The freedom of life under the Jolly Roger extended to another perhaps surprising group of sea-robbers: women pirates. Women weren’t quite as rare at sea in the 17th and 18th centuries as you might imagine them to have been. There was a fairly well established tradition of women cross-dressing in order to seek their fortune, or to follow husbands or lovers to sea. Of course the only women we know about are the ones that got caught and exposed. Their more successful sisters have sailed off into anonymity. Even so, it would seem that women aboard pirate ships were few. Ironically this may have contributed to the pirates’ downfall—they were relatively easy for the state to crush because the pirate community was widely dispersed and inherently fragile; they found it hard to reproduce or replenish their numbers. By comparison, the much longer lived and more successful pirates of the South China Seas were organised in family groups with men, women and children all at sea together—thus there was always a new generation of pirates to hand.(36)

Just as pirates in general defined themselves in opposition to the emerging capitalist social relations of the 17th and 18th centuries, so also some women found in piracy a way to rebel against the emerging gender roles. For example, Charlotte de Berry, born in England in 1636, followed her husband into the navy by dressing as a man. When she was forced aboard an Africa-bound vessel, she led a mutiny against the captain who had assaulted her, cutting off his head with a dagger. She then turned pirate and became captain, her ship cruising the African coast capturing gold ships. There were also other less successful women pirates; in Virginia in 1726, the authorities tried Mary Harley (or Harvey) and three men for piracy. The three men were sentenced to hang but Harley was released. Mary’s husband Thomas was also involved in the piracy but seems to have escaped capture. Mary and her husband had been transported to the colonies as convicts a year earlier. Three years later in 1729, another deported female convict was on trial for piracy in the colony of Virginia. A gang of six pirates were sentenced to hang, including Mary Crickett (or Crichett), who along with Edmund Williams, the leader of the pirate gang, had been transported to Virginia as a felon in 1728.(37)

However, the women pirates about whom we know the most are Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Mary Read was born as an illegitimate child, and brought up as a little boy by her mother in order to pass her off to her relatives as her legitimate son. She had to be tough to deal with the harsh circumstances of her life and by the time she was a teenager she was already “growing bold and strong.” Mary seems to have liked her male identity and enlisted herself as a sailor on a man-of-war and then as an English soldier in the war in Flanders. At the end of the war she joined a Dutch ship bound for the West Indies. When her ship was captured by ‘Calico’ Jack Rackham’s pirate crew, which included Anne Bonny, she decided to throw her lot in with the pirates. She seems to have taken to pirate life and began a new romance with one of the crew. When her lover got into an argument with a fellow pirate and was challenged to settle it in the pirate’s customary way “at sword and pistol”, Mary saved her lover by picking a fight with the contender, challenging him to a duel two hours before that he was due to fight with her lover and then running him through with her cutlass.(38)

Anne Bonny was born the illegitimate child of a “Maid-Servant” in Ireland and raised in male disguise, her father pretending she was the child of a relative entrusted to his care. He eventually took her to Charleston, South Carolina, where they no longer needed to keep up the pretence. Anne grew up into a “robust” woman of “fierce and couragious temper.” Indeed, one time “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.” She ran away to the Caribbean where she fell in love with the captain of a pirate crew called ‘Calico’ Jack Rackham (so-called because of his outlandish and colourful clothing). Anne and ‘Calico’ Jack, “finding they could not by fair means enjoy each other’s Company with Freedom, resolved to run away together, and enjoy it in Spight of all the World.” They stole a ship from the harbour and for the next couple of years Bonny was Rackham’s shipmate and lover as their crew (which soon also included Mary Read disguised in male clothing, who joined them from a ship they captured) raided shipping in the Caribbean and American coastal waters.(39)

One of the witnesses at their trial, a woman called Dorothy Thomas, who had been taken prisoner by the pirates, said the women “wore Mens Jackets, and long Trousers, and Handkerchiefs tied about their Heads, and that each of them had a Machet[e] and Pistol in their Hands.” Despite the fact Read and Bonny were in men’s clothing, their prisoner was no fool; she said that “the Reason of her knowing and believing them to be Women was, by the largeness of their Breasts.”

Other prisoners taken by the pirates reported that Bonny and Read “were both very profligate, cursing, and swearing much, and very ready and willing to do any Thing on board.” Both women appear to have exercised some leadership; for example, they were part of the group designated to board prizes—which was a role reserved for only the most fearless and respected members of the crew. When the pirates “saw any vessel, gave Chase or Attack’d,” the pair “wore Men’s Cloaths,” but at other times, “they wore Women’s Cloaths.”(40)

Rackham, Bonny and Read were all caught in 1720 by a British navy sloop off Jamaica. The crew were all totally drunk (a common event) and hid in the hold—there was only one other apart from Bonny and Read who was brave enough to fight. In disgust, Mary Read fired a pistol down into the hold “killing one and wounding others.” Eighteen members of the crew had already been tried and sentenced to hang by the time the women came to court. Three of them, including Rackham, were later hung in chains at prime locations to act as a moral instruction and “Publick Example” to the seamen who would pass their rotting corpses. However, Mary Read insisted that “Men of Courage”—like herself—did not fear death. Courage was a primary virtue amongst the pirates—it was only courage that ensured their continued survival. ‘Calico’ Jack Rackham had been promoted from quartermaster to captain when the then current captain, Charles Vane, had been deposed by his crew for cowardice. So it was an ignominious end for Rackham to be told by Anne Bonny before he was due to be hanged that “if he had fought like a Man, he need not have been hang’d like a Dog.” Both Bonny and Read escaped execution because they “pleaded their Bellies, being Quick with Child, and pray’d that Execution might be staid.”(41)

The most famous pirate utopia is that of Captain Misson and his pirate crew, who founded their intentional community, their lawless utopia of Libertalia in northern Mada-gascar in the Eighteenth century.(42)

Misson was French, born in Provence, and it was while in Rome on leave from the French warship Victoire that he lost his faith, disgusted by the decadence of the Papal Court. In Rome he ran into Caraccioli—a “lewd Priest” who over the course of long voyages with little to do but talk, gradually converted Misson and a sizeable portion of the rest of the crew to his brand of atheistic communism:

“…he fell upon Government, and shew’d, that every Man was born free, and had as much Right to what would support him, as to the Air he respired… that the vast Difference betwixt Man and Man, the one wallowing in Luxury, and the other in the most pinching Necessity, was owing only to Avarice and Ambition on the one Hand, and a pusilanimous Subjection on the other.”

Embarking on a career of piracy, the 200 strong crew of the Victoire called upon Misson to be their captain. They collectivised the wealth of the ship, deciding “all should be in common.” All decisions were to be put to “the Vote of the whole Company.” Thus they set out on their new “Life of Liberty.” Off the west coast of Africa they captured a Dutch slave ship. The slaves were freed and brought aboard the Victoire, Misson declaring that “the Trading for those of our own Species, cou’d never be agreeable to the Eyes of divine Justice: That no Man had Power of Liberty of another” and that “he had not exempted his Neck from the galling Yoak of Slavery, and asserted his own Liberty, to enslave others.” At every engagement they added to their numbers with new French, English and Dutch recruits and freed African slaves.

While cruising round the coast of Madagascar, Misson found a perfect bay in an area with fertile soil, fresh water and friendly natives. Here the pirates built Libertalia, renouncing their titles of English, French, Dutch or African and calling themselves Liberi. They created their own language, a polyglot mixture of African languages, combined with French, English, Dutch, Portuguese and native Madagascan. Shortly after the beginning of building work on the colony of Libertalia, the Victoire ran into the pirate Thomas Tew, who decided to accompany them back to Libertalia. Such a colony was no new idea to Tew; he had lost his quartermaster and 23 of his crew when they had left to form a settlement further up the Madagascan coast. The Liberi—”Enemies to Slavery,” aimed to boost their numbers by capturing another slave ship. Off the coast of Angola, Tew’s crew took an English slave ship with 240 men, women and children below decks. The African members of the pirate crew discovered many friends and relatives among the enslaved and struck off their fetters and handcuffs, regaling them with the glories of their new life of freedom.

The pirates settled down to become farmers, holding the land in common—”no Hedge bounded any particular Man’s Property.” Prizes and money taken at sea were “carry’d into the common Treasury, Money being of no Use where every Thing was in common.”

The Golden Age of Euro-American piracy was roughly from 1650 to 1725 with its peak in about 1720. There were very specific conditions and circumstances that led to this hey-day on the high seas. The period opens with the emergence of the buccaneers on the Caribbean islands of Hispaniola and Tortuga. For most of this period piracy was centred around the Caribbean, and with good reason. The Caribbean islands provided innumerable hiding places, secret coves and uncharted islands; places where pirates could take on fresh water and provisions, rest up and lie in wait. The location was perfect; lying just on the route taken by the heavily laden treasure fleets from South America back to Spain and Portugal, the Caribbean was effectively impossible for any navy to police and many islands were unclaimed or uninhabited. All in all it added up to a freebooter’s paradise.

In 1700 a new law was introduced to allow for the swift trial and execution of pirates wherever they may be found. Previously they had to be transported back to London to stand trial and be executed at the low tide mark at Wapping. The ‘Act for the More Effectual Suppression of Piracy’ also enforced the use of the death penalty and gave rewards for resisting pirate attack, but most importantly, it was not trial by jury but by a special court of naval officers. The famous Captain Kidd was one of the first victims of this new law—indeed the law was partially rushed through specifically so that it could be applied to him. He was hanged at Execution Dock in Wapping and his body was then placed in a gibbet, coated with tar to help preserve it, and hung at Tilbury Point to be a “terror to all that saw it.” The blackened and rotting corpse was intended to serve as a very clear reminder to the common seaman of the risks of resisting the disciplines of wage labour.(43)

Kidd’s case was unusual in that he was executed in London. After 1700, under the provisions of the new law the war against the pirates would increasingly take place around the peripheries of Empire, and it wouldn’t just be one or two corpses that dangled from crosstrees down near the tidemark but sometimes twenty or thirty at a time. In one particularly significant case in 1722 the British Admiralty tried 169 pirates of Bartholomew Roberts’ crew and executed 52 of them at Cape Coast Castle on the Guinea Coast. The 72 Africans on board, free or not, were sold into slavery, which perhaps some of them had escaped for a short while.(44)

It was the disappearance of the unique favourable conditions of the Golden Age that ended the reign of the pirates. With the development of capital in the 17th century came the rise of the state, fostered by the imperial wars that wracked the globe from 1688 onwards. The requirements of conducting these vast wars necessitated a huge increase in state power. When, in 1713, the Treaty of Utrecht ended war between the European nations, the state’s ability to actually police piracy was massively increased. The end of the war also allowed naval ships to concentrate on hunting down the pirates and granted the British even larger commercial interests in the Caribbean, giving an extra incentive to these efforts. As the new, more powerful state consolidated its monopoly on violence, the colonies were brought into line. The practice of dealing with pirates and investing in pirate voyages had continued in the colonies long after it had become unacceptable at home; it was wiped out by an extension of state power from the mother country to enforce discipline on the colonies. The beginning of the end was marked by ex-buccaneer Sir Henry Morgan’s return to Jamaica as Governor with express orders to destroy the pirates. Naval patrols flushed them from their lairs and mass hangings eliminated the leaders. Ultimately the pirates’ war on trade had become too successful to be tolerated; the state was fighting to allow commerce to flow unimpeded and capital to accumulate, bringing wealth to the merchants and revenue to the state.(45)

If we want to look for the heirs of the libertarian piracy of the Golden Age we shouldn’t necessarily only be looking at more recent pirates, but rather at how piracy fed into the Atlantic class struggle. Just as some of the initial impetus behind the piracy of the 17th and 18th centuries had come from land-based radical movements like the Levellers, the flow of ideas and practices circulated around the Atlantic world, emerging in sometimes surprising places. In 1748 there was a mutiny aboard the HMS Chesterfield, near Cape Coast Castle off the west coast of Africa. One of the ringleaders—John Place—had been there before; he was one those captured with Bartholomew Roberts back in 1722. It was “old hands” like John Place who kept alive the pirate tradition and ensured the continuity of ideas and practices. The mutineers hoped pirate-fashion “to settle a colony”. The term ‘to strike’ originated in mutiny, particularly the “Great Mutinies” at Spithead and the Nore in 1797 when sailors would strike their sails to disrupt the ceaseless flow of trade and the state’s war machine. These English, Irish and African sailors established their own “council” and “shipboard democracy” and some even talked of settling a “New Colony” in America or Madagascar.(46)

The pirates prospered in a power vacuum, during a period of upheaval and war that allowed them the freedom to live effectively outside the law. With the coming of peace came an extension of control and an end to the possibility of pirate autonomy. This is not so surprising really when we consider that periods of war and turmoil have often allowed for revolutionary experiments, enclaves, communes and anarchies to flourish. From the pirates of the 17th and 18th centuries, to D’Annunzio’s piratical Republic of Fiume in the First World War, the Paris Commune in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, The Diggers’ land communes in the English Civil War and the Makhnovist peasants in the Ukraine during the Russian Revolution, it is often in interstice and interregnum that experiments in freedom can find space to flower.

“Is this Utopian? A map of the world which does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”
—Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism(47)

1. Daniel Defoe (Captain Charles Johnson)—A General History of the Pyrates, Edited by Manuel Schonhorn, (London, Dent, 1972), p. 244
2. For example, the East India Company was brought near to collapse by piracy in 1690s. Robert C. Ritchie—Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates, pp. 128-34
3. Larry Law—Misson and Libertatia, (London, A Distribution/Dark Star Press, 1991), p. 6
4. Marcus B. Rediker—Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo- American Maritime World 1700-1750, p. 258
5. Op. Cit. 4, p. 255; Op. Cit. 2, p. 29, 142
6. Op. Cit. 4, p. 272 n52, 274—”as more pirates were captured and hanged, the greater cruelty was practiced by those who were still alive”; Op. Cit. 2, p. 2
7. Marcus B. Rediker—’Libertalia: The Pirate’s Utopia’ in David Cordingly (ed.)—Pirates, p. 126
8. Christopher Hill—’Radical Pirates?’ in Collected Essays, Vol. 3, pp. 162, 166-9; Peter Lamborn Wilson—’Caliban’s Masque: Spiritual Anarchy and the Wild Man in Colonial America’, in Sakolsky and Koehnline (eds.)—Gone to Croatan: The Origins of North American Dropout Culture (New York/Edinburgh, Autonomedia/AK Press, 1993), p. 107; Op. Cit. 2, pp. 14-15
9. Jenifer G. Marx—’Brethren of the Coast’ in Cordingly (ed.)—Pirates, pp. 47, 49-50; Op. Cit. 4, pp. 69, 81- 2; Op. Cit. 2, pp. 65, 211, 226
10. Richard Platt and Tina Chambers (Photographer)—Pirate (Eyewitness Books) (London, Dorling Kindersley, 1995), pp. 20, 26-7; Op. Cit. 2, pp. 22-23
11. Hill—’Radical Pirates?’, pp. 169-170
12. Op. Cit. 4, p. 258; Hakim Bey—T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (New York, Autonomedia, 1991) pp. 23, 139; Op. Cit. 1, p. 587
13. Op. Cit. 2, pp. 65, 117-8
14. Ibid. pp. 42, 234
15. Op. Cit. 1, p. 211
16. Op. Cit. 2, p. 124
17. Op. Cit. 2, p. 124
18. Lawrence Osborne—’A Pirate’s Progress: How the Maritime Rogue Became a Multicultural Hero’ Lingua Franca March 1998 <http://www.linguafranca.com/ 9803/osborne.html> (unpaginated)
19. Op. Cit. 2, p. 59, 258 n38; Op. Cit. 4, p. 264; Op. Cit. 1, pp. 212, 308, 343
20. Op. Cit. 4, p. 262
21. Op. Cit. 2, pp. 87-88, 117; Douglas Botting and the Editors of Time-Life Books—The Pirates (Time Life’s The Seafarers Series) (Amsterdam, Time-Life, 1979), p. 142; Op. Cit. 4, p. 278; Op. Cit. 1, p. 7
22. Cordingly—Life Among the Pirates, p. 271; Op. Cit. 2, p. 234; Botting—The Pirates, p. 61; Op. Cit. 4, pp. 269-272
23. Op. Cit. 4, p. 269; Peter Lamborn Wilson—Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes, p. 57
24. Op. Cit. 4, pp. 255, 274, 277; Op. Cit. 2, p. 234; Botting—The Pirates, pp. 48, 166; Platt and Chambers—Pirate, p. 35
25. Op. Cit. 7, pp. 133-4; W. Jeffrey Bolster—Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 12-13; Op. Cit. 1, p. 228; Op. Cit. 20 (unpaginated)
26. Op. Cit. 7, p. 133; Bolster—Black Jacks, p. 15
27. Op. Cit. 20 (unpaginated); Op. Cit. 7, pp. 133-4, 249 n37; Bolster—Black Jacks, p. 14; Op. Cit. 1, p. 82
28. Op. Cit. 7, pp. 134, 249 n42, 250 n44; Bolster—Black Jacks, pp. 50-1
29. Op. Cit. 7, p. 134; Op. Cit. 1, p. 273
30. Lionel Wafer—Voyage de Mr. Wafer, Ou l’on trouve la description de l’Isthme de l’Amérique (Publisher not stated, Paris? 1723) <http://www.buccaneer.net/piratebooks.htm>
31. Platt and Chambers—Pirate, pp. 26-7; Op. Cit. 4, p. 146; Cordingly—Life Among the Pirates, p. 7
32. Op. Cit. 1, p. 131; Op. Cit. 2, pp. 86-7, 104, 118
33. Op. Cit. 2, pp. 84-5
34. Ibid. pp. 59, 69, 72-3; Cordingly—Life Among the Pirates, p. 64
35. Cordingly—Life Among the Pirates, p. 115
36. Ibid. pp. 122-5; Marcus B. Rediker—’Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger: The Lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, Pirates’ in M. Creighton and L. Norling (eds.)—Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Atlantic Seafaring, 1700-1920 (Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 9; Op. Cit. 2, pp. 123-4; Marx—’Brethren of the Coast’, p. 39
37. Rediker—’Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger’, pp. 8-11, 233 n26; Op. Cit. 1, p. 212; Platt and Chambers—Pirate, pp. 32-3, 62; Op. Cit. 4, p. 285; Ulrike Klausmann, Marion Meinzerin and Gabriel Kuhn (trans. Nicholas Levis)—Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger, pp. 36-7
38. Platt and Chambers—Pirate, p. 33; Rediker—’Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger’, pp. 10, 232-233 n24, n25
39. Rediker—’Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger’, pp. 3-5, 8, 13; Platt and Chambers—Pirate, pp. 32-3
40. Rediker—’Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger’, pp. 5-7, 13-16, 234 n41; Platt and Chambers—Pirate, pp. 32-3; Op. Cit. 1, pp. 623-6
41. Rediker—’Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger’, pp. 7-8
42. Ibid. pp. 2-3, 5-7, 13-14; Platt and Chambers—Pirate, pp. 32, 35; Op. Cit. 1, pp. 158-9
43. The whole of the following narrative is drawn from Captain Charles Johnson’s General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, published in London in 1728, (Op. Cit. 1, pp. 383-439). Because Johnson’s book is the only source for the history of Captain Misson, the story is almost universally asserted to be fictional. However the overall credibility of Johnson’s book has been established—it would appear that this is the only fictional episode in an otherwise reliable work of history. The General History was published only a very few years after the events it recorded took place, and yet no one at the time denounced the Misson story as fiction. The story of Misson was believed. And it was believed because it was believable. There were radical, libertarian pirates, and there were pirate settlements on Madagascar—all the elements of the story fit with what we know of pirates. Perhaps the Misson story is a fiction with a solid basis in fact; perhaps like the story of Robin Hood it collects together a wide range of different experiences in one narrative. In either case the story of Libertalia represents the literary expression of the living traditions, practices and dreams of the Atlantic proletariat.

    On the Misson story and the reliability of the General History see: Maximillian E. Novak—’Introduction’ to Daniel Defoe (Captain Charles Johnson)—’Of Captain Misson’ (1728) extract from the General History—Augustan Reprint Society, Publication number 87 (W. A. Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 1961), pp. i-iii; Op. Cit. 3, pp. 6-8; Op. Cit. 7, pp. 125-7, 249 n2, n7; Manuel Schonhorn—’Introduction’ to Op. Cit. 1, pp. xxxvii-xxxviii; Rediker—’Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger’, pp. 230-1 n4, n11; Botting—The Pirates, pp. 6, 21-22; Cordingly—Life Among the Pirates, pp. 10-11, 77

44. Op. Cit. 2, pp. 153-4, 228, 235; Cordingly —Life Among the Pirates, p. 237
45. Op. Cit. 2, p. 235; Botting—The Pirates, pp. 174-5
46. Op. Cit. 2, pp. 7, 128, 138, 147-51; Op. Cit. 20 (unpaginated)
47. Op. Cit. 7, pp. 137-8
48. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Glasgow, Harper Collins, 1994), p. 1184
49. Howard J. Ehrlich (ed.)—Reinventing Anarchy, Again (Edinburgh, AK Press, 1996), p. 31
50. Cordingly—Life Among the Pirates, pp. 2, 138-143: “Red or ‘bloody’ flags are mentioned as often as black flags until the middle of the eighteenth century”; Op. Cit. 2, p. 22; Platt and Chambers—Pirate, p. 35
51. Woodcock—Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (London, Penguin, 1963), p. 284; Jason Wehling—’History of the Black Flag: Why Anarchists fly it. What are its origins?’, in Fifth Estate (Vol. 32, #1, Summer 1997), p. 31; Le Pirate: Journal Quotidien #1-4 (1871) in University of Sussex Commune Collection—continuation of Le Corsaire.
52. John Nicholson—The Great Liberty Riot of 1780 (London, Bozo, 1985), pp. 44-46
53. Bolster—Black Jacks, pp. 152-3
54. For more on this check out two excellent pieces by Peter Linebaugh—’ Jubilating: Or, How The Atlantic Working Class Used the Biblical Jubilee Against Capitalism, With Some Success’ in ‘The New Enclosures’: Midnight Notes #10 (1990), p. 92; and ‘All the Atlantic Mountains Shook’, in Eley and Hunt (eds.)—Reviving the English Revolution: Reflections and Elaborations on the work of Christopher Hill (London, Verso, 1988), p. 214. All you Sussex bioregionalists out there will be thrilled to discover a Brighton connection to this notorious conspiracy—one of the three executed was a Brighton butcher called James Ings (perhaps recruited for his skill with a carving knife?), who said: “I will cut every head off that is in the room and Lord Castlereagh’s head and Lord Sidmouth’s I will bring away in a bag. For this purpose I will provide two bags.” See Rocky Hill—Underdog Brighton: A Rather Different History of the Town (Brighton, Iconoclast Press, 1991), pp. 23-4, and John Stanhope—The Cato Street Conspiracy (London, Johnathan Cape, 1962), p. 87