Anne Bonny

Anne Bonny

Anne Bonny (8 March 1697 – disappeared April 1721), sometimes Anne Bonney, was an Irish pirate operating in the Caribbean, and one of the few female pirates in recorded history.

Quote

• Sorry to see him there, but if he had fought like a man, he need not have been hanged like a dog
  • Druett, Joan (2000). She Captains : Heroines and Hellions of the Sea. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Quotes about

• Two 18th-century women corsairs share a remarkable story. Anne Cormac — born in Ireland but raised in South Carolina - married and eloped with a young seaman, James Bonny, to the Bahamas, only to ditch him there for the infamous pirate ‘Calico’ Jack Rackham. Disguising herself as a man, she joined Jack’s crew on board The Revenge, and embarked on a life of piracy. By an astonishing coincidence, however, the only other woman pirate in the Caribbean, Mary Read, was also on board, also disguised as a man. Raised as a boy to secure an inheritance, English-born Mary had continued the charade for much of her life, and when ‘Calico’ Jack’s pirates waylaid her ship en route to the West Indies, they mistook her for a man and forced her into piracy. Reputed to ‘Swear and Shoot as well as any Mann’, she caught the eye of Anne Bonny, The two became lovers, though clearly also indulged in heterosexual relationships for when, in 1721, The Revenge was captured by the British and the crew sentenced to be hanged, Mary and Ann (still dressed as men) declared ‘Sir, We plead our bellies’, well aware that a pregnant woman could not be hanged under English law. Both were duly reprieved, and though Mary died of fever a few months later, Bonny apparently escaped justice, possibly bailed out by her wealthy father.
  • Simon Sebag Montefiore, Monsters: History's Most Evil Men and Women (2009), p. 137