Anne Bonny

but a small number of women refused to accept that prohibition.

Anne Bonny and Mary Red are the most famous, but they were not the only women who disguised themselves as men and joined pirate crews.

Anne Bonny was born in Ireland around 1698, the illegitimate daughter of a lawyer and a maid.

Her father moved to Charlestown in the colonies to escape the scandal.

Anne grew up in colonial Carolina with a strong and rebellious personality.

She revealed her true identity to the captain and proved her courage as a sailor and fighter.

She was accepted and joined the crew.

Anne Bonny and Mary Red became something extraordinary.

Who is your favorite historical pirate that you learned about in your research process? And who would you not want to meet in a dark alley at night? Who?

Well, I mean, like Mary Read and Anne Bonny are kind of like they're the most well-known, at least recorded female pirates in the Caribbean at this time, right? So it was in the history of pirates.

And I can't remember the author, but some people have attributed it to Defoe, I think.

But like there's been other theories and stuff like that.

And I like, you know, their names escape me.

But there are they're not really great you know the fact that like there's this idea that like pirate ships are democratic which you know for the most part they were in terms of like election of like the the captain and and things like that that's cool they also when they would encounter ships that were transporting enslaved africans they would take them and sell them so like that's not good that's horrible you know what i mean and they're also like like they would inflict brutality on their some of the on on the ships that refuse to surrender so i think most of them i wouldn't want to meet and i don't even know if i'd want to meet ann bonnie and mary reed either because they were fierce fighters but they're really cool to learn about jen what do you think

Anne Bonny and Mary Read are absolutely fascinating to me.

Like, I really want to learn more about them.

But, as we know, Jack has a bit more detail.

We don't have any record of him before he joined up with Anne Bonny, apart from what the general history has.

But we decided to trust the general history on the fact that he was Vane's quartermaster.

So he may have been born in England, but at some point he finds himself, as most pirates did, in Nassau.

I mean, it's not the best pirate story in the world.

it's not but it does have a lot happening

yeah you get to see the fight against Woods Rogers if you're making a TV series about Rackham you'll get that and then you'll get all the Anne Bonny stuff as well and the Mary Root stuff So he's definitely worthy of going through, but is he worthy to go into the semi-finals? Who knows? In the end, we gave Rackham 18 for Swashbuckley.

A lot of that was for his pre-meeting and Bonnie days.

The man pirate and the woman pirate now went savagely to work, and it was not long before the man pirate lay dead upon the sand, while Mary returned to an admiring crew and a grateful husband.

During her piratical career, Mary fell in with another woman pirate, Anne Bonny by name, and these women, being perhaps the only two of their kind, became close friends.

Anne came of a good family.

She was the daughter of an Irish lawyer who went to Carolina and became a planter, and there the little girl grew up.

He is having fun with the idea of pirates, but he is also very clearly enjoying using the history that's around it and has read many of the books that we probably read when we were getting ready for this whole unit.

He knows who Anne Bonny is.

He knows about Steed Bonnet.

And he is adapting their actual historical stories for his purposes in the plot.

Then we get to see all of this swashbuckling and double-crossing, another thing that I think becomes a standard of what is a pirate experience, the idea that we have people going back and forth and shifting their loyalties with the winds and opportunity.

We get all of these extended sequences of buccaneering life on the beaches.

This is where Shandi meets Anne Bonny and her husband, a couple of other historical pirates, and also learns how to be apparently an incredible cook out there because everybody wants him to be the ship's cook after he makes a couple of meals.

Then we have one of the best set-piece moments in this novel, where Shandy gets to actually use all of his puppeteering skills in the weirdest way possible.