HIS EXCELLENCY Sir Nicholas Lawes, Kt. His Majesty's Captain-General, & Governor in Chief in and over this His Majesty's Island of Jamaica, and other the Territories thereon depending in America, Chancellor and Vice-Admiral of the same, PRESIDENT", the commissioners being those "Named and Appointed in His Majesty's Commission for the Trying of Pirates; By Vertue of an Act of Parliament made at Westminster, in the Eleventh and Twelth Years of the Reign of King William III". The taking, from the deposition of James Spatchears of Port Royal, mariner: "one Captain Bonnevie, and one... Jonathan Barnet, sailing in Company towards Negril-point, at the West-end of Jamaica, (bound on a Trading Voyage to the South-Keys on the Island of Cuba)", and "Captain Barnet gave Chase to the Sloop which so fired a Gun, and about Ten a Clock at Night came up with her, and hailed her".
  4. Barnet hailed the William and called on her to surrender, was answered by a refusal and a shot, and replied with a broadside and small-arms fire that carried away the sloop's boom and disabled her, upon which the pirates called for quarter; the engagement was brief and one-sided, little or no loss of life is recorded on either side, and the whole company together with others found aboard was carried in as prisoners. Likely More likely than not on the evidence we have. Period narrative: A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson (1724)
  5. The celebrated account that at close quarters only Anne Bonny, Mary Read and one other kept the deck while the rest of the company went below, that Read "called to those under Deck, to come up and fight like Men, and finding they did not stir, fired her Arms down the Hold amongst them, killing one, and wounding others", and that Bonny afterwards told Rackham that if he had fought like a man he need not have been hanged like a dog, derives from the 1724 General History attributed to Captain Charles Johnson and cannot be confirmed from the trial record. Possible Consistent with the evidence, not established. Period narrative through a museum account: A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson (1724), as quoted by Royal Museums Greenwich, "Anne Bonny and Mary Read: real pirate histories" (accessed 2026)
  6. The prisoners were carried to St Jago de la Vega (Spanish Town), where the Court of Vice-Admiralty condemned Rackham and the men of his company on 16 and 17 November 1720; Rackham was hanged on 18 November 1720 at the gallows on the approaches to Port Royal, his body was afterwards hung in irons on a small cay at the main harbour entrance then called Plumb Point, which by the middle of the eighteenth century had come to be called Rackham's Cay, and several of the company hanged with him or within days while others were acquitted or otherwise dealt with. Likely More likely than not on the evidence we have. Trial pamphlet: The Tryals of Captain John Rackam, and other Pirates... St. Jago de la Vega, Jamaica, printed by Robert Baldwin, 1721 (National Library of Jamaica; TNA Discovery C14075679); Library of Congress, In Custodia Legis law blog, "The Life and Trial of Anne Bonny" (2024)
  7. Anne Bonny and Mary Read were brought to the bar together on 28 November 1720 and tried under one set of articles, were convicted and sentenced to death, and then informed the court that they were quick with child, after which their executions were respited. Confirmed Directly supported by the record. Trial pamphlet and secondary library account: The Tryals of Captain John Rackam, and other Pirates... including the tryals of Mary Read and Anne Bonny, Jamaica, 1721; Library of Congress, In Custodia Legis law blog, "The Life and Trial of Anne Bonny" (2024)
  8. Mary Read and Anne Bonny were tried at St Jago de la Vega in Jamaica on 28 November 1720 and sentenced to death, whereupon both informed the court that they were quick with child and prayed a stay; the court respited execution and ordered an inspection, and the trial pamphlet records no execution of either woman. What became of them afterwards is not established by the trial record: the reported death of Mary Read in prison in April 1721 and the burial entry in the parish of Saint Catherine of 28 April 1721 rest on sources not examined here, and the accounts of Anne Bonny's release and long life afterwards rest on tradition rather than on documents. Very likely Strong evidence, short of proof. Printed trial: The Tryals of Captain John Rackam and other Pirates (Jamaica, 1721), the National Library of Jamaica copy read in the Internet Archive (archive.org/details/the-tryals-of-captain-john-rackham). Title page: "THE TRYALS of Mary Read and Anne Bonny, alias Bonn, on Monday the 28th Day of the said Month of November, at St. Jago de la Vega aforesaid"; the articles were "Exhibited at an High Court of Admiralty, held at the Town of St. Jago de la Vega in the said Island, the Twenty eighth Day of November". After sentence: "After Judgment was pronounced, as aforesaid, both the Prisoners inform'd the Court, that they were both quick with Child, and prayed that Execution of the Sentence might be stayed. Whereupon the Court ordered, that Execution of the said Sentence should be respited, and that an Inspection should be made." The pamphlet then adjourns the court to 19 December and records nothing further of either woman.