[This post has been edited for brevity].
From my Notable Charlestonians series, professional hellion Anne Bonny.
 |
| Anne Bonny, by Ciana Pullen. A charcoal drawing of what I imagine Bonny would have looked like circa
1720. Drawn completely from imagination. [Image:
realistic, somewhat detailed black & white charcoal drawing on a sepia-grey background of a
young white pregnant woman leaning insouciantly against a ship railing.
She wears a dress and man's coat, as well as a sabre and pistol holster
slung over her belly. She wears a slouchy hat over her loose stringy
hair, which was purported to be red. The ocean stretches behind her to
the horizon and meets some advancing drizzly nimbus clouds.] |
Sometime Charlestonian Anne
Bonny (8 March 1702 – 22 April 1782) was a pirate. As a girl
she moved with her family from Ireland to Charleston, SC, where she
was noted as a “good catch” in the marriage department (we know only that she had red hair). However her notorious temper became infamous; on one occasion she stabbed a
family servant with a table knife. Over the objections of her family
she married a sailor, whom she soon abandoned. Much of what we know
of her time in the Caribbean is from an early 1700s Dutch book called
A General
History of the Pyrates, which includes the one and only contemporary portrait of
of Bonny, likely idealized or imagined:
.jpg "Historical Illustration of Anne Bonny") |
| Image: An antique black & white full-length engraving of Bonny pointing a gun. Her hair blows in the wind, she wears a sword, an ax, another pistol, and another sabre. Some of these weapons are hard for me to identify, but there are a lot of them strapped to her. She wears a hat and men's clothes, including long loose pants, boots, a saggy jacket that reminds me of a revolutionary soldier, and a loose blouse that, for whatever reason, bares her breasts. In the style of the day, her head is very small and her breasts are positioned really oddly. Her features look neither particularly pretty nor distinctive, but rather stereotypically eighteenth-century-ish. Several pirate ships sail in the background.] |
Bonny had affairs with several others engaged in illegal
smuggling, most notably “Calico Jack” Rackham (with whom she had a
child in Cuba), on whose ship she was a frequent crew member. But most interesting was her affair with another female pirate, allegedly disguised a
as a man, named Mary Read, also in Calico Jack's crew.
Skilled in combat, Bonny, Mary Read and one unknown pirate were
the only crew to fight and defend their ship against attack
in 1720, as the remaining crew were simply too drunk to fight, including Calico Jack himself.
The crew were tried as criminals, but Read and Bonny “pleaded their
bellies” and were excused from execution because they were
pregnant. Bonny visited Calico Jack in his cell and reportedly uttered
that she was “sorry to see him there, but if he had fought like a
Man, he need not have been hang'd like a Dog."
It is unknown what she did upon being released-- return to her
husband, resume piracy under a new identity-- but most likely her
well-connected father secured her release and she returned to
Charleston to give birth, presumably to Rackham's child. In 1721 she
married a local man named Joseph Burleigh, and they had 10 children. She
died “a respectable woman,” at the age of eighty.
The portrait I drew above is purely imagined based off her description and how I imagine a habitually violent, unwashed pregnant woman living off hardtack biscuits and liquor might have looked. Prints of the drawing are for sale on
my Etsy store.
.jpg "Historical Illustration of Anne Bonny")
