Women at Sea

Women are continuous in the maritime records of this period and almost absent from the pirate deck. Both halves are documented.

What the condition was

Women owned ships, kept the houses where plunder became money, travelled as passengers, traded alongshore and swore depositions.

Against that, the number documented between 1690 and 1725 as serving in an armed pirate company, on oath in a court of record, is two, and both were tried on one day, in one court, on four articles. Women enter this archive as witnesses, victims and widows, because clerks recorded them when a court needed them.¹

The two who were tried

Mary Read and Ann Bonny, alias Bonn, "late of the Island of Providence, Spinsters", were tried at St Jago de la Vega in Jamaica on Monday 28 November 1720, twelve days after the same commission tried John Rackham's company. Sir Nicholas Lawes sat as President, William Norris as Register. Four articles were exhibited, both pleaded not guilty, five deponents gave evidence in four statements, and the court convicted on the third and fourth only. The women's trial is printed with the men's in the Jamaica print of 1721.²

On what the prisoners did the depositions are short: they carried arms, Bonny handed gunpowder to the men, and two French witnesses gave the finding that convicted, that the women were aboard "of their own Free-Will and Consent". The claim in Johnson's General History that Read's sex went unsuspected cannot stand beside that sworn evidence, set out under gender disguise at sea. He attributes Read's firing into the hold and killing a man to evidence at her trial; that record holds no such deposition.

The plea after sentence

After sentence of death "both the Prisoners inform'd the Court, that they were both quick with Child", and the court ordered execution "respited, and that an Inspection should be made". The plea came after judgment, and the printed record never reports the inspection's result.³

The operative words were quick with child, quickening being the legal threshold; an inspection would ordinarily have meant, in English practice, a jury of matrons.

On liability the court treated the two as it had the men, down to the sentencing formula; on execution the law offered a stay only a woman could claim. Read died in prison and was buried in Saint Catherine parish on 28 April 1721; of Bonny, Johnson says only "that she was not executed."

Traders, passengers and receivers

Dorothy Thomas deposed that she was "being in a Canoa at Sea, with some Stock and Provisions, at the North-side of Jamaica" when the sloop took her and stripped the canoe. None of the four articles charged that robbery.⁴

A woman in a canoe with stock and provisions reads as a small trader at work in the waters the company cruised; that is a reading of her deposition, not a statement in it. Elizabeth Trengrove "was taken a Passenger in the African Company's Ship Onslow" and afterwards deposed at the Cape Coast Castle trials, supporting a forced man's good character. Ashore, on the standard account, plunder became money in houses women kept, and the wives and widows who received pirate goods on the English, Welsh and Irish coasts ran real legal risk; that opportunity had narrowed by 1690 as the trade moved to distant ports. At New York, Margaret Hardenbroeck traded on her own account just before the window.

One crew's clause

Bartholomew Roberts's sixth article reads "No Boy or Woman to be allowed amongst them", with death for the man who carried a woman to sea disguised. John Phillips's ninth makes it death to meddle with "a prudent Woman" without her consent. George Lowther's eight say nothing of women. One excludes, one criminalises rape, one is silent; the belief that pirate codes barred women rests on the first alone.⁵

The Roberts text is a reconstruction: the signed original went overboard and what is printed is a substance taken from informants. In the Onslow the rule is said to have failed, the men contending for the post of sentinel over a woman prisoner.

Women as objects of pirate violence

By one account a woman passenger in the Irwin was forced by twenty-one men and thrown into the sea, though Johnson will not positively attribute it to Thomas Anstis's company; the same account carries mass rape in the Laccadive islands, and a young wife abused by Edward Thache at Ocracoke.

The governor and the Navy

Governor Lawes wrote to the Council of Trade and Plantations on 13 November 1720 that Jonathan Barnet had taken a vessel commanded by "one Rackum in which were 18 pirates more whom he took and are now in goal". Nothing else on that calendar page mentions the two women.⁶

On that page the capture reached Whitehall as eighteen pirates in a gaol, with no notice taken of what would become its only famous feature.

Article XXXVIII of the captain's instructions in the Regulations and Instructions relating to His Majesty's Service at Sea, printed in 1731, runs: "He is not to carry any Woman to Sea ... without Orders from the Admiralty." First printing is not invention, and the 1731 article does not date the Navy's rule.⁷

The inspection ordered on 28 November 1720 is nowhere reported; what stands is the respite on the plea, not a pregnancy. The trial print names no jury of matrons, so the form such an inspection would have taken is read from English practice, and Dorothy Thomas's deposition carries no date. No corroboration has been found for the stories of the Irwin, the Laccadive islands and Ocracoke, which are Johnson's alone. Anne Bonny disappears from the record after 1721; a burial entry of 1733 in the same parish, reported in 2020 by the researcher Tyler Rodriguez, rests on a common name in a parish record that has not been inspected. No woman keeping a house ashore at Nassau or Port Royal, and no woman working a shipboard trade, has yet been named from a primary source.