10
Women on the Edge
AS THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY rolled into the nineteenth, pirate procedure developed further and further away from the Golden Age model. The United States was entering its third decade, and the fledgling country was beginning to take shape, developing a distinctive character all its own. Canada had been under British rule since the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, but the American Revolution had caused strain between the Canadians and their leaders across the Atlantic. England also ruled the British colony of New South Wales, establishing a penal colony there in 1788. The world was becoming a smaller place, with fewer and fewer unknown spots on the map.
Since the end of the Golden Age, pirates were no longer able to elude the grasp of the law, which had gotten smarter and faster. Countries also no longer needed pirates to act as privateers—they were doing their own dirty work now through their own national navies. With no place to hide, Western pirates were forced to adopt new ways of life. Targets became less valuable as treasure fleets shrank. Pirates may no longer have wielded cutlasses or fired cannons as they did in their “glory days,” but during the early nineteenth century they remained a solid part of seafaring life: as long as there exists something to steal, there will be pirates to steal it.
Two of the most unusual female pirates of the nineteenth century were Charlotte Badger and Catherine Hagerty. These women started their lives in England but ended up settlers in a strange new land. Their story is documented in several sources, including Joan Druett’s She Captains. Charlotte is said to be the first female settler of New Zealand. Unlike the average eighteenth-century pirate who stole gold and other valuable cargo, these women “stole” themselves—their freedom was their own “treasure.”
Catherine Hagerty, Druett claims, is the more interesting of the women, but unfortunately we do not have nearly as much information about the “blonde, nubile, and husky voiced” Hagerty as we do about the “fat” Badger. Other reports describe Charlotte as the attractive one of the pair. Whatever her physical appearance, it is clear that Charlotte Badger was a woman possessed of no small amount of charisma. Charlotte was born in 1778 in Worcestershire, England, a rural county in the West Midlands rumored to be the inspiration for the Shire in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings saga. A teenage Charlotte was convicted of picking pockets (though some reports say housebreaking) in 1796. Legend has it she stole a silk handkerchief and a few guineas. In England, picking pockets was considered a felony and was eligible for the death penalty until 1808. Charlotte was not sentenced to death, however, but to transportation for life to a penal colony in New South Wales—present-day Australia.
The Australian penal colony movement was just getting started in 1796. Since prisoners were believed to be inherently mentally defective and incapable of rehabilitation, they had to be either locked up or executed. England’s prisons were under scrutiny after reformer John Howard’s 1777 study The State of the Prisons, which pointed out the often appalling conditions on the inside. Judges were reluctant to cram more people into these overcrowded jails and risk more public outcry and scrutiny from reformers, but they were also loath to execute every common criminal who came before them. It was a pressing dilemma: What was England to do with all its criminals? Apparently the option of letting petty thieves go instead of giving them life sentences was not on the table at this point. Sending the prisoners to America was no longer an option due to the Revolutionary War and subsequent loss of the colonies. England, despite losing the American outpost, nevertheless still seemed to favor the out-of-sight, out-of-mind philosophy, because on January 26, 1788, the country established the first penal colony in Australia.
Charlotte and Catherine endured the six-month voyage to Australia on the Earl Cornwallis. Conditions on the ship were deplorable. Convicts were chained belowdecks for the entirety of the trip, and many died on the journey. Charlotte survived the trip and arrived in Port Jackson, Sydney, in 1801. She wound up at the women’s prison, the Parramatta Female Factory, where she gave birth to a daughter at some point, father unknown. It is possible that Charlotte’s baby was fathered by one of her guards. Children were allowed to remain with their mothers in the Factory until age four, when they were sent to Orphan (and later Infant) Schools. After the separation, many mothers were never reunited with their children.
Parramatta is a riverside city in New South Wales about fourteen miles west of Sydney. The jail at Parramatta was a one-hundred-foot-long building made of logs surrounded by a high fence. The place was modeled on English workhouses and, just like at the workhouses, women endured unsafe conditions and poor treatment. They were not, however, entirely broken in spirit. Sir Roger Therry, a judge from the New South Wales Supreme Court, wrote in 1863 that the women were far more a blight on the local government than the male criminals transported there. He recounted how they destroyed everything that wasn’t nailed down in the dormitories and often rebelled to the point that soldiers with bayonets had to be sent in to restore order to the place. “The Amazons,” as Therry refers to the women, were not a bit frightened of the soldiers but instead threw rocks at them and chased them out of the factory. Therry’s disdain for these criminals is evident in his book, but underneath there does seem to be a note of grudging admiration for their confidence and vigor in the face of such wretched circumstances.
There was a factory constructed above the jail where women did weaving work. It was notoriously overcrowded and women had to sleep in the workrooms among the bales of wool. There were four ways out of the prison: a ticket of leave upon completion of one’s sentence, a transfer, a death, or a marriage. One of the more peculiar functions of the Parramatta Factory was as a matchmaking service. A man seeking a bride had merely to obtain a paper from a clergyman or judge proclaiming him a man fit to marry and present himself to the matron. She would then select a number of eligible prisoners and put them in a room with the bachelor, where a bizarre round of speed-dating would commence. The man would ask the women he found physically attractive if they’d ever been married before, and the women would ask in turn about the man’s wealth. If both parties were amenable to the match, the matron was notified, a clergyman was hired, and the banns were proclaimed. Once the marriage was performed, the woman was able to walk out of the prison as a free woman, provided she remained on the right side of the law ever after. Thousands of marriages took place in this way. Catherine and Charlotte did not obtain their freedom through this practice, but they somehow caught the eye of someone important at the factory because their sentences were commuted in 1806. They were selected to be shipped nearly a thousand miles as the crow flies to Hobart Town, present-day Tasmania, to become domestic servants.
The two women found themselves onboard the Venus, a forty-five-ton brig. These ships were big, with two tall masts, each featuring the square-rigged sails. The mainmast also flew a smaller, triangular sail called a gaff sail. The ship would be primarily constructed of wood, possibly pine. The captives were housed below the main deck, where there would be almost no light or ventilation, similar to what they endured on the passage from England. Possibly the women would have been given separate quarters from the men, but that comfort was not guaranteed and was often not given. This particular voyage housed Charlotte, Catherine, Charlotte’s daughter, two male convicts, a guard by the name of Richard Thompson, and the crew.
Once the women boarded the Venus, accounts differ on what exactly transpired. Some stories paint the captain, Samuel Chase, as a sadist who regularly beat the women for his amusement. Other stories claim that the women danced naked for the captain nightly and were generally friendly with the crew, causing mischief and breaking into the whiskey stash, which correlates with Therry’s account, but both sources could be false or exaggerated. Another recounting says that Catherine struck up a romantic relationship with the first mate, Benjamin Kelly, while Charlotte took up with Lancashire, one of the male convicts. Whatever truly happened onboard, by June 1806 the women had experienced enough of it and decided to mutiny.
On June 16, Captain Chase docked at Port Dalrymple, a town on the mouth of the Tamar River in present-day northeast Tasmania. One story claims he spent the day doing business and slept, for some reason, aboard another ship that night. The next morning, as he sailed back toward the Venus, he was horrified to realize it was sailing off without him. Another story says that he was onboard during the mutiny and was flogged by Charlotte, who was dressed in men’s clothing. The captain later said that Kelly was the ringleader of the mutiny but that the women were both enthusiastic participants. No matter who incited the mutiny—Catherine, Charlotte, Benjamin Kelly, or someone else altogether—the end result was that ten people sailed away with the Venus, leaving the captain behind. Stealing the ship and making off with the cargo, some of which was the captives themselves, made them officially pirates.
Now that the newly christened pirates had made their daring escape, what next? The first order of business was to drop off the ladies. The pirates, despite their rudimentary sailing skills, managed to sail clear across the Tasman Sea to Rangihoua Bay, in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand. Catherine, Charlotte, and Charlotte’s daughter were dispatched to the shore. The men did not want to leave them entirely defenseless and hastily constructed a rudimentary structure for them before sailing off into the sunset. Some reports say that their lovers, Kelly and Lancashire, remained on the island with them, while other stories say that they took off with the Venus. All sources seem to agree, though, that in about a year, Charlotte and her daughter were alone on the island. Catherine died in early 1807, by which time the men—assuming they had gone ashore with the women—seem to have either left the island or been arrested for their part in the mutiny.
What happened to Charlotte next is a mystery. She might have died of natural causes or been killed by the native Maori population. The Maori had been isolated until American and European sealers and whalers began showing up with some regularity in the 1780s. These Western explorers were greeted with hospitality and enthusiasm, which they routinely abused. As a result, relations between Maori and Westerners had become strained, and at the time of Charlotte’s arrival, the Boyd Massacre of sixty-six people by the Maori in retaliation for the whipping of a chieftain’s son was only a few years in the future. Reports of cannibalism were not uncommon from this area. In all likelihood, Charlotte and her daughter perished on the island, either due to starvation or a bad encounter with the natives.
Many other possibilities exist regarding her fate. One account tells that in 1826, an American ship visited Tonga, some twelve hundred miles from Bay of Islands. The author of the account arrived at the tropical paradise and was shocked to find two pale faces among all the dark-skinned ones. This “stout Englishwoman” and young girl had arrived in Tonga a few years earlier and were able to translate between him and the natives because they spoke a “Polynesian” dialect fluently. If this woman was Charlotte, as has been speculated, what was she doing in Tonga? Why had she left the Maoris? The account does not say what happened to this woman after the author left Tonga, so the reader is left to speculate. There are so many different stories about Charlotte’s life after being dropped off by the Venus that it’s impossible to sort out which, if any, are true.
The stories told about Catherine and Charlotte concerning their stay in the Parramatta prison were told by the men who kept them there. The stories were colored by the males’ perception of these women as criminals and degenerates, something to be looked down on as inferior and borderline subhuman. Many important details, such as how the women felt about their treacherous sea journey, what they thought about the prison marriage program, and why they decided to mutiny against Captain Chase, are left out of the tale. The reader is left to guess how Charlotte and Catherine felt about the odd incidents that dictated their eventful lives. Charlotte’s story was always told by men, so in a way the fact that there is no definitive ending to her tale is a blessing in disguise. By disappearing, she took control of her own story and lived the remainder of her life outside of a male narrator’s gaze. Wherever Charlotte Badger went, she died a free woman, far from the prison where she had been sentenced to spend the rest of her life. Her piratical adventure earned her a spot in the history of Australia as the first female settler of New Zealand, as well as Australia’s first female pirate.
The next pirate from this period also entered piracy due to circumstances outside her control, but with considerably less joyous results. Margaret Croke was born in Ireland sometime in the late eighteenth century. She married Edward Jordan, an attractive man with “dark hair and eyes, a flashing grin, and very white teeth” in 1798. Edward had a history as a rebel and troublemaker, and he was fabled to have once barely escaped execution by leaping over a prison wall. Ireland at the time was under Anglican control (Irish Protestants loyal to the British crown). Catholics and non-Anglican Protestants, such as Presbyterians, were widely discriminated against by the government. At various times, these minority groups were not allowed to vote, run for Parliament, or be appointed to state jobs, depending on the whims of the ruling monarch. Edward was part of this minority, as well as a landlord’s deputy. In his job, he would have had to evict his fellow countrymen from farms owned by an absentee landowner, a situation that made Edward the bearer of bad news for many people and would have made him the unjust target of a lot of abuse. Given this background, and the fact that he was sent to jail by his landlord for “training rebels,” it isn’t particularly surprising that he did not look kindly on the English. After he escaped from jail, he joined the Society of United Irishmen. He fought against the British at the Battle of Wexford in 1798, a significant defeat for the British.
Margaret either was unaware of this part of her husband’s past, chose to ignore it, or wasn’t bothered by it because the marriage appears to have been, at first, a love match. The newlyweds lived with her father for a year, enduring the arrest and trial of Edward for not having his papers in order. They moved out of her father’s house and tried living in a different spot in Ireland for four years before deciding the New World had better opportunities for their family, which now included several daughters. The Jordans immigrated to the United States, which is where Margaret claims that the marriage turned sour.
The United States did not offer Margaret and her family the new start that they needed, and the family moved again—this time up to Canada, trying out numerous locations and vocations, even giving farming a shot for a brief period, before landing in Percé, on the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec. Percé was at the time a seasonal fishing village known for its attractive landmarks. Quebec was newly under British control after the failure of the New France experiment. Canada would not gain its independence until 1867. The Jordan family tried farming again in Percé before attempting to get into the dominant industry of the area: fishing.
Edward Jordan went in with a wealthy family in the area, the Tremaines of Halifax, on a fishing boat. He felt that the joint venture would bring them all money, and if the Tremaines would only loan him the money then he would get the boat into seaworthy shape. The Tremaines sent Edward back to Gaspé with the supplies necessary to fix up the ship. Once he completed the repairs, he returned to Halifax, sailing on the jointly owned boat the Three Sisters. Up to this point, all parties generally agreed on the sequence of events. From here, the stories begin to diverge.
The Tremaines reported that Edward showed up without the money he owed them. He claimed that he had dried fish back in Gaspé that would satisfy his debt, but the family doubted his story. No longer content to give him free rein to sail wherever he liked with the boat they co-owned, they put their own captain, John Stairs, on the ship as an additional security measure and sent them both back to Gaspé to find the additional money Edward owed them. Stairs would come to play a pivotal part in the Jordan trial. When Edward returned to Gaspé, he and Margaret could not find anyone to loan them the money that they needed. Edward believed that he had been cheated—he felt that he was the true owner of the Three Sisters because he had fixed it up. No matter what anyone else said, he was certain he was right.
Margaret was understandably upset when her husband returned to Gaspé. Not only was he once again in search of money, but he also had not brought the supplies Margaret had requested from Halifax. Their children were starving and clothed in rags, and instead of providing for them, Edward got the family into more and more financial trouble. To make matters worse, when John Stairs realized that the dried fish Edward had talked about would cover only a fraction of what Edward owed the Tremaines, he officially repossessed the ship in their name. Now the Jordans were well and truly out of luck: shipless, penniless, and in massive debt.
Stairs, his three men, and the entire Jordan family set sail on September 10, 1809, from Gaspé for Halifax, a distance of nearly 550 miles as the crow flies. Why the Jordan family was onboard for this voyage is not clear. Stairs later claimed he was taking them to Halifax as a favor to Jordan to enable him to clear up some of his debt in person. Edward believed that, on the contrary, he and his family were being thrown into debtor’s prison. Having narrowly escaped serving time in jail once before in his youth, Edward was in no hurry to return—and with his entire family this time. Jailing people who couldn’t pay their debts was common at the time, and people could remain locked up indefinitely or even be transported. Margaret and Edward felt that they had been through too much to wind up in debtor’s prison so many miles from home. So they hatched a desperate plan to keep their family out of jail at all costs.
In the afternoon of September 13, according to Stairs, they launched their attack. They crept stealthily through the ship and wounded or killed the members of the crew, taking them down one by one. Edward was wielding a gun in one hand and an axe in the other, while Margaret’s weapon of choice was a boat hook. She reportedly beat Stairs over the head several times with it during the bloody skirmish. Once Stairs realized that two of his men had been killed by the Jordans, he leaped overboard into the freezing sea, clinging to a hatch he’d pulled from the ship, using it as a life raft.
At trial, Margaret told a different version of these events. She claimed that Stairs—who had previously aroused Edward’s jealousy by giving Margaret some calico to clothe her children—visited her cabin alone. When her husband discovered the two of them, even though they were behaving innocently, he was tipped into a murderous rage. The scene was so distressing to Margaret that she lost her senses and was no longer aware of her actions. She testified at trial that “to the best of my knowledge I did not [hit Stairs with the boat hook],” but she couldn’t say for sure. She said she was afraid for her children and would have acted out of instinct to protect them.
With Stairs in the sea and two men dead, the Jordans had officially taken the ship and turned pirate. Their original plan was to sail home for Ireland and get as far away from Canada as possible. Their only problem was that the approximately 2,500-mile journey could not be made with just the two of them; they needed more crew members. The Three Sisters was forced to dock in Newfoundland in order to recruit some new men. Onshore, Edward had some business to take care of and so the voyage home kept being delayed. Edward and Margaret, according to some accounts, only took trips to shore separately, which took twice as much time and further pushed back their departure date. Although they were in possession of a stolen ship and had murdered three men, the Jordans seemed almost hesitant to leave Canada. This departure delay would prove fatal for one of the Jordans.
John Stairs knew he was headed for certain death in the icy waters when he leapt from the Three Sisters. Miraculously, he was picked up just three hours after his jump into the water and so he managed to survive the plunge. The lucky captain sailed with his rescuers to America, where he reported the ordeal that he’d been through to the British consul. Word traveled to Canada that the Jordans were in possession of a stolen ship. On October 20, 1809, a warrant was made out for Margaret and Edward Jordan’s arrest by the governor of Nova Scotia. A £100 reward was offered by the government, with an additional £100 put up by the Tremaine family.
With everyone on the lookout for the villainous Jordans, they were apprehended almost immediately and put on trial. Governor Prevost was determined to make an example out of the Jordan trial to prove how far His Majesty’s law extended—all the way to Canada. After the trial, there would be no doubt as to who was in charge in the country. He convened a special court just for the occasion, spending large sums of money to ensure that everything was picture-perfect for the trial. No fewer than fourteen men sat on the judges’ bench. Everything about the trial was meant to impress, and it certainly did, attracting plenty of attention.
At trial, both Edward and Margaret made brief statements in their own defense. While Edward claimed that he was only defending what was his, Margaret gave an emotional speech detailing the long history of abuse she had suffered at Edward’s hands. As for the assault on Stairs, she could not recall the exact incident due to the state she was in at the time. Testimony from the two new crew members Edward had hired after the murders corroborated her statements. They painted a picture of a woman trapped aboard a ship with her murderous husband, constantly in fear for her life and the lives of her children. Even Stairs’s testimony about her beating him with a boat hook could not overcome this sympathetic image. Edward was found guilty of piracy and hanged, but Margaret was acquitted.
Interestingly enough, many accounts of this story claim that both Margaret and Edward were hanged. The court report, however, clearly states that she was found not guilty and released. There are even some stories that say a collection was taken up by the friendly Canadians to help resettle the widow and her children back in Ireland. No matter where she ended up, Margaret Jordan almost certainly committed acts of piracy and yet walked away from the gallows. The fact she was able to tell her own story saved her, as it had saved many women before her. The public was not ready to believe that a woman could do such daring and heinous acts, and so it was quick to accept any alternate explanation, such as spousal duress. For Margaret, that acceptance was the difference between life and death.
A final pirate from this time is the totally fictional Gertrude Imogene Stubbs, also called Gunpowder Gertie. Although her story is verifiably made up, it was so convincing that the Canadian Broadcasting Channel told her story on the air as part of the radio program This Day in History without realizing that it was fiction. The story was created by British Columbia schoolteacher and historian Carolyn McTaggart as a tool to introduce children to the history of their area. She included many factual references about the period and the geographic area as she told the story to her students, who participated in a treasure hunt on the nearby shores of Kootenay Lake. They loved the story and told their parents, who called the school expressing wonder that such an amazing woman could have lived right in their area. The widespread popularity of the tale convinced McTaggart that Gunpowder Gertie needed a bigger audience.
She worked with a student’s father who ran a local magazine called the Kootenay Review. On May 8, 1995, Gunpowder Gertie was the cover story of the magazine. Her fantastic life story was printed, without the caveat that it was made up by McTaggart. The author described it as an April fool’s joke, though the piece ran in May. Somehow the magazine ended up on the desk of Bob Johnson, host of the popular CBC program This Day in History. The Gunpowder Gertie segment aired from coast to coast in Canada on February 12, 1999. A friend of McTaggart’s told her about the broadcast, which prompted her to call the radio station and ask about this pirate. When the radio station confessed they’d had a hard time locating sources for their story, she explained that was because she’d made the whole thing up! Host Johnson was initially embarrassed about the mistake, but he later found it quite funny, claiming the story is one of his fondest memories of his time on air. On March 2 that same year, Johnson invited McTaggart on to his program to explain the origins of the story.
Gertie’s story is pretty fantastic and chock-full of adventure. According to the story, Gertrude Imogene Stubbs was born in 1879 in England and emigrated with her family when she was sixteen years old to Sandon, British Columbia, Canada. The young girl left behind a beloved grandfather, who had filled her head with stories of pirates. Before she embarked for Canada, he gave her a gift—a small steam-powered boat, which he christened the Tyrant Queen, after his nickname for Gertrude. Her new home, Sandon, had recently become a boomtown with the discovery of galena ore there in 1891, and the railroads were racing to connect the city to the rest of Canada. Gertie’s father was hired as a train operator for the newly finished Kaslo and Slocan Railway. It seemed the Stubbs family was destined for a happy and prosperous life in their new home.
Unfortunately, tragedy struck about a month after their arrival. Mrs. Stubbs was killed in an avalanche, which also destroyed the family home. The only thing that survived the avalanche was Gertie’s toy boat from her grandfather, which floated up to the top of the snow. In addition to having to endure losing her home, young Gertrude witnessed the whole thing but was unable to save her mother. Her father sank into a deep depression and became a heavy drinker. Gertrude was forced to take care of her father, eventually doing his job for him at the railroad when he was too drunk to work, which was most of the time. His death in 1896 left Gertrude orphaned and jobless—the railroad refused to officially hire her because she was a woman, despite the fact she’d been doing her father’s job for some time.
Gertrude was penniless after paying off her father’s debts. She spent one of Canada’s famously harsh winters earning the meager wages that were available to women in those days, barely getting by. At the end of the winter, she had made a wild choice—since she could not make a living as a woman, she would do so as a man. She sheared off her hair, donned some trousers, and set off to make her fortune as a coal hand on a steamboat.
Stern-wheelers, as the large steamboats were called, traveled up and down the rivers of British Columbia, shuttling supplies such as coal, mining equipment, and even livestock. During the height of the Klondike gold rush (1896–99), these ships provided vital material to the northern frontier. Before railways connected Canada to the rest of the world, these stern-wheelers were the most efficient way to move supplies from point A to point B.
Gertrude, due to her extensive experience helping out with the railroad coal engines, was a natural on the boat. She quickly worked her way up the chain of command and was doing fine on the ship until an explosion exposed her secret. During a race with another shipping vessel to determine which was faster, the boiler onboard was ignored and caused an explosion, in which Gertrude was injured. She lost her right eye and sustained other injuries. She was rushed to the hospital, where the attending physician realized that she was actually a woman in disguise. Without so much as a thank-you for her service, Gertrude was fired. Not only that—she was barred from finding another job on a stern-wheeler; all the companies had policies that forbade the hiring of women.
Gertrude, twice fired from jobs simply because she was a woman, decided that enough was enough. She swore vengeance on the shipping lines and said good-bye to Gertrude Stubbs. She became the fierce pirate Gunpowder Gertie. As a pirate she could do the jobs she was not allowed to do as a law-abiding boat worker. In piracy, she was finally able to break the bonds of her gender and work to her full potential.
The first thing she needed was a ship, and it just so happened the provincial police had a top-of-the-line, cutting-edge ship delivered just as she was starting out on her piratical career. In a stunning feat of illusion, she managed to get the patrol boat from the rail yard where it was delivered and into the river without being discovered. The Witch, as it was named, was rechristened by Gertie as—what else?—the Tyrant Queen, after her grandfather’s gift.
The Tyrant Queen happened to be a ship excellently suited for piracy. The hull was encased in a protective layer of iron. The propellers were the newly invented ducted propellers, which only had to be halfway in the water. This gave the ship the advantage of having a comparatively shallow draft, meaning it could sail into small nooks and crannies where larger boats could not fit, much like the earliest pirate ships in the Mediterranean. The boat also boasted a steam engine capable of twenty-two knots and a water-cooled Gatling gun. The Tyrant Queen was the fastest thing in the water, and the captain was hell-bent on revenge. It was a deadly combination for the shipping companies that had wronged her.
Due partly to Gertie’s excellent skills and partly to the vastness of the Canadian frontier at the time, Gertie was practically unstoppable. Her hand-sewn Jolly Roger flag flying, she would sail right up to the ship she wanted to plunder and fire some warning shots with her Gatling gun to show she meant business. Once she boarded the ship, she would rob the cargo—either valuables from passenger ships or gold and silver payloads from mining boats—at pistol point. She and her crew would then load up the Tyrant Queen with their booty and zip away, not to be seen again. Because there were no radios, few police boats, and generally very little communication from ship to shore, by the time the authorities got wind of another Gunpowder Gertie strike, she had vanished into the wind again. From 1898 to 1903, roughly the same time as the Klondike gold rush, she patrolled the Kootenay River and surrounding waterways, racking up a fortune in gold and silver.
Gunpowder Gertie could have sailed on forever. She may have continued pirating happily into old age had she not been betrayed by one of her men. Bill Henson, an engine man on the Tyrant Queen, was unhappy with his share of the booty. Nobody knows how Gertie divided up her treasure, but presumably she followed the pirate convention of divvying up treasure into shares based on the position held on the ship. So what happened? Did Bill get greedy? Was he of the opinion that they ought to strike more often or choose more lucrative targets? Did he decide that as a man he deserved more treasure than a woman, even if that woman was his captain? The legend is silent on this point.
Henson answered the provincial police’s call for information on Gunpowder Gertie. For a handsome reward, he sold her out to the police. A trap was laid for the pirate in the form of a bogus tip about a big payoff coming into town on the SS Moyie. The Moyie was a real ship, and, at the time, a large, new paddleboat steamer that was active in the Kootenay Lake, well liked by passengers for the elegant dining room and luxurious details. The ship was 161 feet long and could reach speeds up to twelve knots. The Moyie served for almost sixty years, finally being retired in 1957. Today the ship is a National Historic Site of Canada and the world’s oldest intact passenger stern-wheeler.
When Gertie attacked the ship in the area known as Redfish Creek (near the school where McTaggart taught), she found it full not of unsuspecting passengers but of armed police. Gertie, anxious to avoid unnecessary damage to her ship, prepared to run, but the dastardly Henson had sabotaged a gasket on the Tyrant Queen; it blew and made the pirates sitting ducks on the water. The ensuing battle was long and vicious, and the water ran red with blood before the fight was over. Gertrude was captured by the police and tried for piracy. She was sentenced to life in prison and died there of pneumonia during the winter of 1912.
All of Gertie’s crew were killed in battle, so nobody was able to tell the authorities where Gertie had hidden her treasure. In the story, she buried it along the water’s edge and it waits to this day to be discovered. Historically, very few pirates—if any—actually buried their treasure, preferring to spend it quickly instead, but this detail would have excited the school-aged listeners of the tale, who may have been inspired to explore the area in which they lived. The story would agree with the images of pirates for listeners familiar with Treasure Island and Peter Pan. The whole story is cleverly constructed to pique listeners’ interest and encourage them to look up some of the places and events in a history book. It’s hardly surprising that people would mistake this tale for truth and spread it around.
These three women pirates, so different in location and motive, give a cross-section of Western piracy during this century. Only a few more women pirates exist in the history of this century, and all of them hail from America. But the most successful pirate of all time ruled the waters of China during the early 1800s.