Hear the word ‘pirate’ and what picture springs to your mind? I see a richly-bearded geezer in a tricorne hat and a frock coat, with a notched cutlass and bandolier stuffed with pistols. Never mind the real-life pirates of our present day, the maritime robbery-and-kidnap specialists of Somalia and West Africa — they are all too recent to have generated sufficient fiction for us to draw on. Our common pirate is like the zombie, the vampire, the robot — a creature of the imagination, coming to us via Robert Louis Stevenson, J.M. Barrie and Johnny Depp. But where did he come from, really?
He or she, that is. As Neil Rennie points out in his new book tracing the historic and fictional interlacing of the pirate concept, there were women involved right from the start of the ‘golden age’ of piracy. Mary Read and Ann Bonny sailed with the buccaneer Captain John Rackam in the early 18th century, and according to A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates published in 1724, they had a penchant for cross-dressing, while outdoing their male counterparts when it came to pure violence.
The General History also relates the story of a jealous love triangle between Rackam, Read and Bonny (a plot which included frequent baring of heaving breasts), and tells us that all three were executed in Jamaica, the corpse of Rackam being ‘hung on Gibbets in Chains, for a Publick Example, and to terrify others from such-like evil practices.
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