7

His Majesty’s Royal Pirates

FOR MANY PEOPLE, the Royal Navy conjures up images of strapping young men in sharp, pressed uniforms with artfully windblown coifs straight from the set of a historical period drama. For others, it is no more than “rum, sodomy, and the lash,” a quote about British naval tradition often mistakenly attributed to Sir Winston Churchill. To the surprise of almost nobody, the actual Royal Navy—particularly during the Golden Age of piracy—bore little relation to either of these images. Life in the Royal Navy was perilous and harsh, and conditions there directly contributed to the outbreak of piracy in the Caribbean.

Today’s Royal Navy, the United Kingdom’s main seagoing fighting force, can trace its origins back to the middle of the seventeenth century. It was instrumental in establishing the British Empire as a world power and was, for a long time, the most powerful navy in the world. In 1660, just as the earliest part of the Golden Age was getting under way, Charles II took the throne. During the bloody English Civil War, the Commonwealth regime had assembled an efficient and powerful fleet. After the Commonwealth’s defeat, Charles II inherited the fleet and used it to build the Royal Navy, which would become the dominant fighting force on the water. Among its first tasks was the destruction of the Barbary pirates who had been terrorizing English shipping. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Royal Navy was a force to be reckoned with, made up of 127 battleships and 49 frigates.

Those ships could not sail themselves, however, and men were desperately needed to fill out the navy’s ranks. Men were contracted to the individual ship and were required to stay on until the commission was ended. Of course, the navy encouraged men to stay on after their commissions expired, but it wasn’t possible for a nonofficer to join the navy permanently, and many men chose to pursue other careers after their time on a Royal Navy ship came to an end. Recruitment was able to pull in many men, but not nearly enough.

The Impress Service, otherwise known as the press-gang, was an ingenious—although unsavory—solution to this problem. First made legal by Queen Elizabeth, it was expanded in 1597 to include the impressment of “men of disrepute.” Popular posters from the time depict armed men snatching hapless grooms from their brides at weddings, and the reality was only slightly less dramatic. The press-gang was employed to force men to serve in the navy, similar to the American military draft. Men could be called into service from land or from sea. Seagoing impressment was done by individual warships instead of the Impress Service. In theory, the Impress Service used the king’s power to summon men to serve their country. In practice, it was more like kidnapping—and it disproportionally affected the poor and unemployed. Men could be stolen from ships that were headed home after a job well done and forcibly installed on a Royal Navy ship for an indeterminate period of time. The families of these impressed sailors often suffered: as Frank Sherry notes, “Pay aboard a warship was low and, at best, intermittent.”

Another contribution to the rise of piracy was the decrease in privateering. England had long been a fan of privateering and had employed many men and ships to plunder for the Crown, but the newly brokered peace with England’s mortal enemy Spain at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession brought the practice of privateering to a sharp halt. France, a former ally, could now be attacked by privateers as a result of King William’s War, but the French ships were much faster and harder to take than the lumbering Spanish treasure galleons. So the cessation of privateering and the dismal life of a navy man combined to make a lot of unhappy, restless sailors. These sailors yearned for something more than better pay or more food—they longed for freedom. Sherry writes that “denied, the universal hunger for freedom inevitably breaks out in some form of rebellion. . . . The thousands of disaffected seamen who worked the ships of the world’s maritime and naval fleets had the capacity to turn their craving into action.” When pirates took a navy ship and offered to take the captives on as new pirates, many common sailors put up little resistance.

Besides making navy life so inhospitable that it drove men to piracy, the navy also did very little to suppress piracy in the Caribbean for many years, further contributing to piracy in the region. England occasionally sent warships to patrol the area when colonial governors requested assistance, but these warships generally didn’t deter the pirates, for a number of reasons. First, the Royal Navy felt itself above talking to the local population and refused to listen to the advice of the colonials. As a result, they often had little to no information about the pirates’ whereabouts and habits, which would have been very helpful in hunting them down.

Second, some Royal Navy commanders decided to use their time in the Caribbean to make a little extra profit. They would sell themselves out as escorts to the terrified merchant ships of the area for a hefty fee, taking advantage of the merchants’ fears of pirates to make a buck. This off-the-books income was quite lucrative—and it would go away entirely if the pirates were wiped out. So the navy didn’t try too hard to eradicate the pirates; they were too valuable to the navy. Also, it’s worth mentioning that the navy force in the Caribbean was ravaged by disease and malnourishment and hardly in any condition to mount a serious attack. The pirates were much more accustomed to the weather and generally healthier. The sweaty, sunburned Englishmen alternating between vomiting and diarrhea were not much of a match for the hale and hearty pirates. For all these reasons, the pirates were allowed to run free while the navy looked the other way, at least until Woodes Rogers arrived on the scene in 1718.

Given all this information, it seems natural that some of the most famous pirates started out in the Royal Navy or as privateers. Marcus Rediker goes so far as to claim that nearly all pirates began their careers as navy men, merchant sailors, or privateers, which makes sense because these men would have the benefit of the sailing skills and training that these occupations provided. Although pirates and privateers of this era did participate in land and sea raids, they were first and foremost sailors and considered themselves men of the sea. There was a sharp divide between the burglars of the shore and the robbers of the sea.

One of the robbers of the sea who started in the navy was Henry Avery. He was also known as Long Ben, John Avery, and a score of other names, and he was a midshipman in the Royal Navy during the end of the seventeenth century. He served on the HMS Kent and the HMS Rupert before his fateful journey on the English privateering ship the Charles II. On that voyage the captain failed to pay the crew, which turned out to be a disastrous mistake because the crew then mutinied, turned pirate, and elected Avery their captain. Samuel Bellamy, known as “Black Sam,” may also have been in the Royal Navy before his pirating days. Countless other pirates during the Golden Age distinguished themselves as privateers before turning pirate, such as Charles Vane, Thomas Tew, William Kidd, and possibly even Edward Teach, also known as Blackbeard.

Besides incubating the next generation of pirates, the Royal Navy also had countless women in its ranks during this time. Rediker says, in his essay “When Women Pirates Sailed the Seas,” that an anonymous writer in 1762 claimed there were so many women in the British army that they should have their own battalions. The world may never know exactly how many women fought for England because just like with women pirates, the only ones remembered in history are the ones who were discovered after their time in the service. Countless women have slipped through the grasp of history, their secrets forever safe from the prying eyes of people who came after them.

Two of the most famous female navy sailors are Hannah Snell and Mary Ann Talbot. Mary Ann started her life at sea at age fourteen, serving on several ships in various capacities, becoming a prisoner of war for eighteen months, and suffering multiple grievous wounds that could have ended her career before she was discharged at age nineteen when she was forced to reveal her gender. Because she was a woman, she was never able to obtain payment for her service in the navy, although she petitioned for what was rightfully owed her for many years. Mary Ann died in poverty at age thirty.

Hannah joined the military after the death of her daughter, disguising herself as James Gray. She served as a foot soldier and a sailor while pretending to be James and eventually retired, somehow successfully petitioning the Duke of Cumberland for her pension. This victory brought her into the public eye, where she would stay for much of the remainder of her life. She spent her postservice years onstage, performing military drills in her dress uniform to packed houses of curious spectators. An account of her story was published during her lifetime to great acclaim. She contracted syphilis, in those days untreatable, and she was admitted to Bethlem Royal Hospital, known as Bedlam, by her son. She died there six months later at the age of sixty-eight in 1792.

Besides Hannah and Mary Anne, at least two other women served in the Royal Navy and are particularly relevant: Charlotte de Berry and Mary Read. They both started out in the navy but turned pirate, and they both met sad ends as well. To be sure, there were not many rags-to-riches, joyful stories for women during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but it is worth noting that military service did not prevent any of these women from meeting unhappy fates. Becoming a pirate did not enhance these women’s outcomes, but it did not seem to harm them, either.

Charlotte de Berry enters history in 1836, two centuries after her alleged birth. She was written about in publisher Edward Lloyd’s History of the Pirates, a penny dreadful from a man who would become famous for his popular plagiarisms of stories by Charles Dickens. Although she is common in current piratical literature, there does not seem to be a source for her other than the Lloyd book. However, her story—tailor-made to sell as many copies as possible—gives the reader a glimpse into the fervor of the reading public for female pirates. Books are published in order to sell, so Charlotte’s story was crafted to have wide appeal. For example, the much-beloved fictional tale of girl-turned-pirate Fanny Campbell (explored in chapter 12) would be published just a few years after Charlotte’s story, to the public’s adoration.

Why did stories of women pirates have so much popular appeal? Did women, yearning to escape the confines of their society, look to these daredevils for inspiration? Or did the books serve as warnings to virtuous young ladies about the dangers that befell women who stepped out of their traditional spheres? Art can explore cultural anxieties and illustrate flaws in current popular thinking. A study of the murder pamphlets of the seventeenth century explains that “by questioning unruly behavior, [the pamphlets] attempted to restore stability and convince the populace of the importance of performing their gender role properly.” However, the stories might have also demonstrated the unreasonable limitations in the typical gender roles, which would have resonated with younger readers who chafed at traditional mores. Perhaps it was a combination of both of these. Lloyd’s depiction of Charlotte’s story is clearly meant to titillate with its more salacious elements, but also to capture the heart of the female reader. Charlotte’s story inspires sympathy even as it increases the heart rate, probably precisely what Lloyd’s publishing house intended.

Charlotte, as the story goes, was born somewhere in England, most likely along the coast, in 1636. Even as a young girl, she dreamed of a life at sea. Starting in her early teens, she would sneak out of her home and hang around the docks, dressed like a man. Why? The story does not say. Perhaps she feared for her chastity if she slunk around the docks as a girl—she could be mistaken for one of the many prostitutes who haunted the water’s edge. Maybe she did it for safety reasons. It’s possible that she was attracted to women and felt she could pursue them only dressed as a man. She eventually met a sailor (one version of the tale calls him Jack, which will be used here for clarity’s sake) and fell in love with him—while still dressed as a boy. Once Charlotte revealed her identity to Jack, he proposed to her and they were married, despite her parents’ objections to the match.

How could a young couple manage getting married without the support of parents? The banns had to be published and licenses had to be obtained. There was no such thing in the seventeenth century as a civil marriage; weddings had to be conducted through the church. Luckily, in London in the early seventeenth century, “Fleet Marriages” existed for people wishing to get married without the traditional trappings and regulations. They could get married inside Fleet Prison, which claimed to be outside of the church’s jurisdictions. There were enough ordained ministers imprisoned there, or living in the sketchy area surrounding the prison, who were willing to bend the rules a bit—for a price. A filthy prison, with leering inmates for bridesmaids and a felon for an officiant, does not seem like an auspicious beginning to wedded bliss, but desperate times called for desperate measures. Many sailors took advantage of these marriages before shipping off. It seems extremely likely that Charlotte and Jack were married in this way.

For a honeymoon, Charlotte followed her husband into the Royal Navy. She claimed to be his brother. Some versions of the story assert that she went by the name of Dick while in the Royal Navy. Dick and Jack were inseparable and fought side by side. Somehow, the lovebirds revealed that they were more than brothers, and an officer on the ship found them out. Rather than kick them both off the ship, this officer decided he wanted Dick for himself. He propositioned Charlotte, but she refused him, remaining faithful to her husband.

Not content to take no for an answer, this officer instead assigned Jack the most dangerous duties during battle in hopes that he would be killed, similar to the Old Testament story in 2 Samuel of David and Uriah, in which David sends Uriah to the front lines to die so he can take Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba. However, the officer’s dastardly plan was foiled time and again due to Charlotte’s bravery and strength; she rushed to Jack’s aid more than once in the heat of battle and saved his life.

Fed up with waiting, the officer played his trump card: he accused Jack of mutiny. In the Royal Navy, a common sailor’s word didn’t stand a chance against the word of an officer, and so Jack was convicted and sentenced to flogging. Charlotte could not step in and take the flogging for her husband, and so the officer finally accomplished his mission of getting rid of Jack. Without Charlotte to save him, Jack died as a result of the flogging.

Flogging was a common punishment in the Royal Navy, according to Colin Woodard’s Republic of Pirates. The number of lashes was determined by the seriousness of the offense, with the worst crimes receiving up to three hundred lashes, which was thought to be the maximum a person could endure without dying. Variations on this punishment included “running the gauntlet,” which involved the prisoner’s walking between parallel lines of his fellow crew as they all whipped him, and “flogging around the fleet,” a particularly bizarre practice in which a prisoner was tied on a rack on a small boat and rowed from ship to ship in the fleet, receiving lashes at each ship. Ordinarily, lashes were delivered to the victim’s bare back in full view of the rest of the crew. The instrument of choice was the cat-o’-nine-tails, a whip with nine thin ropes at the end—each one bearing a knot—that caused considerable damage. After the whipping, the victim would be taken belowdecks to have salt rubbed into his wounds, an excruciating process that helped prevent infection. With discipline like this, it seems little wonder that so many men died in the service of king and country.

After Jack’s death, the officer was surprised to find that Charlotte was still not interested in his advances. In fact, rather than seek comfort in the arms of the officer, Charlotte murdered him as soon as the ship was close to shore. After taking her revenge, she snuck off the ship and disappeared into the world of the docks.

London at this time was a city on the brink of a great rebirth. In a decade or so, the Great Fire would sweep through the city, and the rebuilding efforts would create some of the city’s architectural marvels such as Christopher Wren’s majestic St. Paul’s Cathedral. Shipping and trade were on the rise, the population was exploding, and by the end of the seventeenth century, London would rival Paris as a great intellectual and artistic capital of Europe. However, by the water’s edge, there was little evidence of this great renaissance. Wapping, where the Execution Dock for the pirates was built, was a fetid maze of crumbling buildings teeming with unfed, unwashed bodies, people who could not afford to live anywhere else. In this world, there was just one rule: survival of the fittest, and the competition was fierce. Here Charlotte tried to blend in with the crowd, working as a waitress in one of the many waterfront cafés.

She attracted the attention of a merchant captain, who kidnapped her and forced her to marry him. This captain was even crueler than the officer on her first ship, and she was raped and abused by him. On the way to Africa, she convinced the crew to mutiny against this vicious man. Charlotte decapitated him and declared herself captain of the ship. The men agreed to follow her lead and turn pirate. They were successful for several, some say two, years. This part of the story seems to be an allusion to the Pirate Round route, which postdates the time in which Charlotte’s story is set by a little over a hundred years but would have been known to Lloyd in 1836.

During her travels, Charlotte found love again, this time with a Spaniard named either José or Armelio, depending on the version of the story. He eventually joined her on her ship, and Charlotte married for the third time—this time for love, like her first marriage. However, their honeymoon was short lived, as their ship was sunk in a horrible storm and only a few crew members survived. The marooned survivors had no food and were forced to resort to cannibalism, drawing straws to determine who was to be eaten. Charlotte’s husband was the chosen victim.

This macabre process was not an uncommon occurrence at sea. Before ship-to-shore communication existed, ships were alone on the sea, at the mercy of the waves and wind. There were virtually no safety regulations regarding ship construction, navigator qualifications, or emergency protocols. If something went wrong, nobody would come rescue the unfortunate sailors unless they happened to pass by. A sailor knew that when he set foot on a ship he was taking his life into his own hands. Law books are filled with cases revolving around cannibalism at sea, the earliest recorded one dating back to 1641. It was customary to draw lots to determine who was to be eaten, as was done in Charlotte’s case. Cannibalism at sea was so common that it was routinely allowed as a defense to murder in English courts until 1884, with the R v. Dudley and Stephens verdict (which outlawed necessity as a defense for murder approximately fifty years after Lloyd published Charlotte’s story).

The band of survivors was rescued by a passing Dutch ship, but the rescue came too late for the luckless José/Armelio. Soon after the rescue, the Dutch ship was attacked. Charlotte and her remaining crew—probably reckoning they had nothing left to lose at this point—defended their rescuers, fighting off the attackers. It was to be Charlotte’s last fight. She and her crew fought mightily, and they were able to overpower the attackers. While they were celebrating their victory, Charlotte threw herself overboard, her beloved’s name on her lips.

Charlotte’s story is an odd amalgam of the stories of Mary Read and Anne Bonny, biblical stories, piratical history, and current events at the time of its writing. While it is certainly sensational, it does not feel out of place among more verified pirate women stories. Only one detail fails to ring true: Charlotte’s suicide. Only one other pirate in this volume voluntarily took her own life: Maria Cobham, another possibly fictional pirate. Lloyd may have felt that he had to include this detail in order to return things to the status quo; a thrice-married woman who took part in murder and mayhem would not have been able to seamlessly integrate back into polite society. If her tale had ended with her married to an upstanding man and renouncing her former occupation, she might have been allowed to live without reader outrage, but since she killed her second husband and refused to give up piracy, she could not be granted a happy ending. Unfortunately for Charlotte, her fate was in the hands of her biographer, a Victorian male with little sympathy for lawless ladies.

Another pirate who carried on despite being twice widowed was one of the most famous women pirates of all time. Mary Read, usually spoken of as one half of the dynamic duo Mary Read and Anne Bonny, had a rich, adventure-filled life before she ever clapped eyes on Calico Jack and his crew and began a life that “some may be tempted to think the whole Story no better than a Novel or a Romance,” according to biographer Charles Johnson. Mary Read, like Anne Bonny, first appeared in Johnson’s wildly popular A General History of the Pyrates, published in 1724.

If Exquemelin is the second man held responsible for the popular image of pirates, Johnson is definitely the first one. His images in his book have endured for centuries and are said to have inspired many piratical storytellers who came after him. Despite the book’s massive popularity, the author of the book is still a mystery. “Captain Charles Johnson” is thought to be a pseudonym. Various theories over the years have posited the author’s identity, with a popular but disproven theory attributing the book to Daniel Defoe. Whoever Captain Johnson was, his book was an instant bestseller, capturing the imaginations of readers back in 1724 and keeping them captive up to the present day. The book still sells well and is likely the most referenced primary source of pirate information. However, its accuracy as a source is doubtful; Johnson liked to embellish the facts when they weren’t picturesque enough. The book has been reprinted many times in various editions. The first edition had two volumes, the first of which included on the title page a promise to recount the “remarkable actions and adventures of the two female pyrates [sic], Mary Read and Anne Bonny.” Johnson knew that the inclusion of two women, so recently tried in a very public fashion, would grab the reader’s attention. Indeed, the tales of both women seem to have been ripped from the headlines and were practically guaranteed to keep people reading. However, the sensational nature of the stories doesn’t mean that they are untrue. Enough of the account corresponds with the court documents and other primary source material of the time that Captain Johnson’s account is generally accepted as, if not wholly accurate, then accurate enough. He may have added some details and language to sell books, but the spectacular story of these two women is presented more or less intact.

According to Johnson, Mary Read’s mother was married to a sailor who got her pregnant before going off to sea and never returning. Whether he died or just abandoned his wife is unknown. Mrs. Read had her baby, a son, and lived with her husband’s family until she became pregnant again, this time by a man she was not married to.

Knowing she would be disgraced if her secret was discovered, Mary’s mother left her husband’s family and moved in with some friends. Her son died shortly before her daughter, Mary, was born. Mrs. Read had no money of her own; her mother-in-law had been sending money to care for the senior Mrs. Read’s grandson. With the grandson dead, the senior Mrs. Read would no longer have any reason to send money to Mary’s mother. How would they live? Mary’s mother hatched a desperate plan. Why not swap a living daughter for a dead son? She hid her son’s death and dressed Mary as a boy, passing her off as her son. It was as if Mary had never been born. This went on until Mary was thirteen years old.

When the elder Mrs. Read died, Mary and her mother had to find another way to make money. Young Mary was hired out—still dressed as a boy—as a footboy to a French lady. Footboys ran alongside a carriage to ensure it did not tip over due to a tree root, pothole, or other obstacle in the road. They also ran ahead of the carriage to ensure everything at the destination was prepared to the master’s liking. Footboys were used by only the wealthiest people. They provided a less essential service than cooks and other domestic servants and were primarily for show. Footboys were chosen for their good looks—the woman who hired Mary Read must have found the feminine-looking “boy” alluring. Eventually, Mary’s developing body would have given her away, but she left her job before she was discovered. She was fed up with domestic life and was ready to strike out on her own. No more a servant’s life for Mary: she was going to sea.

The details of Mary’s Royal Navy service are unclear. Some accounts combine her army service and naval service into one. Johnson says only that she “enter’d herself on board a Man Of War, where she served some time, then quitted it,” which leaves out a lot of information. Some stories claim that she served as a cabin boy, others as a powder monkey. As a cabin boy, her duties would have included running errands for the officers onboard, assisting the cook, climbing up the rigging when the sails needed trimming, and various other duties, sometimes of a sexual nature, depending on the captain. Mary could have engaged in sexual acts with her captain and still kept up the deception, but she would have had to be very, very careful. As a powder monkey, she would have had to ferry gunpowder from the ship’s hold to the artillery on deck during battle. Neither job would have paid well or offered the benefits that she would have received as a footboy.

Besides the low pay, life on a Royal Navy ship was not particularly glamorous. Danger levels were high, and shares of any prizes found were notoriously unequal, with officers taking the lion’s share and common seamen getting only a pittance. Crews faced a “poor diet, harsh discipline, exposure, and disease,” according to Woodard. Samuel Johnson remarked that “no man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in jail with the chance of being drowned. . . . A man in jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.”

Perhaps more distressing than the lack of food and space was the discipline program onboard a navy ship. Although the king’s law reigned, each ship was a microdictatorship in which the captain had absolute power. Sailors were subject to the whims and caprices of their captain with nobody to complain to up the chain of command if they were treated unfairly. Captains punished infractions, real or perceived. It was not uncommon for crewmen to be struck with canes, whipped by crewmates or officers, or hanged. Woodard claims that half of the men pressed into the Royal Navy died at sea. For so many reasons, Mary would have been better off staying on land.

But Mary had her reasons for joining the navy. After being a possession of others her entire life—first her mother’s, then the French lady’s—she decided to make a decision for herself. In the navy, she would be property of king and country, but at least that was a service she had chosen for herself instead of one that had been chosen for her. At sea, there were no familial entanglements. Working on a British ship would have been the freest period of Mary’s life up to this point.

At some point, perhaps Mary grew tired of life at sea or she was discovered. She left the navy and went to Flanders, where she joined the English army. At the turn of the eighteenth century, England was allied with the Dutch forces fighting the War of the Spanish Succession in the Spanish Netherlands, of which Flanders was a part, and which is now part of present-day Belgium. This war lasted from 1701 to 1714, during which Mary would have been aged eleven to twenty-four, if we take 1690 to be her birth year. As she fought alongside her Flemish comrades, she fell in love with one of them.

Johnson spins a misogynistic aside here, explaining how love made Mary a poor soldier, because “Mars and Venus could not be served at the same time,” and how she would run into battle without orders to do so just to be closer to the object of her affection. Her behavior was so odd that her comrades thought she had gone mad. Johnson describes how she “found a Way of letting him discover her Sex, without appearing that it was done with Design.” When her beau-to-be “accidentally” discovered Mary was a woman, he apparently was delighted that he could have a “Mistress solely to himself,” but Mary was so chaste and ladylike that he decided instead to court her as his wife.

What an odd little anecdote this is; it paints Mary as a lovesick fool, gladly placing herself in harm’s way for her love. Her sweetheart fares little better; he comes across as a womanizer content to take advantage of Mary’s charms before deciding she was ladylike enough to take home to mother. This whole escapade feels out of place in the story. Perhaps Johnson spun this yarn to inject some virtuous behavior into Mary’s life to make her more sympathetic to readers. Mary would fall in love once more in her life after her Flanders beau, but that story belongs in the next chapter.

When Mary and the Flemish man married, their fellow soldiers were so moved by their story of love that they threw Mary a sort of bridal shower, offering her gifts and money toward setting up their married household. The army got caught up in the sentiment as well and discharged the two lovers. The couple bought a tavern near Breda (present-day Holland) and named it the Three Horse Shoes. It was very popular with their former comrades and other soldiers, and they did a brisk business until Mary’s husband died. Exactly how long they ran the tavern together is unknown due to their unknown wedding date.

To compound Mary’s misery after her husband died, the war ended and business dried up. Mary found herself in the same position as her mother had been many years before: husbandless with no income or means to support herself. Once again, she donned a man’s clothes and joined the army, but during peacetime she could not gain a position where she could support herself. She left the army and boarded a ship headed for the West Indies, determined to try her luck in a warmer climate.

Generally during this time, people did not go to the Caribbean without reason. It was viewed as a hot, disease-ridden, uncivilized place, not an unwarranted reputation, tolerable only for the potential tobacco-growing land available there. Yet Western powers were competing to establish supremacy in an area where nobody actually wanted to live. Jamaica in particular was the “center of Anglo-Spanish imperial competition in the seventeenth century,” according to Amanda Snyder. When England won control of it in 1655, the island was full not of planters but of pirates. Oliver Cromwell added Irish dissidents, Jews, Quakers, convicts, loose women, and other “undesirables” whom he wanted out of the way to the pirates and privateers already there. This motley crew of people earned Port Royal nicknames such as “Sodom of the New World” and “wickedest place in the Caribbean.” Of the reported two hundred buildings on the fifty-one acres of land, at least forty-four of them were taverns. A woman of good breeding would not be caught dead there if she could help it, but Mary Read was not a woman of good breeding—she was a woman with nothing left to lose.

What Mary planned to do upon reaching the West Indies is unknown because her ship did not arrive there. It was intercepted by pirates, who kidnapped Mary and forced her to join their crew. She pirated with them until the crew decided to take advantage of Governor Woodes Rogers’s pardon and become privateers for the English against Spain. Mary was “resolved to make her Fortune one way or another.” When some of the privateers mutinied and became pirates again, Mary was among them.

Pirate ships shared many of the dangers that Royal Navy ships faced, but on the whole were a more pleasant place to be. For one thing, the crews were much larger. David Cordingly explains in Under the Black Flag that while a one-hundred-ton legal ship would be crewed by twelve men, a comparable pirate ship would have around seven times that many crew members. Generally discipline onboard a pirate ship was not nearly as aggressive as it would be on a navy ship. Most of all, pirate ships of this era were democracies. Captains were elected by the crew at the start of each voyage. Decisions on where to sail and whether or not to make a raid were decided by majority vote. Rules, division of prize money, and injury pay were all written into a charter that had to be signed by every pirate at the start of a new voyage. This system, developed by the Brethren of the Coast and perfected in Madagascar by the pirates of the Pirate Round, would come to be a hallmark of the Golden Age of piracy. As Cordingly comments, “Liberty, equality, and brotherhood were the rule rather than the exception.”

It’s not hard to imagine why Mary chose to join the pirates. Johnson claims Mary said she hated piracy and only did it under compulsion, but that appears to be a bald-faced lie. Numerous witnesses testified at her trial that she was as willing as anyone else to join in the raids. She also had many opportunities to get out of the pirating racket and never took them. Despite Johnson’s own story that she told Rackham that pirating was for the courageous, which contradicts her own testimony that she abhorred piracy, it seems most likely that Mary was attracted to the freedom a life of piracy offered. As a former navy sailor, she would have recognized that piracy offered a more comfortable life than the Royal Navy. As a pirate, she could make more money than as a servant of His Majesty and also have a say in where she sailed. For a woman whose entire life had been dictated for her, it would have been a practically irresistible offer.

Before long, she was onboard Captain Jack Rackham’s ship and about to meet the woman who would help enshrine her name in history, the other half of the dynamic duo of women pirates: Anne Bonny. For Mary Read the best was yet to come.