Enemies of All Mankind: Gender, Violence and the Queering of Anne Bonny and Mary Read

ABSTRACT

Anne Bonny and Mary Read remain the best known, and perhaps only, female pirates active in the so-called Golden Age of Piracy, the late 17^th and early 18^th century in the Caribbean. They were caught and sentenced to death but no records exist of an execution. This paper engages with the multiplicity of fictions inspired by the brief record of their trial and traces how legal meaning can be created and negotiated through the imaginative genealogy of a single trial, and in particular how the form of these secondary texts reflects changing attitudes towards gender, sexuality and violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Piracy
• legal history
• queer legal studies
• gender and sexuality
• feminist history
• law and humanities

1. Introduction

The violent female criminal defies the authority of the law as well as the powerful masculine gendering of crime and violence. Perhaps due to the fascination such a figure provokes, she has long enjoyed prominence in popular culture, from Medea to Aileen Wournos, in both fiction and retellings of historical events. Popular culture representations of real violent female offenders engage with and contest the legal narrative produced by the trial and thereby shape and reflect broader social ideas around gender, violence, sexuality and crime. In the case of historical female criminals, where limited records except trial documents survive, the silences and gaps of law’s texts may prove fertile ground for critical and even feminist engagement, enabling the ‘reading in’ of contemporary concerns, including queer sexuality.

The practice of queer history, the act of looking backwards into the past for the lives and stories of gender and sexual outlaws, is necessarily in constant conversation with popular narratives of progress. Public interest, coupled with the rapid gain in legal rights and social acceptance for some privileged queers, has rendered both the queer present and past increasingly acceptable subjects for popular culture. A desire to escape the legacy of the queerphobic past, however, often strains against a need to memorialise the harm suffered by those like us in years gone, and to connect, however tenuously, with a lineage of desire that situates our lives and feelings within a genealogy of queer existence. In particular, the severance from blood relations often caused by queer expression can create a yearning for ancestry that only queer history can hope to provide. The clandestine nature of much queer desire and love from the past creates archival problems, however, and it is not infrequently the records of legal violence against queer people which have preserved these stories.

In this context, the tale of Anne Bonny and Mary Read has re-emerged in both academic history and popular culture as an example of lesbian sexuality in the eighteenth century. Bonny and Read were the only women (that we know of) operating during the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Caribbean piracy, the late 17th and early eighteenth century from which the Western piratical archetype of swashbuckling, treasure-burying and Jolly Rogers has emerged. Their trial in 1720 is captured in a single five-page legal document which is the only source detailing their lives. By tracing their representations from this document to the present day, I hope to explore how their narrative reflects a shifting understanding of female autonomy and independence, a myth perched on the outskirts of acceptability but consistently encompassing a specifically gendered version of the pirate as a queer outlaw and antihero – powerful, autonomous and free. The ways that the figures of Bonny and Read twist and morph, their outlines barely visible through the smoke of the intervening centuries, I suggest, illuminate society’s changing concerns with women; how they should behave, how they should dress, who they should fuck and who they should kill.

In this paper, I attempt to trace Bonny and Read’s evolution from a single document which sentenced them to death, and the intersecting concerns of gender, violence, sexuality and history which have shaped their afterlife in popular culture since. In Part 1, I examine the trial itself within its legal, cultural and historical context. Part 2 concerns Bonny and Read’s initial depiction in Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates, the foundational text for the Western cultural conception of piracy. In Part 3, I follow Bonny and Read through the years between A General History and the present, focusing on twenty-first century depictions of the pair and what they reveal about popular culture’s shifting concerns with queer history, femininity and crime.

2. The Trial of Anne Bonny and Mary Read

Anne Bonny and Mary Read were tried jointly for piracy on 28th November 1720 at the High Court of Admiralty in St Jago de la Vega in Jamaica, now known as Spanish Town.¹ They were charged with assaulting the crew and stealing the boats and goods of seven fishing boats, three sloops and a schooner.² Three witnesses were called, each testified that Bonny and Read ‘were very active on Board and willing to do any Thing’ and that ‘they did not seem to be kept or detain’d by Force but of their own Free-Will and Consent’.³ Both were given the opportunity to cross-examine the witnesses and speak in their own defence, which they declined to do.⁴ The court unanimously found them guilty and they were sentenced to ‘be severally hang’d by the Neck ‘till … severally Dead’.⁵ After this was pronounced, ‘both the Prisoners inform’d the Court that they were both quick with Child and prayed that Execution of the Sentence might be stayed’.⁶ The court agreed and ‘passed Sentence, as in Cases of Pyracy, but ordered them back, till a proper Jury should be appointed to enquire into the Matter’.⁷ No evidence exists of their execution. Local parish records indicate Mary Read died shortly after, perhaps from complications associated with childbirth.⁸ A record from the same parish lists the death of Anne Bonny in 1733, though if this is truly Bonny, or how she escaped execution to live another decade is unclear.⁹

As was usual for pirates, their trial was heard by the governor of the colony, Nicholas Lawes, and a panel of local merchants and naval officers.¹⁰ Neither prosecution nor defence counsel would be a regular of trials for another fifty years, even in London, and there was no established standard of proof for criminal trials except those for treason.¹¹ Bonny and Read’s background is unknown, but it was almost certainly working class, with little or no education and no real ability to mount a defence. Most pirates claimed they were drunk, forced by the captain, or made no defence at all.¹² Bonny and Read, and their captain Jack Rackham, had already been publicly declared ‘Enemies to the Crown of Great Britain’ by Woodes Rogers, governor of the Bahama Islands in the Boston Gazette a mere two months before the trial.¹³ Rackham himself and 17 other male crew members had been hanged and left to rot in public view in gibbets as an example to other sailors for nearly two weeks by the time Bonny and Read faced the court.¹⁴ The verdict was a foregone conclusion and, to the British authorities, a valuable example to others. President of the court, Lawes, would write the following year that ‘I make no question but the example that has been made of these rogues will defer others in these paths’.¹⁵ Pirate trials as fodder for popular culture, through the medium of the trial pamphlet, was consciously intended to serve as a deterrent, an instrument of law wielded by those other than the traditional creators of legal meaning: judges, legal scholars, perhaps lawyers themselves.

This trial would have been heard in English, and the sentence recorded in Latin.¹⁶ No transcripts were created at this time and trial records relied on ad hoc reports from those physically present during the trial.¹⁷ Notes of significant cases sometimes made their way into law reports, privately published compilations of notes on trials, usually limited to the cause of action and the outcome. These, however, were composed in the London courts and ‘largely barren of criminal cases’ and so the trial of a few pirates in the far-flung colony would have never made the cut.¹⁸

I will be using the term popular culture to refer to widely consumed media and creative expression, including balladry, novels, films, television shows, podcasts, visual art, poetry and theatre. The trial pamphlet does not sit comfortably in either category, as a legal text or an example of popular culture. It has aspects of both. It was a record of a legal proceeding, and one created variably by court staff or freelance transcribers, and certainly with the tacit endorsement of legal officers such as Lawes, who encouraged the publicisation of pirate trials and, more importantly, executions.¹⁹ It clearly also contains characteristics of popular culture; a trial pamphlet was produced by a commercial publisher who bought the transcript, they were distributed widely and were hugely profitable.²⁰ It would be misleading, however, to suggest a transfer of Bonny and Read’s story from the legal realm to the popular where the barrier between the two is so permeable. As feminist legal scholar Margaret Thornton wrote,

[t]he reading, writing and viewing practices that are invoked to make sense of social phenomena, including law and legal texts, reveal that meaning is a process involving active participants who are members of interpretative communities and who participate in the constitution of knowledge about law, about gender, and about social phenomena of all kinds.²¹

The boundary here is even harder to discern where the only remaining text is that of the trial pamphlet which, as pirate historian Hans Turley notes, ‘is already a “frame” removed from the actual event … [t]he reproduction of a trial as a pamphlet suggests an authority and a realism that are actually constructed by the trial’s transcriber and the pamphlet’s printer’.²² This first reinscription of Bonny and Read already engages many of the concerns which will haunt those iterations to come. The legal establishment’s desire for cautionary tales is only served by media that is widely consumed. It is in law’s interests for the record to be entertaining and popular, and in the publisher’s too, to sell pamphlets. Where does this fit with a motivation for the trial pamphlet to record the proceedings accurately?

The implications of this relationship between law and popular culture for feminism will be explored later. It is worth noting now, however, the trial pamphlet’s haunted quality as a document: it is a record of both their death sentence and their immortalisation. The specifically criminal nature of Bonny and Read has enabled their legacy in a manner inaccessible to most women from their working-class backgrounds in this period. This document, a mere five pages, forms the basis of our shared conception of female pirates. It contains none of their own words.

2.1. Bonny and Read in Context

Bonny and Read lived during a brief window of opportunity for successful and widespread piracy in the Caribbean. The rapid expansion of colonial settlements along the coast of the Americas, predominantly Spanish and British, and increased trade of high value between these settlements, Europe and the west coast of Africa provided ample financial incentive in the second half of the seventeenth and into the early eighteenth century.²³ Coupled with the end of war between Spain and Britain (1701–1714), crews of both nations’ navies and scores of privateers left a glut of able seamen unemployed and competing for fewer jobs for lower wages.²⁴ The tide did not turn until around 1718 when Governor Woodes Rogers was installed in Nassau, offering a general pardon to any pirate who would take it, and ‘a short drop and a sudden stop’ to those who would not, seeking to transform the pirates’ nest into a profitable colony.²⁵ He was largely successful. Over 500 pirates were hanged from 1718 to 1724 in the Bahamas, including Rackham and the rest of Bonny and Read’s crew.²⁶ The practice had largely disappeared in the region by 1726.²⁷

Dominance over the pirates formed part of the larger civilising mission of British colonialism in this period. Pirates were considered hostes humani generis – the common enemies of all mankind,²⁸ a designation dating back at least as far as Cicero in the context of the Roman Empire.²⁹ The political rhetoric surrounding piracy may be delineated from its legal meaning during the early modern period, which was the subject of considerable legal debate.³⁰ Privateering, capturing ships and goods under permission from a European sovereign (a letter of marque) was legal. Piracy therefore existed only where the culprit exceeded the bounds of the letter of marque, failed to submit a share of the captured goods back to the state,³¹ or operated without permission at all.³² Culturally, however, piracy was described in near-apocalyptic terms. Their enormous impact on trade and therefore the state’s economic health, was considered ‘an imperial crisis’³³ sufficient that piracy ‘may justly be accounted Treason’ according to one judge who heard such cases.³⁴ Pirates could even ‘Subvert and extinguish the Natural and Civil Rights of Mankind’.³⁵ No wonder, then, it was essential to hunt down the ‘Sea-Monsters, who have been the Terror of them that haunt the Sea’.³⁶

This opposition between a life of piracy and the common good was further reinforced by the animalistic violence, lust and drunkenness attributed to pirates both at trial and in newspaper coverage.³⁷ All this was evidence of the heathen nature of pirates who defied not only the law and society but God and were therefore ‘no better than Devils Incarnate’.³⁸ The crusade against piracy was then not merely an economic necessity, to hear the colonial powers describe it, but a moral and religious imperative. This figure of the pirate, as the law depicts them, must be held in the mind to follow what was to come.

2.2. The Question of Pirate Equality

To a law-abiding eighteenth century citizen, the pirate was perhaps the worst kind of criminal, a man who had chosen to become enemy to all mankind.³⁹ This opposition to European ‘civilization’ is multi-faceted; the pirate threatens its economic and military interests and equally, his decision to do so renders him socially apostate. Despite this, pirates were popular fodder for contemporaneous depictions, those created by and directed towards the working class which varied widely in sympathy for them.⁴⁰ Complicating this further is contemporary chroniclers’ inability to ‘resist the impulse to heroicize the pirates’ economic and cultural outlaw behavior’.⁴¹ They are, queer literary scholar Hans Turley suggests, ‘fascinated by [pirates’] extreme individualism’, and their literary representations as such destabilise the figure of the pirate.⁴² He is neither despicable criminal or free-spirited renegade, he is both, and neither. This liminality may itself be read as queer, in the sense of ‘that which systematically refuses stability, fixity, or assimilation’.⁴³ The figure of the pirate has, since its modern inception in early eighteenth century popular culture, Turley suggests, been a ‘romantic antihero’ despite and perhaps because of his criminality.⁴⁴ This counter-narrative of piracy exemplifies the ability of popular culture to create legal meaning outside and in opposition to the designations and strictures of the law itself. Despite the vitriolic and cataclysmic language with which pirates were described in legal texts, the work of the 18th press, stage and balladry, these ‘interpretive communities’ of law, expressed a much more nuanced framing.⁴⁵ Crucially, as will be discussed later, it is this framing of the pirate as a romanticisable anti-hero that has prevailed today.

The moral indeterminacy of the figure of the pirate is underpinned by the intentionally oppositional pirate culture. Pirate ships were predominantly crewed by members of the working or under-classes of western Europe and early American settlements. Piracy offered the potential for higher wages as well as escape from the ‘authoritative, exploitative, and rigidly hierarchical organization of pre–Industrial Revolution “state capitalism”’.⁴⁶ Piracy generally offered better conditions than legal seafaring where food was scarce, wages pitiable, disease rampant and discipline frequently harsh to the point of fatality.⁴⁷ Legal recourse for overly harsh or even deadly ‘discipline’ was functionally unavailable as courts regularly found in favour of captains even where their ‘discipline’ caused fatalities, citing the necessity of preserving the officers’ absolute authority over the crew.⁴⁸ A decision in this context to ‘go on the account’ may be viewed as one of rebellion against oppression. The role of the law in facilitating and excusing this treatment of lower-class people lays bare its imperative ‘to assure a ready supply of cheap, docile labour’ and thereby protect class and capital interests.⁴⁹

Some pirates viewed themselves in this manner, as righteous rebels against economic exploitation and its facilitation by the law. Famed pirate Samuel Bellamy allegedly condemned a captured captain thus:

Damn ye, you are a sneaking Puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by Laws which rich Men have made for their own Security, for the cowardly Whelps have not the Courage otherwise to defend what they get by their Knavery … They vilify us, the Scoundrels do, when there is only this Difference, they rob the Poor under the Cover of Law, forsooth, and we plunder the Rich under the Protection of our own Courage.⁵⁰

Existing as they did in clear opposition to the law, pirates developed a distinctive and unusual shipboard culture and ‘in defiant contradistinction to the ways of the world they left behind’.⁵¹ Instead of strictly hierarchical authority of naval and merchant ships, pirate captains were elected and could be challenged by any member.⁵² Profit was shared between the crew according to skills and duties in a ‘precapitalist’ arrangement which ‘decisively reduced the disparity between the top and bottom of the scale’.⁵³ A portion was also set aside in a ‘common fund’ to compensate sailors who sustained permanent injuries.⁵⁴

One manifestation of this culture was matelotage, an economic arrangement whereby two crewmates split profit from prizes equally between them, sharing both the risk and the reward.⁵⁵ Common ownership of belongings on board extended to the posthumous inheritance of any surviving money or goods, including compensation for the death itself paid out by the ship collectively.⁵⁶ Whether more akin to master-servant or husband-wife is debated, but an economic and, on occasion, emotional relationship between two men suggests the possibility of homosexual romance and dedication in a manner not safely possible on shore for many decades to come.⁵⁷ The prevalence of pirates of African, Native American and Middle Eastern backgrounds also suggests some unusual measure of racial equality within pirate communities.⁵⁸ Some black men were elected captains of largely white crews,⁵⁹ however many pirates also traded in enslaved people.⁶⁰ Some ships even had both freed slaves on the crew and others in chains in the hold.⁶¹

Although the prohibition of women at sea was far from universal in general,⁶² Bonny and Read’s presence aboard Rackham’s ship may too have contributed to the common egalitarian conception of pirate society, as distinct from merchant or navy vessels. This assumes, however, that Bonny and Read’s gender was known to the crew. Despite Johnson’s insistence otherwise, this is very likely to have been the case. One witness at trial stated that they wore men’s clothes for combat but women’s clothes at other times. Another claimed to have recognised them as women immediately by ‘the largeness of their Breasts’.⁶³ Given the lack of privacy aboard, especially for non-officers, it is logistically unlikely Bonny and Read went undetected for long, if at all.

These factors have fuelled a popular understanding of pirates as egalitarian rebels and the pirate figure as an ‘outcast or socially liminal figure who rejects the normative’.⁶⁴ Indeed, the construction of alternate systems of governance, money and codified, committed relationships outside of and in direct defiance to British and colonial law could be understood as a separate legal system with its own norms, rules and punishments. This shared understanding lays the groundwork for a queer reading of what Turley terms ‘the piratical subject’.⁶⁵ The pirate is queer in a theoretical sense in that he blurs boundaries of good and bad, hero and villain; he is rapacious in lust for women but exists almost entirely in homosocial environments by choice. He is queer in the sense of marginality, he is in constant conflict with the normative forces of law and ‘civilisation’ and defines his own culture in opposition to it. As queer theorist Martin Fradley argues, ‘[p]iracy is positioned in ideological opposition to the patriarchal hierarchies of colonial society and, by extension, the stifling logics of heteronormalcy’.⁶⁶ On top of this, of course, he may also have been having sex with other men.⁶⁷

3. Afterlife

Bonny and Read lived for an unknown number of years, in various places. They may have married, or had children, or they may not. They may have loved piracy or violence. They may have been in love with each other. But, ‘[n]ot having written their own accounts, they have become the heroines of a multiplicity of fictions’.⁶⁸ Their story has been retold and reworked over the past 300 years into near-unrecognisability; there are two of them, there is one, they are bloodthirsty madwomen, they are helpless victims, they are on a spaceship. The piratical utopian fantasy is key to this. Progressive and desirable behaviour or ways of living, anathema to dominant discourses of womanhood or society more generally, are easily read into their story. Gems of feminism, socialism, racial justice and queer liberation may be dug up from the sands of time, regardless of whether or not they ever existed to begin with. I suggest that the reimagination of Bonny and Read reflects the challenge that popular culture makes to law more generally by emphasising the embodied and affective aspects of their (imagined) lives over the rigidly self-referential nature of the law.⁶⁹ By their trial and death sentences, the law ignored the motives and subjectivity of Bonny and Read and sentenced them to die. As part of a larger fascination with pirates and their lives that rebuked the law’s designations of ‘evil’ and ‘monstrous’, Bonny and Read were supplied by popular culture’s representations of them with histories, desires and emotions – those things the law’s violence stripped away. Equally, some depictions, such as A General History, emphasise their female bodies as existing in opposition to their careers as pirates and thereby perhaps reinforce the law’s violence as justifiably responsive to their crimes of both violence and gender transgression.

In this section I will attempt to chart this evolution as reflected by the representations of Bonny and Read, from the publication of A General History to today. We begin with an almost-entirely unverifiable romp in the tradition of the ‘warrior women’ of balladry, a lapse in popularity in the nineteenth century, and a return to favour on the wave of first-wave feminism in the early twentieth century (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Original Woodcut.¹⁷⁶

3.1. The Eighteenth Century

3.1.1. A General History of the Pyrates

Charles Johnson’s version of Bonny and Read remains the bedrock for the vast majority of ‘information’ about their lives. Johnson’s A General History is the most famous and popular text to emerge from the so-called Golden Age of Piracy, roughly 1690 to 1730.⁷⁰ His book details the lives and exploits of many pirates including Blackbeard, split across two volumes based on timeframe.⁷¹ Considerable debate exists over the true identity of ‘Charles Johnson’, a pseudonym however no conclusive evidence has emerged.⁷² A General History was wildly popular and ‘[i]t has been said, and there seems no reason to question this, that Captain Johnson created the modern conception of pirates’.⁷³

Johnson pre-empts the following criticism by proclaiming:

Some may be tempted to think the whole Story no better than a Novel or Romance; but since it is supported by many thousand Witnesses … the Truth of it, can be no more contested, than that there were such Men in the world, as Roberts and Black-beard, who were Pyrates.⁷⁴

Unfortunately, precious little of Johnson’s narrative is verifiable. There are a mere handful of witnesses, at least whose accounts survive today, and all can testify only to Bonny and Read’s activities in a brief period. The essential elements alone can be steadily relied upon; two women named Anne Bonny and Mary Read sailed with Jack Rackham as pirates until their capture and conviction in 1720. Both escaped immediate execution due to their pregnancies. They dressed as men during conflict, at least, and possibly women’s clothes at other times. Their existence and piracy are verifiable both by the trial pamphlet and several newspaper reports which mention two women serving on Rackham’s crew.⁷⁵

As many enthusiastic historians have been eager to note, however, the fact that little of Bonny and Read’s story can be fact-checked does not render it automatically untrue, nor is it as far-fetched as it may at first appear.⁷⁶ What is clear, however, is that ‘through his use of fact and fiction, Johnson began the process that turned the pirate into the romanticized antihero twentieth century readers are familiar with’.⁷⁷ The lives of Bonny and Read, according to Johnson, are as follows.

Mary Read was born in England, the illegitimate child of a presumed widow whose husband had gone missing at sea.⁷⁸ Her mother had a legitimate son before her who died and so, to preserve her reputation and ask her husband’s mother for money, Read’s mother raised her as a boy to attempt to pass her off as the son.⁷⁹ From here, Read went to work as a ‘Foot-boy’ but, ‘growing bold and strong, and having also a roving Mind’ she soon joined the crew of a Man of War, then travelled to Flanders to work as a soldier.⁸⁰ She served some time before falling in love with a Flemish soldier and she ‘found a Way of letting him discover her Sex, without appearing that it was done with Design’.⁸¹ Although the soldier ‘thought of nothing but gratifying his Passions with very little Ceremony’, Read ‘prov’d very reserved and modest’ and the soldier ‘quite changed his Purpose’ and courted her for a wife.⁸² They bought women’s clothes for Read and were married.⁸³ They kept an eating house together until the husband died suddenly.⁸⁴ Without income, Read once again joined the army before sailing for the West Indies.⁸⁵ Her ship was captured by pirates who spared her life as the only English person aboard, and the new crew began work at privateers.⁸⁶ The crew, including Read, soon mutinied against their commanders and took to piracy.⁸⁷

Johnson’s tale of Bonny’s early life begins with seven pages detailing her mother’s affair as a maid with her employer, Bonny’s father, and their discovery, a complicated farce involving sex, mistaken identity and wrongful accusations of theft of silver spoons.⁸⁸ Bonny and her father moved to Carolina together where her father gave up the practice of law and became a successful plantation owner.⁸⁹ Johnson notes Bonny was rumoured to have killed a servant with a cake-knife however he finds this baseless, although he reports that ‘once, when a young Fellow would have lain with her, against her Will, she beat him so, that he lay ill of it a considerable Time’.⁹⁰ Bonny instead married a penniless sailor, prompting her father to cast her out. The couple travelled to Providence where she met Captain Jack Rackam and eloped with him, joining his crew dressed as a man.⁹¹ She was soon pregnant and Rackam organised for her to stay with some friends of his in Cuba until she had recovered from the birth.⁹² She re-joined the crew to find Read a new member of it.⁹³

Johnson continues:

Her Sex was not so much suspected by any Person on Board til Ann Bonny, who was not altogether so reserv’d in point of Chastity, took a particular liking to her; in short, Ann Bonny took her for a handsome young Fellow, and for some Reasons best known to herself, first discovered her Sex to Mary Read; Mary Read knowing what she would be at, and being very sensible of her own Incapacity that Way, was forced to come to a right Understanding with her, and so to the great disappointment of Ann Bonny, she let her know she was a Woman also.⁹⁴

This queer frisson was apparently popular with readers as the later 1765 edition had Read claim that ‘she entered into the service of the privateer purely upon the account of Anne Bonny, who was her lover’.⁹⁵ No further mention of it is made, and this aspect went largely unremarked upon until the twentieth century. They sailed together for some time, capturing the ships for which they would one day be hanged until their capture in 1721. When surprised after a night of revelry by a pirate hunter, ‘none kept the Deck except Mary Read and Anne Bonny, and one more’.⁹⁶ Mary ‘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’.⁹⁷

Their valour was to no avail. They were all captured. Anne was given the chance to see Rackham in prison before his hanging where she famously declared ‘that she was sorry to see him there, but if he had fought like a Man, he need not have been hang’d like a Dog’.⁹⁸ Johnson documents Read dying in prison but claims Bonny was ‘reprieved from Time to Time’ but ‘what has become of her since, we cannot tell; only this we know, that she was not executed’.⁹⁹ The inconclusiveness of Bonny’s fate created space for endless possible futures in the fiction to come.

3.1.2. Crossdressing in Balladry and Law

To trace the origins of the mythos of Bonny and Read, it is necessary to consider how they would have been understood by the first audience for their narrative, Johnson’s readers. A General History in its discussion of Bonny and Read draws heavily on the popular storytelling tradition of balladry. Bonny and Read both fit structurally alongside, and have been fictionalised in, the tradition of balladry of what Dianne Dugaw terms ‘warrior women’.¹⁰⁰ This figure ‘conforms to an ideal type – a conventionalised heroine who, pulled from her beloved by “war’s alarms” or cruel father, goes off disguised as a man to sea or to war’.¹⁰¹ Unlike those today whose gender presentation does not align with their assigned sex at birth, who are still subject to discrimination and harassment, warrior women are portrayed as feminine ideals.¹⁰² The warrior woman is ‘a model of beauty and pluck, is deserving in romance, able in war, and rewarded in both’.¹⁰³ The ballads describe her glowingly as a ‘fair and virtuous Maid’ and a ‘fearless maiden fair’.¹⁰⁴

Both Bonny and Read fit this model, to differing extents. According to Johnson, Read stayed in the military to remain close to her lover and attempted to return to civilian life with him before his death. She continued to cross-dress to secure her own livelihood and was forced from ‘honest’ privateering to piracy at the end of a blade. Bonny fits the trope a little better, following Rackham to sea out of love for him, pirate or no. Their illegitimacy and poor backgrounds also fit the classic heroine of balladry, a genre written primarily by and for the working classes.¹⁰⁵ Bonny and Read’s ‘very lives and subsequent popularity represent a subversive commentary on the gender relations of their own times as well as “a powerful symbol of unconventional womanhood” for the future’.¹⁰⁶ One key element of ‘warrior women’ balladry was the romantic purpose of the heroine’s cross-dressing in pursuit of a lover, marking their behaviour as ‘both heterosexual and temporary; these women, in other words, were not viewed as adopting their disguises in an effort permanently to usurp male privileges’.¹⁰⁷ These figures, both real and fictional, were generally treated sympathetically by audiences and the press, with one notable category of exception.

Women who cross-dressed ‘permanently’ in order to live with or marry other women were the subject of considerable censure, both socially and legally.¹⁰⁸ Mary Hamilton, the subject of The Female Husband, ‘was try'd for pretending herself a man, and marrying 14 Wives. … After a debate of the nature of the crime, and what to call it, it was agreed that she was an uncommon, notorious cheat, and sentenc'd to be publickly whipt … [and] to be imprison'd for 6 months’.¹⁰⁹ Others received similar punishments, combining short custodial sentences with public humiliation such as the pillory.¹¹⁰ One magistrate ordered the defendant to burn all of her male clothes in front of him.¹¹¹ The shared approach between these trials, as historian Catherine Craft-Fairchild points out, is to treat the women involved as fraudsters, tricking unsuspecting women into providing financial benefits generally associated with heterosexual marriage.¹¹² She suggests that the sharp divergence in attitudes towards cross-dressing was because such an unambiguous expression of ‘sapphic desires and practises’ would have been ‘disturbing’ to the public.¹¹³ Whether the law’s concern was economic or otherwise, it seems clear that any ‘attempt to assume the social and sexual privileges accorded to men … marks the divide at which pleasurable ambiguity becomes transgression’.¹¹⁴

Johnson’s care to reassert Bonny and Read’s female bodies and their heterosexuality through his emphasis on their breasts likewise reflects this boundary between acceptable and unacceptable cross-dressing. Within the narrative, both women’s bodies tether them to their physicality and foreclose any attempt to rely on their assumed male genders permanently. Johnson’s ‘theatrical, repeated unveiling of the breast reminds women who have used gender to acquire agency and power in the world that they can go no further: the female body is now asserted as an absolute fact, a truth that cannot be sidestepped’.¹¹⁵ Later editors and illustrators place even more emphasis on their exposure. The 1725 Dutch edition of A General History features the best-known image of the pair, swords aloft and breasts exposed by an unbuttoned shirt. Leaving their breasts exposed during combat, or exposing them to a vanquished foe, became popular tropes in later editions (Figure 2).¹¹⁶

Figure 2. Dutch Woodcut.¹⁷⁷

It is Bonny and Read’s pregnancies which establish the ultimate victory of their bodied sex over their performed gender, of heterosexual romance over their piratical behaviour when they avoid the noose. The sole words even indirectly attributable to these women bring this inherent tension into sharp relief; ‘My Lord, we plead our bellies’.¹¹⁷ The pair live a little longer, Bonny an indeterminate time, but cement with these words the apparent contradiction of their stories which would ensure their popularity. As Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert states,

Their tale became emblematic of the Bahamian struggle between lawfulness and lawlessness, between their "true" nature as domestically bound women needing to reveal their breasts, pleading their bellies, and their unnatural incarnation as bloodthirsty pirates.¹¹⁸

A General History may be read, then, as a form of reassurance to the British public and other European audiences. Pirates were fearsome, yes, but ultimately vanquished and vanquishable. In the end, the threat posed by Bonny and Read to settled concepts of gender and sex, of womanhood and violence, was neutralised by their inescapably female bodies. In this light, popular culture may be seen reinforcing the sexually oppressive politics of the law, rhetorically extending the law’s victory over Bonny and Read by framing it as the inevitable outcome of their gender transgression, in addition to their criminality.

The sapphic possibility at the moment of Bonny’s attraction to and sexual advance upon Read, the pivotal window of opportunity upon which much subsequent queer speculation is based, must be understood in this context. The characters teeter on the edge of acceptability, the knife’s edge between men and women, between folk heroines and travesties. They are people who cannot fuck because they are both men, or because they are both women – unless, perhaps, they can.

3.2. Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Bonny and Read, and the figure of the female pirate with which they were so intertwined, faded in popularity through the nineteenth century.¹¹⁹ This appears to be largely the result of a paradigmatic shift in the dominant understanding of gender. As Thomas Laquer describes, ‘the female body came to be understood no longer as a lesser version of the male's (a one-sex model) but as its incommensurable opposite (a two-sex model)’.¹²⁰ This oppositional model renders cross-dressing an attempt to transgress the ‘natural’ categories of sex rather than an understandable attempt to ‘move up’ the hierarchy.¹²¹ Craft-Fairchild notes that novels and theatre became increasingly hostile towards cross-dressers towards the close of the eighteenth century with fictional offenders facing death or social ostracisation.¹²²

Dugaw suggests that this shift also transformed the dominant understanding of gender, as well as sex, from ‘an external code of manipulable markers of dress and behaviour to an internalized set of supposedly natural physical and psychological characteristics’.¹²³ Under this model, cross-dressing women like Bonny and Read could no longer be understood as behaving in a ‘womanly’ manner. Their dress and other ‘masculine’ traits such as physical strength, aptitude for combat, promiscuity and other debauchery rendered them alien. Those depictions scattered throughout the nineteenth century focus on Read’s innately feminine nature and justify her foray into piracy by her romantic love and desire for domesticity.¹²⁴ Based upon Johnson’s narrative, Read’s patriotic service in the English army and her refusal to sleep with the Flemish soldier until they were wed displayed some redeemable qualities. Accordingly, eighteenth century ‘historians’ and writers often distinguished starkly between Read and Bonny. One such characterisation from 1837 leans heavily on Read’s appropriately womanly emotions:

[Mary] was vain and bold in her disposition, but susceptible of the tenderest emotions, and of the most melting affections … Though she was inadvertently drawn into that dishonorable mode of life which has stained her character … yet she possessed a rectitude of principle and of conduct, far superior to many who have not been exposed to such temptations to swerve from the path of female virtue and honor.¹²⁵

Accordingly, this historian, Charles Ellms, considered it ‘probable that [Read] would have found favor’ (escaped execution) after delivering her baby post-trial.¹²⁶ Read is rewarded in this narrative for appropriate womanhood with her life. This reinscription of Read frames the law as merciful, capable of and willing to grant Read reprieve on the basis of her positive feminine traits. This is not supported by any factual analysis or examples of similar cases, however it is clear that Ellms considers it appropriate that the law should have regard to Read’s gender performance in assessing her sentence.

Dugaw argues that the cultural shift from the one-sex to two-sex model coincided with the ‘consolidation of the dominance of the middle class, a group for whom gender identity be[came] interwoven with property ownership, patterns of consumption and other attributes of class status’.¹²⁷ Bonny and Read’s working class origins and ‘masculine’ traits, once admirable in a ballad, were now distasteful in a novel. Menie Muriel Dowie, author of popular 1893 collection Women Adventurers, justified her decision to exclude Bonny and Read from its pages thus: ‘The account of their lives is freaked with so little genuine adventure or romance and smeared with so much coarseness and triviality that I have not thought it worthy to be included with those of the other adventurers’.¹²⁸ Too divergent from acceptable womanhood, Bonny and Read lapsed into some obscurity.

Rapidly shifting values surrounding womanhood towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, fuelled in part by the nascent suffragist movement, drew Bonny and Read back into the spotlight. Paravisini-Gebert documents how ‘[t]wentieth-century accounts … provide seemingly endless re-imaginings of Bonny and Read's piratical adventures, treating them as canvases on which authors can superimpose, with heavy doses of fiction, everything from feminist ideology to 1960s-style alternative societies’.¹²⁹ These antecedents are helpful in charting the evolution of Bonny and Read’s representations as reflective of women chafing against the limits of acceptable womanhood. The female pirate is representative of freedom and adventure, but she is not so far outside the boundaries to be unprofitable or distasteful. Her criminality is largely absent or minimised in these representations; she is capable of violence in a largely abstract sense.

The popular utopian notion of pirate life fuelled feminist adoption of the female pirate as a symbol of emancipation in the early twentieth century. Poet and satirist Dorothy Parker longed in 1926 ‘to ride the seas, a roaring bucanneer, a cutlass banging at [her] knees, a dirk behind [her] ear’ instead of ‘writing verse as little ladies do’.¹³⁰ The pirate appeared as the figure of queer longing in Havelock Ellis’s seminal study of ‘female inverts’ where the homophobic hostility of reality pushed the lesbian subject into the world of imagination: ‘Dreaming was forced upon me … . I was always the prince or the pirate rescuing the beauty in distress or killing the unworthy’.¹³¹ Piracy was a liberatory imaginary for women, even upper-class, well-educated women who, 200 years earlier, would have likely never met a pirate, let alone become one. Treating Sexual Inversion in Women as popular culture is a stretch, but this early association indicates something in the evolution of the figure of the female pirate to encompass lesbian desire, not just for other women but for the more holistic liberation of a world in which that desire was capable of being acted upon, and perhaps even celebrated.

As the century progressed, female pirates surged in popularity in mainstream art. Cultural historian Neil Rennie suggests that ‘[i]n keeping with the emancipation of the film-going public’, ‘piracy was becoming a love story and by the middle of the century pirates were increasingly becoming piratesses’, including Bonny and Read themselves in films such as The Spanish Main.¹³² Heavily fictionalised ‘histories’ likewise retold Bonny and Read, leaning heavily on romantic entanglements.¹³³ Maritime historian Julie Wheelwright suggests that female pirates in twentieth century popular culture ‘provided an appropriately safe container’ for gender transgression because, in fiction, it was ultimately temporary – ‘the war ends, the crew is arrested, or a heroine gives up her adventures for love’.¹³⁴ She notes, however, the female pirate’s enduring popularity with women who ‘relish the female pirate’s defiance of the rules’ despite their inevitable defeat, and suggests that we focus on ‘the significance of the transgression’ rather than its end.¹³⁵ Perhaps in response to this audience, in the later half of the century consciously political art drew on female piracy; Bonny and Read appeared by name in Steve Gooch’s feminist and anti-imperialist 1978 play The Women Pirates Anne Bonney and Mary Read.¹³⁶ Second-wave feminist concerns with sexual liberation are legible in these ‘reclamations’, and romantic and erotic novels such as Fanny, The Pirate Queen and The Empress of the Seven Oceans fixated on female pirates’ sexuality, whether hetero or homosexual, sadomasochistic or polyamorous.¹³⁷ At the close of the century, the female pirate has largely fallen away from cinema (with the notable exception of Miss Piggy’s star turn in The Muppets’ Treasure Island) but is thriving in print as an erotic, ‘liberated’ swashbuckler, bold in her breeches (when she feels like putting them back on).

3.3. Twenty-First Century

This section will examine how popular representations of Bonny and Read have fuelled contemporary queer re-imaginings and their cult status as proto-feminist heroines. I have selected three examples here across mediums; a blockbuster franchise, a gritty television show and a visual art instalment, tied into a podcast. There are plenty of others in every conceivable format, including the pirate-themed instalment of the Assassins Creed video game franchise.¹³⁸ The ‘Golden Age’ female pirate of contemporary popular culture is an active participant in the explicitly criminal and, importantly, violent aspects of piracy, suggesting a degree of cultural acculturation to the notion.

These depictions likewise reflect a stronger presentation of the queer potentiality present in versions of Bonny and Read since A General History. Perhaps, like her male counterparts in the late twentieth century, the female pirate has ‘bec[ome] in essence an alluring and romanticized queer outlaw exploring uncharted territories beyond the trappings of the heterosexual matrix’.¹³⁹ Unlike male pirates, for whom there is ample evidence of at least occasional same-sex behaviour, these queered Bonny and Reads are based only on the collective authorial embellishments of the last three centuries. Despite this, romance between Bonny and Read has now crossed over into historical ‘fact’, blurring the lines between queer history as a disciplinary intervention and as wishful thinking. This ‘lesbian pirate’ narrative has come into conflict with the incontrovertible truth of Bonny and Read’s criminality, as I will examine in the final part of this section. The division of public discourse over Bonny and Read’s legacy into these two camps outlines the conceptual limits of each ‘type’ of woman, criminal and lesbian, never mind that each is entirely compatible with the other.

Bonny and Read continue in the pop culture examples discussed below to be depicted on the outskirts of acceptable femininity however the boundaries of this acceptability have shifted noticeably. Far from execution or reform, as was typical for twentieth century female pirates, these examples depict piracy, and thereby criminality, as a tool of individual feminist emancipation. Here, popular culture constructs legal obedience as ideologically incompatible with women’s autonomy and happiness. Moreover, it is a reliance on the law and legal instruments of problem-solving or safety that necessitate these women’s criminality – they have been failed by the law and must live outside it. These texts may therefore be read as embodying feminist theories of law as built by and for the protection and advancement of (certain kinds of) men. Popular culture here expresses a challenge to law’s authority by depicting criminality as not only morally justified but necessary to the feminist cause.

3.3.1. Pirates of the Caribbean

Bonny and Read have achieved perhaps their greatest prominence since the General History in the early twenty-first century due to the release of 2003 film Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl and its sequels (POTC). Kiera Knightley’s character in POTC, Elizabeth Swann, is ‘clearly based’ on Anne Bonny and Mary Read as perhaps the female pirate of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.¹⁴⁰ The daughter of Port Royal governor, Swann is kidnapped by a crew of undead pirates. Will Turner, unwitting pirate descendant and Swann’s illicit love interest, teams up with Jack Sparrow, a notorious pirate, to rescue her.¹⁴¹ POTC uses Swann to engage playfully with tropes and motifs of the pirate genre, including their place within contemporary notions of feminism.

Swann may be read as a product of neoliberal, ‘girl power’ feminism. This focuses on ‘participatory equality’ for women through their involvement in historically male institutions and spaces.¹⁴² On one reading, Swann achieves her goals by acting like a man. She casts off her (historically inaccurate) corsets and their associated ideological restrains to rebel against her gendered and class position. She dons male clothing as a matter of practicality, and occasionally disguise, and particates with growing competence in combat.¹⁴³ Interestingly, Swann’s quest to rescue Will Turner replicates many tropes of the ‘warrior woman’ balladry, cross-dressing to pursue her love and, upon success, retiring to marriage and domesticity.

Swann’s eventual crowning as the Pirate King in the third film emphasises the utopian allure of mythologised pirate society, and Bonny and Read’s prominence within this paradigm.¹⁴⁴ Far from the largely flat structure of pirate ships, and the complete lack of centralised governance between them, the return to monarchy reveals the tendency within neoliberal post-feminism to recreate existing hierarchies with women, rather engaging in structural reimagining. The substitution of a female heroine may also be seen as a ‘contemporary, popular means of indulging in forms of “imperial nostalgia”’ by using feminism to avoid thornier questions of race and class in historical fiction.¹⁴⁵

The films’ narrative may also be described as post-feminist, however, as it ‘frame[s] feminism as an elusive, yet tangible reality to be ‘discovered’ through the modification of bodily comportment and relationship to space’.¹⁴⁶ Swann’s donning of masculine dress, proficiency with weapons and pursuit of her desires for food, drink, travel and sex express her transition from ‘decorative object’ to ‘active warrior ideal’.¹⁴⁷ She thereby rejects the valorisation of ‘conspicuous consumption, corporeal discipline and self-management’ which typify neoliberal feminism.¹⁴⁸

POTC’s campy instabilities of meaning, character, gender and allegiance have been read to embody a deeply queer sensibility, with Fradley terming it ‘perhaps the contemporary high-water mark for the mainstreaming of queer theory’.¹⁴⁹ Each of the trio end up attempting to rescue each other at points, swapping disguises, genders and allegiances, their identities in constant ‘oceanic flux’.¹⁵⁰ Fradley posits that this ‘underscores the patent queerness of Pirates of the Caribbean, both in its rejection of normative versions of selfhood and its playfully persistent troubling of gender and sexual identities’.¹⁵¹ Swann is central to this, her ‘desire for piratical emancipation … emblematic of the series’ sustained critique of bourgeois heteronormativity’ as she warps from aristocrat to pirate, damsel-in-distress to morally ambiguous brawler.¹⁵²

Swann continues in the tradition of Bonny and Read’s mythologisations as a site of idealistic escapism for queer women. Escapism is a key attraction of fantasy media and, ‘[i]n a social world governed by repression and rigid definitions of gender and sexual identities, recourse to fantasy and the longing for alternative worlds is an inevitable and self-evidently political act of resistance’.¹⁵³ Perhaps this liminality contained within an ostensibly heterosexual, mainstream Hollywood blockbuster explains in part Swann’s, and by extension Kiera Knightley’s, status as a cult queer icon for young women. Many credit her performance in POTC with their realisation of their sexuality or gender identity at a young age; many more recognise early signs in retrospect as they remember their obsessive interest in the film and Swann herself.¹⁵⁴ Bonny and Read must take some credit for this queer joy. Likewise, Swann’s personal emancipation through criminality reflects a counter-legal feminism that challenges the law’s hegemony.

3.3.2. Black sails

Black Sails, a television prequel to Treasure Island, ran for four seasons from 2014 to 2017.¹⁵⁵ Set in the early eighteenth century, the series follows pirates (drawn from Treasure Island and A General History) attempting to defend Nassau’s status as a pirate haven from colonial rule.¹⁵⁶ Anne Bonny appears throughout as the partner and eventually quartermaster of Jack Rackham. Black Sails explicitly engages with the popular tradition of pirate utopia and the historical ‘reality’ of their monstrosity in the eyes of the law. Pirates themselves are often individually villainous but they are matched by the abhorrent behaviour of British and Spanish forces. The pirates weaponise their designation as hostis humanis generis to create fear and decrease resistance from their colonial enemies; Flint announces at his trial that ‘[e]veryone is a monster to someone … [s]ince you are so convinced that I am yours, I will be it’.¹⁵⁷ Not only is life as a pirate framed as a kind of liberation, but its transformative potential is rooted in civilisation’s detestation of them.

Through piracy, the character Anne Bonny achieves liberation and a version of self-actualisation by pursuing her desires outside and against the law. She learnt to fight in response to her abuse at the hands of her husband and is now able to protect herself against threats of sexual and physical violence, which she does often and with relish. The law’s failure to protect her from her husband is shown to have created both the practical necessity of her career in piracy, as well as the unbridled rage that fuels it. Law’s failure to treat Anne as a victim worth protecting is the direct cause of her expansive and enthusiastic violence against others as a pirate, drawing a clear causal link between Anne’s exclusion as a legal subject and the spate of criminal violence it begets. The tyranny of the law can be seen to sow the seeds of its own destruction. The non-hegemonic decisions that Anne’s piracy enables, including romantic and sexual love with women, depict her as enjoying a degree of autonomy undreamt of by those restricted to an eighteenth century conception of ideal womanhood.

Queerness is thereby constructed a key component of the pirate culture sought to be defended by the show’s protagonists against encroaching British ‘civilisation’ and law. Bonny’s romantic relationship with sex-worker Max is shown to be revelatory for her and its progression coincides with a slow tempering of Bonny’s previously uncontrolled rage. Queer love and desire is framed as fuelling the characters’ determination to protect Nassau and its freedom from British colonialism, both cultural, legal and economic. This show depicts the law as oppressive and violent and challenges the law’s assumption of moral authority by depicting crime as a product of the law’s failure or inability to protect the vulnerable. Framing Bonny as a sympathetic primary character, not a villain, despite her prodigious violence and criminality is likewise reflective of a radical feminist position; under the oppression of capitalist patriarchy, violence is both justified and necessary in response to rape and other gendered harms.

3.3.3. ‘Pilchards Not Pirates’

Unveiled in late 2020, a statue by visual artist Amanda Cotton depicting Bonny and Read caused considerable upset in its proposed location of Burgh Island and in the British national press (Figure 3). The fierce controversy exemplified wider concerns over who deserves to be included in ‘public’ history. Erecting a statue entombs a set of values prized by the erectors, it acts as a proclamation that a person deserves to be immortalised and publicly revered.

Figure 3. Amanda Cotton, ‘Inexorable' (16 November 2020). Photography by Debbie Bragg. I am grateful to Amanda Cotton for permission to use this image.

Historian Katherine Verdery argues that statues are a tool of nation-building, their erection or destruction participation in recasting a national story with new heroes, and new villains.¹⁵⁸ Creating a statue ‘alters the temporality associated with the person, bringing him into the realm of the timeless or the sacred, like an icon’.¹⁵⁹ As social values drift away from those enshrined, however, the statue may no longer be considered an appropriate subject of veneration. The continued existence of statues in public space suggests a tacit acceptance of their ongoing importance, though whether as a reminder of the person themselves or of the moment in history that memorialised them is contested. Recently, Black Lives Matter protests across the world have targeted memorials to racists and slave-owners from Confederate generals to academic eugenicists, some torn down, others defaced.¹⁶⁰ Whether the best way to grapple with this legacy is to tear the statues down, to modify them in some way or to simply leave them as discomfiting reminders of past sins is contentious. Some argue that leaving statues of racist figures alone indicates acceptance of their views and fails to acknowledge the ongoing structural harm caused by the institutions they built and perpetuated, as well as discriminatory attitudes still held by many.¹⁶¹ Others feel that to destroy the statues is to erase the history they represent or limit public education.¹⁶² The debate has been heated and expansive.¹⁶³

Against this backdrop of renewed interest in the significance of statues, the figures of Bonny and Read appeared on London’s Execution Dock, a historic site of pirate and smuggler hangings, in November 2020.¹⁶⁴ It was commissioned by Audible, the audiobook department of online retailer Amazon, as a tie-in to a podcast dramatisation of Bonny and Read’s lives, Hell Cats, which explicitly pitches the story as a romance.¹⁶⁵ The role of e-commerce goliath Amazon in the production and promotion of lesbian Bonny and Read also highlights the discomfiting intersections between corporate profit-seeking and the practice of queer history as activism.

Initial media coverage was positive, declaring the pair ‘trailblazers in an incredibly male-dominated society’, apparently addressing the concerning underrepresentation of women perpetrating property crime.¹⁶⁶ Spokespeople lauded the piece as explicitly queer, proclaiming them ‘[a]s quick to draw their cutlasses as they were to fall in love’.¹⁶⁷ Even historians approached for comment were happy to reinforce the notion of Bonny and Read’s romance:

They were lovers and both fluid – moving between living as men and living as women and … they have been forgotten from history … They lived determinedly and followed their hearts – both in being pirates and seeking their own destiny but also following their desire to love each other.¹⁶⁸

Sociologist Paul Johnson pointed to the statue’s role in reframing British history as ‘diverse’ and its normative goals of queer acceptance, in both current society and our shared idea of the past:

Because of thousands of years of persecution of LGBT people, our histories are fragmented and lost … It is vital, therefore, that efforts continue to discover our past and represent it throughout society. Public art, explicitly dedicated to LGBT lives, reflects the long-standing diversity of Britain and helps create a more inclusive future.¹⁶⁹

On this view, setting aside the obvious marketing angle of their erection, the statues celebrate Bonny and Read as proto-feminists, queer trailblazers for their cross-dressing and (fictional) relationship. The fact that they were pirates is barely relevant – they ‘followed their hearts’. That they followed them to robbery and murder is beside the point. They are ‘sacralized’ for their agency, their determination and a fictional romance attached to them posthumously. Bonny and Read have been drawn into physical being, not from the deck of their ship or the courtroom, but from a concept constructed by the intervening centuries of re-inscription in the popular imagination. Their memorialisation was based explicitly on their romance, the product of marketable potential in lesbian pirates, which is not disprovable but is certainly not supported by anything in the only reliable document associated with them – the pamphlet of their trial. For Bonny and Read, this further imaginary leap from the bare facts of their trial is nothing new. Johnson fictionalised freely in A General History, and perhaps the one constant in their representations since has been a willingness to play fast and loose with the very limited facts available.

Transplanted to their new rural home, however, community sentiment turned swiftly against the art. Locals reportedly felt that a depiction of pirates was ‘totally inappropriate’ and would ‘glamorise crime’.¹⁷⁰ Another termed them a ‘couple of violent criminals who contributed nothing to the local heritage’.¹⁷¹ It is beyond dispute that Bonny and Read were ‘a couple of violent criminals’. This alone is not disqualifying, however. Statues of other criminals such as Robin Hood and Rob Roy have stood in British cities for decades without controversy. Perhaps pirates’ perceived lack of contribution to ‘public good’ disqualifies them from inclusion in the national narrative. Additionally, perhaps Bonny and Read’s divergence from norms of womanhood as criminal, violent women renders them more abject than men who do the same and thus distasteful in a way male criminals are not.

The preferred statue subject proposed by Burgh councillors is deeply telling: pilchards, a local delicacy, or ‘a fisherman’s wife looking out to sea’.¹⁷² A law-abiding woman, appropriately performing womanhood by her definition as an extension of her husband, passively awaiting his return. The conflict between alternate framings of Bonny and Read, either violent criminals or lesbian trailblazers, reflects ongoing concerns over women’s place in a public narrative of history. The strong preference for an unchallenging, heterosexual and patriarchal past attests to the ongoing dominance of this conception of womanhood, historically and today.

The attempted rehabilitation of Bonny and Read as lesbian is revelatory of the mainstreaming of certain practices of queer historical work. The first is that of queer reading, of identifying and dragging from ‘forgottenness’ (whether real or imagined) those people from the past whose behaviour may be read as cohering to a certain modern sexual identity. A determined blindness to the considerable academic work on Bonny and Read (of varying quality, it is true) is necessary to position them as obscure and therefore in need of attention, of rescuing from the dark depths of historical obsolescence. As queer theorist Heather Love wrote in the foundational Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, however, ‘the work of historical affirmation [is] not, as it is often presented, a lifeline thrown to those figure drowning in the bad gay past, but rather … a means of securing a more stable and positive identity in the present’.¹⁷³ The work of reclaiming Bonny and Read as queer through their imputed sexuality expresses the profound sense of lack motivating it. There is no ‘real’ lesbian pirate who fought alongside the men, who acted and desired in the ways now read into Bonny and Read for whom we have even the barest scrap of evidence. Using Bonny and Read, rather than simply fabricating wholesale two lesbian pirates for the Hell Cats podcast, also suggests the ongoing necessity of these engagements with the queer past, despite counter-narratives of queer progress and acceptance.

4. Conclusion

The iterations of Bonny and Read’s story follow the contours of marginal womanhood, on the edges of acceptability but perpetually too deficient in some aspect for wholesale redemption. They were enemies of all mankind in the High Court of the Admiralty, admirable warrior women who fought for their lovers in the General History. They have been ‘freaks’, feminists, socialists, lesbians and even Muppets.¹⁷⁴ Changing with the cultural tides, depictions of Bonny and Read have served for centuries as a barometer of women’s longings. As symbols of freedom and empowerment, the forces that seek to restrain them in popular culture expose the anxieties of their intended audience.

Bonny and Read’s afterlife is a rich history of popular culture’s interaction with a central legal text, that of the trial pamphlet, and the interpretive process of reading, retelling and reconstituting legal meaning. By focusing on the affective aspects of Bonny and Read, their ‘sexuality, corporeality and desire’, popular culture created counternarratives that threatened the law’s authority over Bonny and Read as subjects.¹⁷⁵ Although the law had sentenced them to die, and presumably carried out that sentence, popular culture focused instead on their lives, creating and recreating stories of adventure, romance and desire. The mere existence of this enormous volume of storytelling tradition about Bonny and Read speaks also to the centrality of law to popular culture and the ability of legal texts to become the site of so much contested meaning.

Bonny and Read are, and have been, inescapably queer, regardless of whether they were ever romantically or sexually involved. They are queer in the sense of liminality, figures of ambiguity and disruption. They are neither ‘truly’ women or men, neither heroes nor villains. Best of all, they are fact and fiction in unquantifiable measure, shapeshifting and ungraspable, slipping through the hands like smoke. Their romance, against all odds and risks, isn’t probably real, but it’s real enough. The symbolic power of finding queer ancestry situates the modern struggle for queer emancipation in a historic lineage, tracing ancestors of shared experience, not blood. Their trial set the wheels of this mythologisation in progress, condemning to death two women who could not (yet) be killed.

Anne Bonny and Mary Read evade capture in death in way they could not in life. The lack of reliable information, frustrating for a historian, has left an ocean of possibilities over which they may jaunt, brushing off the dirt of an unmarked Jamaican grave to feel the sea breeze through their hair once more.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Amanda Whiting, Ann Genovese, Peter Rush and Emily Hamann for their invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of this paper, as well as attendees of the Romancing the Tomes: Law, Feminism and Popular Culture 2.0 conference for their generosity and thought-provoking questions. This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tegan Evans

Tegan Evans is a PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow at Melbourne Law School. Her research focuses on the role of mental illness, narrative and monstrous imagery in the trials of queer female homicide defendants.

Notes

1 The Tryals of Captain John Rackam, and Other Pirates, … as Also the Tryals of Mary Read and Anne Bonny, Alias Bonn (Robert Baldwin 1721) 15.

2 ibid 16–18.

3 ibid 18.

4 ibid.

5 ibid 19.

6 ibid.

7 ibid.

8 ‘St Catherine: Baptisms, Marriages, Burials 1669–1764, vol 1’ in Jamaica, Church of England Parish Register Transcripts, 1664–1880, Registrar General’s Department, Spanish Town (Family Search, 20 May 2014) 111 <https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:939F-DWN3-P?cc=1827268&wc=M6GG-3WL%3A161383001%2C161451201> accessed 7 December 2023.

9 ibid 115. This record was discovered by Tyler Rodriquez; see Debunk File, ‘The Legend of Ann Bonny’ (20 November 2020) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOiUgXyk0Fs> accessed 7 December 2023.

10 The Tryals of Captain John Rackam, and Other Pirates, … as Also the Tryals of Mary Read and Anne Bonny, Alias Bonn (n 1) 15; David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates (Random House 1996) 236.

11 John H Langbein, ‘The Criminal Trial before the Lawyers’ (1978) 45 The University of Chicago Law Review 263, 266.

12 Cordingly (n 10) 237.

13 Woodes Rogers, ‘Woodes Rogers, Esq; Governour of New Providence, &C. A Proclamation’ The Boston Gazette (Boston, 31 January 1721).

14 Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Beacon Press 2004) 96.

15 Cecil Headlam (ed), Calendar of State Papers: Colonial Series, America and West Indies 1722–23 (Public Record Office 1934) 142.

16 Hans Turley, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity (New York University Press 1999) 85.

17 ibid.

18 Langbein (n 11) 264.

19 ibid.

20 ibid.

21 Margaret Thornton (ed), Romancing the Tomes: Popular Culture, Law and Feminism (Routledge-Cavendish 2002) xiii.

22 ibid.

23 Rediker (n 14) 22–24.

24 ibid.

25 ibid 32.

26 Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge University Press 1987) 283.

27 Rediker (n 14) 115.

28 ; William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol 2 (3rd edn, Callaghan 1884) 316; Alfred P Rubin, The Law of Piracy (US Naval War College Press 1988) 11–12.

29 Tamsin Paige, ‘Piracy and Universal Jurisdiction’ (2013) 12 Macquarie Law Journal 131, 132.

30 Charles Molloy, De Jure Maritimo et Navali, or, A Treatise of Affairs Maritime, and of Commerce (T Whieldon and T Waller 1778); William Wynne, The Life of Sir Leoline Jenkins: Judge of the High-Court of Admiralty (vol 1, Gale Ecco 2010) xxxvi.

31 Rex v Kidd 14 (1701) How St Tr 147.

32 Paige (n 29) 138.

33 Rediker (n 26) 254.

34 The Trials of Eight Persons Indited for Piracy &C: Of Whom Two Were Acquitted, and the Rest Found Guilty. At a Justiciary Court of Admiralty Assembled and Held in Boston Within His Majesty’s Province of the Massachusetts-Bay in New-England, on the 18th of October 1717 (B Green 1718) 7.

35 ibid 2.

36 Cotton Mather quoted in Rediker (n 14) 117.

37 Rediker (n 14) 96.

38 John Barnard, Ashton’s Memorial. An History of the Strange Adventures, and Signal Deliverances, of Mr. Philip Ashton, Who, After He Had Made His Escape from the Pirates, Liv’d Alone on a Desolate Island for About Sixteen Months, &C. (Samuel Gerrish 1725) 62.

39 Blackstone (n 28) 316.

40 Frederick Burwick and Manushag N Powell, British Pirates in Print and Performance (Palgrave Macmillan 2015).

41 ibid 78.

42 Turley (n 16).

43 Martin Fradley, ‘Why Doesn’t Your Compass Work? Pirates of the Caribbean, Fantasy Blockbusters, and Contemporary Queer Theory’ in Handbook of Gender, Sex and Media (John Wiley and Sons 2012) 295.

44 Turley (n 16) 18.

45 Margaret Thornton (n 21) xiv.

46 Peter T Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton University Press 2009) 11.

47 Rediker (n 14) 42.

48 Jesse Lemisch, ‘Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America’ (1968) 25(3) The William and Mary Quarterly 371, 378–79.

49 ibid 379.

50 Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates, from Their First Rise and Settlement in the Island of Providence, to the Present Time. With the Remarkable Actions and Adventures of the Two Female Pyrates Mary Read and Anne Bonny; Contain’d in the Following Chapters, Introduction. Chap.I. Of Capt. Avery. II. Of Capt. Martel. III. Of Capt. Teach. IV. Of Capt. Eonnet. V. Of Capt. England. VI. Of Capt. Vane. Vii. Of Capt. Rackam. Viii. Of Capt. Davis. IX. Of Capt. Roberts. X. Of Capt. Anstis. XI. Of Capt. Worley. XII. Of Capt. Lowther. XIII. Of Capt. Low. XIV. Of Capt. Evans. XV. Of Capt. Phillips. XVI. Of Capt. Spriggs. XVII. Of Capt. Smith. And Their Several Crews. To Which is Added, A Short Abstract of the Statute and Civil Law, in Relation to Pyracy. By Captain Charles Johnson. (‘A General History’) (3rd edn, T Warner 1725) 597.

51 Rediker (n 26) 267.

52 Rediker (n 14) 42.

53 Rediker (n 26) 264.

54 ibid.

55 ibid 129.

56 ibid 265.

57 BR Burg, Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean (New York University Press 1995) 130; Cordingly (n 10) 117.

58 See further Kenneth Kinkor, ‘Black Men under the Black Flag’ in CR Pennell (ed), Bandits At Sea: A Pirate Reader (New York University Press 2001) 198–200.

59 ibid 200.

60 ibid 198.

61 ibid.

62 See, eg, Margaret Creighton and Lisa Norling (eds), Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700–1920; Dianne Dugaw (ed), The Female Soldier: Or, the Surprising Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell (Augustan Reprint Society 1989) v.

63 The Tryals of Captain John Rackam, and Other Pirates, … as Also the Tryals of Mary Read and Anne Bonny, Alias Bonn (n 1) 15.

64 Kendra Marston, Postfeminist Whiteness: Problematising Melancholic Burden in Contemporary Hollywood (Edinburgh University Press 2018) 72.

65 Turley (n 16) 22.

66 Martin Fradley (n 43) 302.

67 Burg (n 57) xxxix.

68 Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, ‘Cross-Dressing on the Margins of Empire: Women Pirates and the Narrative of the Carribean’ in Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Ivette Romero-Cesareo (eds), Women at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse (Palgrave Macmillan 2001) 64.

69 Margaret Thornton (n 21) 3.

70 Rediker (n 14) 12.

71 Johnson (n 50).

72 David Cordingly, ‘Introduction’ in Charles Johnson, A General History of the Robberies & Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates (2nd edn, Lyons Press 2010) v–viii.

73 ibid.

74 Johnson (n 50) 116.

75 Woodes Rogers (n 14).

76 See, eg, Tamara J Eastman and Constance Bond, The Pirate Trial of Anne Bonny and Mary Read (Fern Canyon Press 2000); Paravisini-Gebert (n 68).

77 Turley (n 16) 16.

78 Johnson (n 50) 118.

79 ibid.

80 ibid.

81 ibid 120.

82 ibid.

83 ibid.

84 ibid 121.

85 ibid.

86 ibid.

87 ibid 122.

88 ibid 124–31.

89 ibid 132.

90 ibid.

91 ibid.

92 ibid.

93 ibid.

94 ibid 123 (emphasis original).

95 Sally O’Driscoll, ‘The Pirate’s Breasts: Criminal Women and the Meanings of the Body’ (2012) 53 The Eighteenth Century 365–66.

96 ibid 122.

97 ibid.

98 ibid 133.

99 ibid 133–34.

100 Dianne Dugaw, ‘Female Sailors Bold: Transvestite Heroines and the Markers of Gender and Class’ in Margaret Creighton and Lisa Norling (eds), Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World 1700–1920 (Johns Hopkins University Press 1996) 34.

101 ibid 37.

102 ibid 35.

103 ibid 37.

104 ibid.

105 ibid.

106 Julie Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in the Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness (Pandora 1989) 119.

107 Catherine Craft-Fairchild, ‘Cross-Dressing and the Novel: Women Warriors and Domestic Femininity’ (1998) 10 Eighteenth-Century Fiction 171, 173.

108 ibid 175.

109 ibid.

110 ibid 175.

111 ibid 175.

112 ibid 175.

113 ibid 175.

114 Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton University Press 1992) 145.

115 O’Driscoll (n 95) 360.

116 ibid.

117 The Tryals of Captain John Rackam, and Other Pirates, … as Also the Tryals of Mary Read and Anne Bonny, Alias Bonn (n 1) 19.

118 Paravisini-Gebert (n 68) 74.

119 Dianne Dugaw, ‘Female Sailors Bold: Transvestite Heroines and the Markers of Gender and Class’ in Margaret Creighton and Lisa Norling (eds), Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World 1700–1920 (Johns Hopkins University Press 1996) 34.

120 Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Harvard University Press 1990) 6.

121 Craft-Fairchild (n 107) 177.

122 ibid 178.

123 Dugaw (n 119) 34.

124 Paravisini-Gebert (n 68) 75.

125 Charles Ellms, The Pirates’ Own Book: Authentic Narratives of the Most Celebrated Sea Robbers (1837).

126 ibid.

127 ibid.

128 Menie Murial Dowie (ed), Women Adventurers: The Adventure Series, vol 15 (Unwin Brothers 1893) xviii.

129 Paravisini-Gebert (n 68) 78.

130 Dorothy Parker, ‘A Song of Perfect Propriety’ in Enough Rope (Boni & Liveright 1926) 76.

131 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion in Women (Random House 1900) 239.

132 Neil Rennie, Treasure Neverland: Real and Imaginary Pirates (Oxford University Press 2013) 244; The Spanish Main (Directed by Frank Borzage, RKO Pictures 1945).

133 Rennie (n 132) 241–50.

134 Julie Wheelwright, ‘Tars, Tarts and Swashbucklers’ in Jo Stanley (ed), Bold in her Breeches: Women Pirates Across the Ages (Harper Collins 1995) 178.

135 ibid.

136 Pluto Plays.

137 Erica Jong (Granada 1980); Diana Norman (Headline 1991); Fiona Cooper (Black Swan 1993).

138 Assassins Creed IV: Black Flag (Ubisoft 2013).

139 Martin Fradley (n 43) 301.

140 ibid 307.

141 Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Walt Disney Pictures 2003).

142 Jess Butler, ‘For White Girls Only? Postfeminism and the Politics of Inclusion’ (2013) 25(1) Feminist Formations 35.

143 Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (Walt Disney Pictures 2006).

144 Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (Walt Disney Pictures 2007).

145 Kendra Marston, Postfeminist Whiteness: Problematising Melancholic Burden in Contemporary Hollywood (Edinburgh University Press 2018) 58.

146 ibid 59.

147 ibid.

148 ibid 8.

149 Martin Fradley (n 43) 296.

150 ibid 309.

151 ibid.

152 ibid.

153 ibid 299.

154 Natalie Williams, ‘Queering Knightley: A Bisexual’s Thank-You Note’ Archer (Melbourne, 22 October 2020) <https://archermagazine.com.au/2020/10/queering-knightley/> accessed 7 December 2023; Anya Crittenton, ‘How Kiera Knightley Helped Me Embrace My Relationship to Genderfluidity’ Gay Star News (London, 2 November 2018) <https://www.gaystarnews.com/article/keira-knightley-helped-me-embrace-genderfluidity/> accessed 7 December 2023; Faith Ann, ‘Kiera Knightley Helped Me Realise I Was Queer’ Medium (San Francisco, 6 August 2020) <https://medium.com/cinemania/keira-knightley-helped-me-realize-i-was-queer-3cab90d1880a> accessed 7 December 2023.

155 Black Sails (Starz 2014–2017); Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (Vintage Classic 2012).

156 ibid.

157 ‘XVIII’, Black Sails (Starz 2015).

158 Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (Columbia University Press 1999) 5.

159 ibid 5.

160 Sadia Habib, Chloe Peacock, Ruth Ramsden-Karelse and Meghan Tinsley, ‘The Changing Shape of Cultural Activism: Legislating Statues in the Context of the Black Lives Matter Movement’ (Runnymede June 2021) 1 <https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/files/204662114/Runnymede_CoDE_Cultural_Activism_and_statues_briefing_FINAL.pdf> accessed 7 December 2023.

161 ibid 1–3.

162 ibid 3.

163 ibid.

164 Maya Oppenheim, ‘Female pirate lovers whose story was ignored by male historians immortalised with statue’ The Independent (London, 19 November 2020) <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/women-pirates-anne-bonny-mary-read-lgbt-statue-b1725018.html> accessed 7 December 2023.

165 ibid; Rachel Savage, ‘Britain Resurrects Lesbian Pirates as World Recasts Statues’ Reuters (London, 19 November 2020) <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-lgbt-statue-trfn-idUSKBN27Y2I8> accessed 7 December 2023.

166 Oppenheim (n 164).

167 ibid.

168 Professor Kate Williams quoted in Oppenheim (n 164).

169 Paul Johnson quoted in Savage (n 165).

170 Amie Gordon, ‘Plan for 8ft Statue of “Lesbian” Pirates at Devon Beauty Spot Notorious for Smuggling Triggers Uproar as Critics Slam Sculpture as “Patriarchal View of Two Skinny Women with Holes Cut Out”’ Daily Mail (London, 16 February 2021) <https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9265489/Plan-statue-lesbian-pirates-Devon-beauty-spot-triggers-uproar.html> accessed 7 December 2023.

171 ibid.

172 ibid.

173 Heather Love, ‘Emotional Rescue: The Demands of Queer History’, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press 2007) 34.

174 Muppet Treasure Island (Walt Disney Pictures 1996). The same might be equally said of the author.

175 Margaret Thornton (n 21) xiv.

176 Johnson (n 50) 116.

177 Charles Johnson, Historie der Engelsche zee-roovers (Robert Hennebo tr, 8th edn, Hermanus Uytwerf 1725) 220.