9

Pirates of the New World

BEFORE THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA became a nation, it had female pirates. And it is no surprise, given the variety of people who lived in the American colonies. Political prisoners were shipped from Europe to the Carolinas and Virginia beginning in the seventeenth century. Georgia was founded as a debtor’s colony. Run-of-the-mill nonpolitical prisoners were also transported to the colonies—English judges realized they could use the colonies as a storage locker, where malcontents could be disposed of and never seen or worried about again.

In the early 1600s many people, both men and women, were sent to America through the Virginia Company for a period of indentured servitude, during which they would work off their contracts as tradesmen, craftsmen, and laborers in both urban and rural areas. The colonies were full of land suitable for farming but lacking people to do the farmwork. Indentured servitude was, at first, an excellent solution to this problem. Some colonies offered incentive programs that gave landowners a set amount of free land for every indenture they imported. It seemed like a good plan—a person could get a free trip and room and board for the duration of his or her indenture, as well as money when he or she finished work.

Less than half of all indentured servants lived to see the end of their indenture. Conditions were unduly harsh. Women and children as young as twelve were subject to kidnapping to become wives and mothers. According to Professor Dorothy Mays, women indentures were subject to nearly constant sexual harassment and pressure, often from their masters, yet if they became pregnant it was considered theft from their masters due to the loss of work time, and they had to serve extra years on their contract as a result. Companies seldom followed through with the promises they made to indentured servants, often giving small fractions of the land and money they had offered to the new colonists. Many of these people died penniless and far from home. This practice did not go on long, however; as the seventeenth century came to a close, many employers shifted to a cheaper source of labor: slavery.

The first colonial women pirates were originally British citizens who had come to the colonies either as prisoners or as indentured servants. As the Golden Age of piracy came to an end in the Caribbean a few hundred miles to the south, Virginia tried and convicted a number of pirates, two of whom were known to be women. On August 15, 1727, at a court in Williamsburg, Virginia, Martha Farley (commonly called Mary Harvey or Mary Farley) and a gang of three men, led by John Vidal, were tried for the crime of piracy. Martha’s husband, Thomas Farley, who had allegedly coerced her into piracy, was never apprehended and was at large at the time of the trial. Martha had been transported to Virginia in April 1725 for an unknown crime. The men were accused of pirating in the area of Ocracoke Island in what is now North Carolina, and Martha was accused of aiding and abetting them. Exactly what Martha’s role was in the pirate crew and whether she cross-dressed or appeared as a woman is unclear, but there are a few clues.

Martha’s marriage to Thomas Farley and her acquaintance with the rest of the gang is compelling proof that her gender was known to at least Thomas; however, even if her gender were known, she may have worn men’s clothing during piratical outings. According to John C. Appleby’s book, Women and English Piracy, 1540–1720: Partners and Victims of Crime, Martha pled ignorance at trial, claiming she had no idea what her husband was doing or where he was taking her. She said that he had taken her and her two children away from their friends and forced them to go begging, and that when he took her out on the boat to go pirating, she thought he was taking her back to her friends. She was released due to lack of evidence and out of concern for her children’s welfare.

Was she really innocent as she claimed? She would have to have been rather naive to be completely unaware of the nature of the piratical boat trip. The court apparently believed her story, or at least thought her wickedness was outweighed by the needs of her children. Ultimately, Martha’s piratical bona fides are uncertain. She could have just as easily been a poor kidnapped wife as a ruthless pirate, and she took that secret to her grave.

A similar situation happened a few years later, also in Virginia. Maria Crichett (or Mary Crickett/Crichett) was transported to Virginia as a felon in 1728, on the same boat as a man named Edmund Williams. A year later, Williams, Crichett, and four other pirates were all tried and convicted of piracy. We know very little about Maria—her style of pirating, her role on the ship, and so on. Like Martha Farley, she might not have even been a pirate at all but simply a woman who was known to spend time with pirates, either voluntarily or involuntarily. That she was tried at all shows that the American colonies were not willing to turn a blind eye to piracy as the Caribbean colonies had done a few years earlier. With Blackbeard dead, pirates were no longer welcomed into polite society as interesting ruffians. Virginia would not stand for it.

Maria was sentenced to death by hanging, like the men, but there is no record that the hangings actually took place. Even if the men were ultimately hanged, she may have escaped the noose like Anne Bonny and Mary Read before her due to pregnancy or another excuse.

What inspired these indentured women to go to sea? Their biographies are frustratingly incomplete. Perhaps the stories of Bonny and Read came to them, through a battered copy of The General History of the Pyrates or a story whispered through the servants’ quarters. These women and potentially many others who managed to avoid detection may have felt a spark of hope for the first time since their indentures began. If another woman could escape her dreary life and grab her freedom with both hands, why couldn’t she? Or maybe they were forced into it by their partners. No matter how or why they entered the ranks of pirate women, they did, taking the torch lit by the women before them and passing it on to the next generation of female pirates.

Thus little is known about these women, and even less is speculated. Despite the fact that they are officially on the record, they are not prominent in pirate lore. They are included in only the most exhaustive pirate history books, and then usually as a footnote or a single paragraph. Maybe their insistence that they took no part in piracy makes them unattractive pirate heroines. But, they might have just been very good actresses determined to save their own skins. Unless more accounts come to light, these women might remain footnotes in pirate history. At least Martha’s story is still regularly told in one place: Colonial Williamsburg, as part of a popular pirate walking tour.

About twenty years earlier, in roughly 1700, there was another woman pirate whose story is inextricably intertwined with one of the most famous pirates of all time. Mary Ann Townsend was allegedly wife of the infamous Edward Teach, also known as Blackbeard. According to W. C. Jameson’s Buried Treasures of the Atlantic Coast, the pair merrily plundered the Carolina coast in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Jameson’s book is the only source for Townsend’s story, and he does not cite his sources—he also erroneously claims that she is the “only successful female pirate on record.” Her ties to Blackbeard give her story a similar feel to Jacquotte Delahaye’s; perhaps she was invented to correct an unsavory part of pirate history—in this case, a notorious womanizer. Nevertheless, a legend of this woman may persist on the Carolina coast.

Blackbeard reportedly had up to fourteen common-law wives, according to Johnson’s General History; ergo any claims that he associated with a particular woman are somewhat believable—she may have been one of the fourteen. He did engage in several partnerships with other pirates over the years, although there are no records of him ever partnering with a woman. Regardless of how Townsend’s story came to be, it is entertaining and illuminates Blackbeard’s life as much as it does Townsend’s. It humanizes the vicious Blackbeard (as many movies and television shows have attempted to do in the twentieth century, such as the 1951 film Anne of the Indies) and allows a woman to gain a place at the table of this particular historical banquet, which is pretty heavily male-dominated during this era.

Townsend, according to legend, grew up in Jamestown, Virginia, the niece of a well-to-do government official, who raised her. This part could also be true: the Townsend family has roots in Virginia as far back as the Jamestown colony, so there may well have been a government official named Townsend during the early 1700s. Mary Ann was attractive and well educated, and she was a favorite at high-society gatherings. The story does not mention her parents. On a business trip to Bermuda with her uncle, Mary Ann’s ship, the Shropshire Lass, was seized by Blackbeard’s crew. The crew murdered many people immediately, then forced others to walk the plank.

Here the story differs from historical fact: Blackbeard, for all his cruelty, did not actually make his victims walk the plank. There’s little proof that any pirates did. Druett says Captain Charles Johnson included a story in General History of Pyrates about ancient Mediterranean pirates telling their captors that they could climb down a ladder and swim for their freedom in the middle of the open sea. In 1837 Charles Ellms’s The Pirates Own Book mentioned a “death plank” from which prisoners fell into the sea. He may have been working off Captain Johnson’s description and adapted it for his own. Robert Louis Stevenson included walking the plank in his 1884 masterpiece Treasure Island, which won the practice a permanent place in piratical lore. In reality, pirates were more likely to simply toss a captive overboard, ransom her, or maroon her on an island. The only female pirate said to have made her victims walk the plank is Sadie Farrell, who will be discussed in chapter 12.

According to the stories about her, when it was Mary Ann’s turn to walk the plank, the six-foot-tall, red-haired beauty refused to let the pirates touch her. She spit in their faces, cursed them soundly, and even kicked a few. This brave—if uncouth—behavior attracted Blackbeard’s attention, and he decided to speak to this girl who showed no fear, even in the face of death by pirates.

Just who was Blackbeard? When most people are asked to name a pirate, chances are his name will spring to their lips. His legend looms largest of all pirates, yet few know much about his life beyond his name and possibly that he had a long black beard. So what is the real story of his life?

Some scholars disagree on the spelling of his name, but he is commonly referred to as Edward Teach. Teach was born sometime around 1680 in Bristol, an English seaside town. He probably attended some school there, given that he was known to be able to read and write. His first piratical activity was to become a privateer during the War of the Spanish Succession, which ran from 1702 to 1713. He sailed under Captain Benjamin Hornigold, who mentored the young pirate-to-be.

As a privateer in the employ of the English navy, Hornigold was able to lucratively plunder England’s enemies during the war. But when the war ended, he found himself out of a job and in fact forbidden to do what he had recently been employed to do. Hornigold and his crew, Teach included, became pirates, albeit pirates who refused to attack English ships due to Hornigold’s love of his home country. Hornigold gave his young apprentice a ship of his own in 1717, which Teach renamed the Queen Anne’s Revenge, a name that would come to strike fear into the hearts of many captains across the waters of the world.

Teach sailed all over the Caribbean and as far as Africa. He did not share Hornigold’s patriotic views and attacked English ships as well as French, Spanish, and Portuguese ones. His penchant for theatrics, including tying lit matches in his beard to give him the “appearance of Satan,” made sure that his reputation preceded him. As long as a crew surrendered quickly, they were most often spared. Despite the legends that proclaim his cruelty, there are no verified reports of him killing anyone, although it almost certainly happened. It seems that his fearsome appearance did a lot of his work for him. Perhaps Mary Ann’s crew refused to hand over their treasure and that’s what prompted their slaughter. Whatever transpired on the Shropshire Lass, Mary Ann enters Blackbeard’s legend at that time.

According to the story, Teach was so taken with this spirited woman that he invited her to step down off the plank and into his cabin. She became a captive of the ship but was not treated like a prisoner. She was instead courted with gourmet meals, jewels, silks, and precious metals. Like Anne Dieu-le-veut before her and Cheng I Sao after her, her fierce antics and refusal to be wooed only endeared her more to her would-be suitor. Many a pirate man, it seems, held a soft spot in his heart for a pirate lass who was his equal in temper. Teach, normally a ruffian, curbed his bad behavior around her and was a perfect gentleman. Eventually, he asked Mary Ann to marry him. After a while, she accepted, and the pair embarked on a mutual career of pirating.

The only woman Teach is known to have married is Mary Ormond of Bath, North Carolina. She was around sixteen years of age and the daughter of a plantation owner. Johnson claims that she was Teach’s fourteenth wife, although she believed herself to be his first. Her fate, as well as the fate of the other wives, is unknown, although some stories, including Johnson’s account, indicate that Mary Ormond was forced to prostitute herself to the members of the Revenge’s crew.

Mary Ann Townsend, however, was not offered such a grim fate, but instead a life of luxury by the side of the world’s most feared pirate. She begged her husband to teach her all that he knew, and he readily agreed. He also took her into Charles Town and showed her the delights of the town, which included the swamps where his treasure was reportedly hidden. Mary Ann is thought to be the only person besides Blackbeard himself who knew the location of his treasure—despite the fact that pirates were known to spend treasure rather than bury it. After a year under his tutelage, she was awarded a ship of her own to command, the Odyssey. Given that she had developed a reputation herself, it was no trouble for her to assemble a crew and begin her solo pirating career—which she did with gusto.

It’s possible that during Mary Ann’s foray into pirating by herself, Blackbeard decided to undertake another project: respectability. In 1718 he downsized his crew from four hundred to forty by running the Revenge aground at Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, either by accident or on purpose, and abandoning most of his crew along with the ship. It is hard to imagine the depths of self-interest that would lead a pirate to send over three hundred men in his care to their deaths to save himself. This coldhearted behavior lends credibility to the stories that claim Blackbeard abused his wives. Surely someone who would leave his men to die in such a way had little regard for the value of human life. With a much more manageable crew, he appealed to the governor of North Carolina for a pardon for his crimes, bribing him heavily to ensure he would grant it. Teach and twenty of his men were pardoned, and Teach set out to live a country squire’s life, living in a fancy house in Bath. Weekends, however, were for sneaking out and pirating. Governor Eden of North Carolina either was unaware of Teach’s double life or chose to ignore it, and evidence suggests it was the latter. The hoi polloi of North Carolina found Blackbeard’s antics to be charming rather than horrifying, and he was very popular among the wealthy of the province.

Eventually, Teach’s flagrant flouting of the law became too much for the law to ignore any longer. North Carolina was hesitant to cramp the style of its newest favorite son, but Virginia had no reservations about going after the pirate. Governor Alexander Spotswood took a hard line against piracy that would remain official policy through the next several governorships, including the years when Martha Farley and Maria Crichett were tried. Lieutenant Robert Maynard was dispatched to hunt down Blackbeard’s hideout at Ocracoke Island, with Spotswood’s money to furnish the ships needed to navigate the narrow inlet.

In the early morning hours of November 22, Maynard and his two ships, the Ranger and the Jane, sailed into the shallow waters off Ocracoke Island where Blackbeard’s one remaining ship, the Adventure, was at anchor. Maynard’s ships were small sloops, purposely chosen to look unthreatening and to travel into the small space. They were able to sail almost to touching distance of the Adventure before Blackbeard and his men noticed and hailed them. Words were exchanged, and then the battle began.

The Adventure fired a cannon at the Ranger; this rendered the ship dead in the water and killed many of its men. If there had been any wind that morning, Blackbeard and his men might have gotten away, but the water was calm and could be traveled only by rowing, so the pirates were stuck in the inlet. The Jane was also gravely damaged by a direct hit from the Adventure. Maynard, on the Jane, saw that Blackbeard and his men were going to overtake them, so he devised a desperate plan not unlike the one Henry Morgan had pulled off at Maracaibo decades earlier. He ordered all his men to go belowdecks and hide, weapons ready, waiting for his command. When Teach boarded the Jane, they were lying in wait for him.

In the hand-to-hand combat that followed, Blackbeard and Maynard traded furious blows, wounding each other over and over again—first with pistols, then with swords. In total, Blackbeard was said to have taken more than a half dozen bullets and twenty sword wounds before falling down dead, cocked pistol in hand. Maynard cut off the infamous pirate’s head and hung it at the front of the ship as proof of his demise and threw his body into the sea. Legend has it that the headless body swam three times around the ship before sinking. His dramatic death suited the life he’d lived and the way that he’d pirated, and no doubt helped boost his status from famous to most famous. A skull that is reported to be Teach’s is on display at the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts, drawing many visitors each year.

Somehow, word reached Mary Ann that her husband had been killed. To make matters worse, she found out that there were privateers on her trail who were after the huge reward offered for her—dead or alive. Not one to get bogged down by hysterics or grief, she immediately stocked the Odyssey with provisions and took off for South America, never to set foot on North America’s shores again. She abandoned her own treasure in the Charles Town swamps, as well as what was left of Blackbeard’s treasure stored there, in order to get out alive. There would be more treasure to plunder in South America.

Over the next decade, many stories surfaced about Mary Ann, but Jameson notes that “none have ever been verified.” It was said that she ended up in Lima, Peru, where she married a wealthy businessman, presumably one who didn’t ask too many questions about her past. Her treasure store has never been recovered, though people go out into the swamps to search for it (along with Blackbeard’s treasure) every year.

Could this woman have existed? Possibly, but most likely not. The parts about Blackbeard’s buried treasure are the most unbelievable, but the whole story lacks a certain credibility. However, many extraordinary women have been swallowed up by history and it is conceivable that she could be one of them. Also, her role in the legend as a woman who tamed Blackbeard’s womanizing ways is telling of what people feel about Blackbeard. There is a desire to make him more humane and less promiscuous. Mary Ann is a new spin on the Blackbeard story, which is continually refashioned as it is retold. It is gratifying to think of a woman at the ruthless pirate’s side, matching him plunder for plunder.

Another American pirate from this period has more historical documentation but frustratingly fewer details about her life. Flora Burn was listed as a crew member on a privateer ship and entitled to a one-and-three-quarter share of the booty the ship brought in, which was an equal share with the other crew members. She operated out of the East Coast of North America at some time during the middle of the eighteenth century. Privateering in America was very common—before, during, and after the Revolutionary War. The American colonies were very lucrative, and all privateers wanted to have a piece of the revenue they brought in for themselves. Privateers were necessary to protect a colonizing country’s interest so far away from home.

How did Flora Burn become part of the business? Why did she join a privateer crew? Was she off to rescue her beloved? Did she have a turbulent home life to escape? The most remarkable part of her story is that there is none; she is simply listed as a crew member without much hullaballoo being made about her gender. One has to wonder what kind of sailor she was, how she was esteemed by the crew, and what became of her. We can only hope that more comes to light about Flora Burn and her career.

Flora was probably not the only woman privateer who fought against the British and helped shape America. During the Revolutionary War, American patriots terrorized the British by sea while the American army fought them on land. Where the American foot soldiers were often poorly equipped and barely trained, American naval privateers were good sailors and wreaked havoc on England’s forces. The Continental Congress officially approved the rules and regulations of the commissioning process so that the newly conceived United States could benefit from a privateer force as England had done for so many centuries. It is estimated that during the war, around eight hundred ships were commissioned as privateers, which resulted in the capture or destruction of six hundred British ships. American privateer vessels were of every shape and size, from eight-ton whaleboats to six-hundred-ton, twenty-six-gun warships, with crews from a few men to over two hundred. These privateers risked their lives against the Royal Navy and many died. However, they made their mark on the navy—it is estimated that the privateers did $18 million in damage, which amounts to over $302 million today. The United States, like so many countries, owes a large debt to piracy. Without American pirates, there might not have been an America as it exists today.

The final pirate from this era is one of the more notorious of the American pirates. Rachel Wall, probably the first American-born female pirate, was born Rachel Schmidt around 1760 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania Colony. Her family was devoutly Presbyterian, according to some sources, and they lived on a farm. William Penn’s work to establish religious freedom in the Pennsylvania colony meant that the Schmidt family was probably able to worship in peace despite the fact that the Presbyterians were a minority at that time. Rachel must not have taken to farm life, because she married sailor George Wall and moved away to Boston, never to return to Pennsylvania.

Stories on how she met George Wall are varied. The most common one is that she ran away from home and met him on the docks where he worked, and that the pair eloped soon after meeting. Another version is that while attending a family funeral in another part of Pennsylvania, Rachel slipped away to the docks and got in a fight with a gang of girls. When George intervened on her behalf, the pair began courting and married soon afterward. Where George was from originally and where the couple were wed are both unclear. Almost all the accounts agree that they married quickly and ended up in Boston, where she became a maid and he a fisherman.

George was not a particularly devoted fisherman. He preferred drinking and having a good time with his buddies to doing his job. After a particularly lucrative trip, the Walls and friends went on a weeklong bender, partying so hard that they failed to realize that the fishing boat the men were supposed to be crewing had left without them. Thusly marooned, George concocted the idea of giving up on fishing altogether and becoming a pirate instead.

This was not a completely ridiculous idea on George’s part. He and his friends had all served as privateers during the Revolutionary War, and so they had gotten a taste for the life. They had sailing skills from their fishing jobs. George had an invalid friend who owned a fishing boat that they could borrow. So long as they brought back some fish each time they took it out, they could slip in and out of the harbor undetected. It was the perfect cover story. So what if piracy wasn’t legal during peacetime? If one was a good enough pirate, one would not get caught. Rachel agreed, though some sources say reluctantly, and the fishing boat was obtained for their first pirate voyage.

Their plan required a storm, which fortunately happened pretty frequently in their neck of the woods. They sailed out to the Isles of Shoals and dropped anchor before things got too rough. The Isles of Shoals are actually a small group of islands about six miles off the east coast of present-day Maine and present-day New Hampshire, although in colonial times the area was all part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Before the Revolutionary War, the islands were a hot fishing spot, but they were abandoned during the war. After the war there remained a fair amount of traffic that passed by the islands due to their proximity to the mainland. There the Walls and their crew laid their trap.

They rode out the worst of the storm in the harbor at the Isles of Shoals, but once the bad part was over, they sailed back toward the coast a few miles, putting themselves right in the shipping lanes. They purposely misrigged the sails, raised a distress flag, and basically did everything they could to make the ship look like it had been damaged in the storm. And to bait this trap and make the illusion complete, Rachel was called on to do her part. Dressed as a woman, she stood on the deck, weeping and calling out for help. Well, the passing ships could hardly resist a damsel in such distress, and eventually one of them sailed close by to offer some assistance.

When they did, allowing Rachel to board their own vessel, the kindly sailors who’d stopped were rewarded by having their throats slit and their bodies tossed overboard. George, Rachel, and the rest of them took an inventory of what was on the big ship, stole anything of value, and then sank the ship, leaving no evidence of their robbery. After all, ships were often lost during bad storms, and nobody would question a schooner gone missing in the wake of a storm. The first time the Walls pulled this stunt, they got around $360 in cash, new fishing gear, and enough fish to sell their story to their friend on shore. They could sell the fishing gear back home, claiming it had washed up on the Isles of Shoals—probably the result of a ship gone down nearby. It was, in the end, a highly effective and profitable gambit. After her first taste of the adrenaline that came with larceny and murder, Rachel Wall knew she would not be satisfied with pulling off such a heist just once.

The pirates honed this routine over the following years, murdering twenty-four people, looting twelve ships, and plundering $6,000 worth of merchandise and cash, according to Cindy Vallar’s essay “Women and the Jolly Roger.” If a ship’s crew was too large to murder outright, Rachel would request assistance fixing a leak onboard her ship. This tactic divided the crew, who could then be killed in two shifts: one on the Walls’ boat, and a second on their own. The Walls made a decent amount of money pirating like this, as well as presumably all the fish they could eat.

The Walls’ spree came to an end in September 1782. Rachel and the gang were headed out to sea—presumably to commit another robbery—when the storm became wilder than predicted and broke the mast of their ship. In the squall that followed, all crew members save Rachel were washed overboard and drowned. In an ironic twist of fate, Rachel found herself on the deck weeping and wailing for rescue, only this time her distress was real. Did the ship’s captain who picked her up have any inkling that the woman he was ferrying back to Boston was a bloodthirsty pirate known for killing kindly captains? Was he aware that such a woman haunted those very waters? Probably not. After all, Rachel and the pirates left no survivors, and dead men tell no tales.

Back in Boston, the newly widowed Rachel got back her old job as a maid. She was done with seafaring piracy, but she had not entirely lost the taste for larceny. She reportedly snuck down to her old haunt, the waterfront, and pilfered ships at anchor. Ever the clever woman, she targeted the captain’s private bathroom as a spot where precious goods would be hidden. She was never caught for these robberies, during which it was said she amassed a sizable amount of loot.

In 1789 she was accused of picking a lady’s pocket on the streets. For this crime—and this crime only—she was sentenced to death, despite protesting her innocence. In her last confession, she admitted to her career as a thief but refused to recant her innocence of this particular crime. She also claimed that she herself had never murdered anyone during her piratical outings. She said it was degrading to be executed for a robbery. She was the last woman to ever be hanged in Massachusetts.

Like Maria Cobham, Rachel Wall is hardly a lovable character. Still, the ingenuity of her scheme does require at least a small amount of praise, if reluctant praise. That she was never caught as a pirate is impressive given how successful she and her crew were. However, in the end she still received the same sentence she would have gotten for piracy: a hanging.

The reality of Rachel’s life may be far different from how she is portrayed, though. At the end of her life, she presented a picture of a repentant sinner, full of sorrow for her wicked ways. In her last confession, she laid out a laundry list of crimes she had committed but, curiously, did not include the piracy career. The story is told in many credible books, but the original source of that particular legend is difficult to track down. She does mention in her confession that an account of her crimes would “extend [her confession] to too great a length” as they are “too numerous to mention,” so it is possible that she left the whole pirate thing out. Whatever really happened, she was a woman who married young, made some mistakes, and in the end, asked for forgiveness.

These American women pirates may have been inspired by Golden Age pirates, but their methods bore little resemblance to those of their Golden Age foremothers. By the turn of the nineteenth century, piracy would be even more different, for male and female pirates alike. But as ever, piracy would endure. Piracy lived on well into the next century and the centuries after that. The trappings of the trade, the treasure sought, and the ships sailed would change, but the fundamental element of piracy—the desire to take something that someone else does not want to give up—would remain ever present.