FOR AS LONG AS there has been a sea to sail upon, there have been pirates. Modern scholarship claims they have played an enormously important role in shaping world history. They have been called raiders, sea dogs, buccaneers, freebooters, corsairs, bandits, and many other names in many languages. They have sailed throughout every millennium. They hail from every inhabited continent, in every age, color, and creed imaginable. What unites these vastly diverse people across time and space? Is it the peg legs and eye patches? The rum and the parrots?
These common tropes pervade modern depictions of piracy, but true piracy is so much more than these cartoonish trappings. The heart of piracy is freedom—freedom from society, freedom from law, and freedom from conscience. Pirates capture people’s hearts as easily as they capture their prey because they actually do what many people only dream of doing—they cast off home and comfort for a chance at life outside society’s confines. A person who does not condone a pirate’s criminal actions can still be inspired by her courageous and adventurous spirit.
No, that was not a typo: pirates have always answered to “she” as well as “he.” (During the periods covered in this book, the gender binary was still firmly in place. As far as I am aware, all the pirates in this book identified as female. My use of “she” reflects the available research on these pirates and is in no way meant to invalidate other expressions of gender.) Female pirates have fought alongside and, in some cases, in command of their male counterparts since ancient times, despite the widespread belief that women at sea were bad luck. For a woman to cast off her petticoats—and often her identity—and take up arms seems impossible, but many persevered. Yet history largely ignores them, and most people are ignorant of their existence.
So who were these women pirates? From royalty such as Queen Teuta to the penniless orphan Gunpowder Gertie, they ran the gamut from princess to pauper. Some were barely out of their teens, such as Sadie the Goat, while others such as Sister Ping were older when they started their careers. Grace O’Malley pirated for many years, and Margaret Jordan participated in only a single piratical venture. Sayyida al-Hurra took to the sea to revitalize her community, while Jacquotte Delahaye sought revenge for her parents’ deaths. Pirate women existed essentially everywhere male pirates did, in nearly every major period of pirate history. They had little in common with each other, except for their gender and their desire to escape the traditional role that their gender dictated.
If pirate women are so prevalent in history, why are they so seldom known? They had to fight at least twice as hard as male pirates to make it to sea and prove their worth, so surely they are doubly worthy of study. Yet all too often, they are left out of the piratical discussion. With the exception of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, and more recently Grace O’Malley, they are given short shrift by history, identified only by nicknames or titles if they are mentioned at all. Of the numerous pirate books on the market, precious few discuss women, and almost none hold women pirates as their focus. David Cordingly, a leading pirate scholar, devoted an entire book to women (originally titled Women Sailors and Sailor’s Women before being renamed the less-patronizing Seafaring Women). He expressed disbelief that Mary Read and Anne Bonny actually lived aboard a pirate ship and questioned how a woman could tolerate the rough working conditions at sea. When even a historian covering women sailors refuses to acknowledge that women pirates existed, there is a problem in the field.
Women pirates are often absent in historical discussion because their very existence is threatening to traditional male and female gender roles. Pirates live outside the laws of man, but women pirates live outside the laws of nature. Women pirates are left out because they don’t fit nicely into the categories of “normal” women or traditional women’s virtues. As historian Jo Stanley puts it, female pirates “like to be on top . . . and maraud fiercely where maidens should step sweetly.” They are “social outrages—and the embodiment of women’s terrifying power.” They upset the balance of power in a patriarchal society and for that reason are not to be discussed, let alone celebrated, by traditional historians.
Pirate women also interfere with man’s storied and complex relationship with the sea itself. Water is primal; life cannot exist without it. Many creation myths feature water, and it’s no wonder—humans are surrounded in water-like amniotic fluid in the womb before birth. The sea, which was here before man and cradles man, is like a mother to sailors—a woman. It is connected to the moon and tides, which have also been associated with women all the way back to the Greek goddess Artemis. Ernest Hemingway opines in his famous novel The Old Man and the Sea that “[the main character] always thought of the sea as ‘la mar’ which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman. . . . The old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favors, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them.” Mermaids and sirens, legendary creatures who lure men to their deaths on the sea, are traditionally female as well. Ships are often named for women, and women are frequently featured on the bows of boats as buxom figureheads. Undiscovered islands on the sea are “virgin” and are “conquered” by colonizing men. For man, the sea and things associated with it are feminine, ripe for male subjugation or, at the very least, male adventure. The feminine sea is an exclusively male domain, where men can prove their bravery or seek their fortune. Adding women to this equation dilutes the established gender binary and threatens the near-sacred relationship between sailor and the sea.
For these and countless other reasons both conscious and unconscious, male historians often exclude women pirates from their work. Unfortunately for women pirates, the vast majority of history has been recorded by—and from the perspective of—men. Scholar Dale Spender explains that “women have been kept ‘off the record’ in most, if not all, branches of knowledge by the simple process of men naming the world as it appears to them. . . . They have assumed their experience is universal, that it is representative of humanity. . . . Whenever the experience of women is different from men, therefore, it stays ‘off the record,’ for there is no way of entering it into the record when the experience is not shared by men, and men are the ones who write the record.” Deidre Beddoe echoes that sentiment, saying that recorded history “is the history of the men and male affairs . . . wars, diplomacy, politics, and commerce.” Indeed, without the efforts of women historians such as Anne Chambers, Dian Murray, and Joan Druett, much of the existing knowledge of women pirates would not have come to light. As long as men control the narrative, women pirates will be mostly left out.
Even if male historians today were inclined to write about pirate women, they would have a difficult time doing so because of the dearth of primary sources about them. Since women have been considered unworthy subjects of historical documentation in the past, it is now difficult to study them—a vicious cycle that persists in keeping women “off the record.” To date, no one has discovered a journal or first-person account of pirating written by a female pirate. Newspaper articles are few, court documents are even rarer, and books written around the time the pirate was active are virtually nonexistent. It is not particularly surprising, given all this, that pirate women have not achieved the celebrity status of their male peers.
But despite all the challenges, these stories deserve to be told. The tendency to exclude women from the narrative ignores a vital part of the history of the sea. As mythologist Suzanne Cloutier explains, “Women’s souls cannot be known without stories—their stories must be told.” This book is an attempt to collect in one volume the stories of female pirates through the ages. Feminist theologian Carol P. Christ claims that “without stories a woman is lost when she comes to make the important decisions in her life. She does not learn to value her struggles, to celebrate her strength, to comprehend her pain. Without stories, she cannot understand herself.” The existing mere paragraphs and footnotes scattered across the vast expanse of pirate lore do not do justice to the breadth and depth of pirate women’s involvement in the trade. Presenting these women together demonstrates how long women have been part of piracy and how much they have achieved. Telling their stories adds them back into the historical record and gives a clearer picture of what life at sea was actually like. After reading the accounts of their lives, it will be impossible to dismiss lone pirate women as anomalous phenomena. Each pirate woman is part of a grand tradition that has been around since the dawn of piracy itself.
Beyond simply retelling these women’s stories, this book examines the storytellers and their motives—the “why” as well as the “who.” Since so many of these stories, particularly the earliest ones, were recorded by men, taking a look at the man’s reason for writing the story is informative in understanding why the events and portrayals in the story are shaped as they are. A medieval monk, for example, would describe a woman differently than a nineteenth-century penny-dreadful author. Questioning who is responsible for spreading these legends and what agenda might have prompted him or her to do it will help to extricate the stories from the grasp of authorial intent and allow them to unfold more organically as they might have actually happened.
A very important caveat: most if not all of these stories are a combination of myth and fact. The nature of piracy is such that it is difficult to separate fact and fiction because pirates were, by necessity, not frequently a part of historical record. Robert C. Ritchie explains that “parish registers, censuses, and tax lists are of no use in studying a population that existed in the fringes of, or even beyond, settled societies.” Even Capt. Johnson’s Pyrates, which is called by Jo Stanley “as central an early [pirate] text as the Bible is to Christians,” is known to be both embellished and frequently anecdotal. The gold standard of historical fact might be said to be multiple high-quality primary sources—documents written at the time, speaking directly about the subject. Many pirate stories, especially female pirate stories, fail to meet this standard. However, since many of these stories come from the time of the pirates, these mytho-historical (and sometimes just mythic) pirates are still vital to the larger tapestry of piracy. Author Gabriel Kuhn claims when it comes to pirates, “The legend and the reality [of pirate life] are woven into a fabric impossible to unravel. However, the way this fabric is woven can be examined. . . . We are exploring the pirate myth rather than trying to expose a pirate truth.” Wherever possible, the historical backing of the stories here is explained.
Thus, this book is not a pure history book. I am not a historian. Although many historical events are described to give context to these women’s stories, nothing should be taken as comprehensive on those subjects. Those seeking to learn about, say, the American Civil War or the Great Leap Forward should seek other works on the subject. Resources are listed in the back of the book to aid readers in their quest. I am a storyteller and a lover of pirates, and so while every effort has been made to present a clear and accurate historical account, this is a book primarily about pirate stories. And besides, as historiographer Keith Jenkin says, “The past and history are two separate things.”
Though fashions, weapons, and even treasure changed over time, all pirate women have at least one thing in common: the desire to be masters of their own fates, whatever the cost. Perhaps an exploration of what that desire meant to these women and how much they endured for it will inspire the next great adventurer—or the next great storyteller. In any case, Audre Lorde reminds us that, in terms of writing by and about women, “we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.” May this book be a worthy addition to the ever-growing pantheon of women’s words about women.
Laura Sook Duncombe
Alexandria, Virginia
May 17, 2016