Gender Disguise and Identity at Sea

Three different things travel under the heading of women disguised at sea, and the record supports them very unequally. The period documents only the second.

Three things under one heading

Sustained passing means living and drawing a man's wage as a man over months or years, under the eyes of shipmates, officers and surgeons. Situational male dress means putting on men's clothing for an action and taking it off again, by a woman whose sex is no secret to her company. The female warrior tradition is a body of ballads and chapbook lives in which a woman takes to breeches, follows a lover to the wars, fights well, is discovered and is restored by marriage. Labels routinely fuse the three.

What the period record documents

The documentary base is one trial and one proclamation, and neither describes concealment. At St Jago de la Vega in November 1720 two French witnesses deposed that the two women wore men's clothes when the vessel gave chase or attacked and women's clothes at other times, and a woman whose canoe was taken on the north side of Jamaica knew both prisoners for women on sight. The depositions are set out under women at sea. What they establish here is narrow: male clothing worn as working kit, in a company that knew who was wearing it.¹

The proclamation runs ahead of the trial. Woodes Rogers issued it at Nassau on 5 September 1720, declaring Rackham's company pirates and naming among them "Ann Fulford alias Bonny" and "Mary Read". A Boston newspaper reprinted it that October. Six weeks before the robberies, the governor of the Bahamas had published both women, as women, to the English Atlantic.²

Nothing yet found shows a woman sustaining a male identity at sea across a career between 1690 and 1725. A trade that kept no musters would not have recorded a successful passer. The question cannot be answered from the surviving evidence.

What passing required, where it is documented

The substantial documented body of early modern cases is Dutch. Rudolf Dekker and Lotte van de Pol assembled one hundred and nineteen cases of women living as men in Holland, concentrated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their explanation is structural: service in the East Indies with the Dutch company fleets lasted years and made no provision for a wife or a sweetheart. Male working dress was cheap and loose, and a woman working as a man drew a man's wage.³

Discovery came through the body under medical treatment, or through a sexual relationship, or through the conspicuous absence of one. Conditions recorded under medicine at sea may have made passing feasible; in the documented cases the surgeon was the usual point of failure.

The female warrior, and what it did to the record

Dianne Dugaw's index of the female warrior ballad runs to one hundred and thirteen English language sheets, a motif at its height from about 1650 to about 1800 and sold by the trade documented under broadsides and ballads. The shape is fixed: the disguise is always penetrated and the heroine always restored. They record a market.⁴

That formula is the mould into which the General History of 1724 poured the lives of Mary Read and Anne Bonny: the regiment in Flanders, the disclosure to a lover, the restoration by marriage. The compiler answered disbelief: the story is "supported by many thousand Witnesses, I mean the People of Jamaica, who were present at their Tryals". The printed trial holds none of the biography at issue. Article VI of the articles attributed to Bartholomew Roberts's company makes it capital for a man to carry a woman to sea disguised, and no witness to it other than the same book is known.⁵

Names, and a single letter

Identity here is unstable at the level of spelling. The Jamaica print of 1721 gives "Anne Bonny" on its title page and "Ann Bonny, alias Bonn" through the articles, verdict and sentence; the proclamation gives "Ann Fulford alias Bonny"; the 1724 book calls "Mary Read and Anne Bonny, alias Bonn" the true names of the two.⁶

One letter is contested. Circulated transcriptions of Dorothy Thomas's evidence give handkerchiefs tied about "their Heads"; the digitised National Library of Jamaica copy appears to give "their Head". The reading is open until the original at Kew is inspected.

The cases that sit outside the window

The English cases usually produced as evidence are later than the period. Hannah Snell, 1723 to 1792, revealed her sex in 1750, petitioned successfully for a pension and sold her story to the publisher Robert Walker; the National Army Museum now states that her claimed service in Guise's Regiment was fabricated. Mary Lacy ran away in 1759 as William Chandler, was apprenticed to a shipwright in 1763 and published The Female Shipwright in 1773.⁷

Christian Davies, said to have enlisted in male dress in 1693, falls inside the window but reaches us through a Life of 1740. Mary Critchett, convicted of piracy at Williamsburg in 1729, is recorded without any disguise.

Every voice in this theme reaches the archive through a court, a governor, a printer or a bookseller. There is no text written by Mary Read or Anne Bonny, and none by any woman who passed at sea in this period. The nearer questions are unsettled: the contested reading of Dorothy Thomas's evidence needs the original pamphlet at Kew, the proclamation is held through a transcription rather than the Boston issue that carried it, and the printed trials of 1696 to 1726 have not been searched systematically, so part of the scarcity is a scarcity of searching.