Anne Bonney (Bonny) d. 1782
ANNE BONNEY (Bonny), pirate, was born in Co Cork, the illegitimate daughter of William Cormac, a wealthy Cork lawyer, and his maid. According to Daniel Defoe, her first biographer, she was disguised as a boy during early childhood in order to conceal her identity. Later, to avoid local censure, Cormac took the mother and child to South Carolina, where he acquired a substantial plantation.
Anne grew up in the colonies as an independent and strong-willed young woman who, on one occasion, was reputed to have murdered her English maid with a case knife.
In 1718, when she married a poor seaman, James Bonney, her father turned her out of the house, and the couple moved to New Providence in the Bahamas. There Bonney became acquainted with a group of pirates, led by Capt John Rackam, better known as Calico Jack, with whom she later eloped and had a child. Disguised as a man on board ship, Bonney took part in raids off Cuba and Hispaniola, joining English-born Mary Read (c1695-1721), another female member of Rackam’s crew.
On September 5th, 1720, the governor of the Bahamas issued a proclamation reporting the theft by Rackam and his associates of an armed 12-ton sloop from Providence, which was subsequently used for piracy and robbery.
The proclamation was published in the Boston Globe, and the following month the vessel was intercepted off the Jamaican coast. The crew, including Bonney and Read, were captured and imprisoned in Spanish Town. On November 16th, Rackam and his male accomplices were tried and condemned, and hanged two days later. On November 28th, at a separate trial in St Jago de la Vega, Bonney and Read were tried for piracy. It was claimed that Bonney and Read were neither kept nor detained by force, but engaged in piracy of their own free will. Eyewitnesses said the two, disguised in men’s clothing, were each armed with a machete and pistol, and that, as one of the last defenders of the ship, Bonney was active on board and willing to do anything.
Pleas of pregnancy saved both women from the death penalty, though Read died in prison. William Cormac, however, apparently secured his daughter’s release from prison, and Bonney returned to Charles Town, South Carolina, where she gave birth to Rackam’s second child. In December 1721, she married local man Joseph Burleigh and the couple had eight children. Bonney died, aged 84, in South Carolina on April 25th, 1782. The exploits of Bonney and Read were dramatised by playwright Steve Gooch in The Women Pirates (1978), where they are portrayed as two women escaping female stereotypes within a small group of anti-colonial rebel pirates.
From the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of Irish Biography. See dib.ie for more details
