Original subtitles

[Narrator] This is the story of two of the boldest pirates

ever to sail the high seas, Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

[Expert 1] The legend is these are the two most famous

female pirates in history.

[Narrator] A fearsome duo who sailed

with Calico Jack Rackham,

one of the most flamboyant figures in the Caribbean.

[Expert 2] So, we know that people were fascinated

with their story.

[Expert 3] They'd just gone completely off the rails.

They were young, and they wanted fun.

[Narrator] Despite being formidable fighters

and wily strategists,

their careers at sea are short-lived.

And their capture leads Bonny, Read, and their captain

to face one of Jamaica's most sensational pirate trials.

♪ ♪

Once used as a base for English privateers

in their wars against the Spanish,

Nassau had grown to become a bustling port

and a sanctuary for pirates.

[Richard Blakemore] Nassau is the main town in the Bahamas,

and it's quite a small colonial settlement.

The Bahamas are scattered islands,

they're hard to navigate,

so they're often a haunt of pirates.

They're a place that pirates escape to

and hide in between their voyages.

And it's very difficult for the colonial authorities

to control this region

because of the complex geography of these islands.

[Hannah Cusworth] Governance wasn't as well established

as it was on some of the other Caribbean islands.

[Blakemore] Colonists are complaining and even fleeing

from the island because of the concentration of pirates.

[Mark Hanna] It was not a place that people wanted to settle

and buy land and live permanently.

[Margarette Lincoln] It was a place where pirates stopped off,

caroused, as they said, had parties, drank a lot,

and then went back to their ship.

[Rebecca Simon] Anywhere you went in Nassau,

you could find a tavern, you could find prostitutes,

you could find all kinds of lawlessness.

[gunfire]

[Narrator] 1717.

News of the chaotic pirate haven reaches England.

King George I is furious,

signing a proclamation for suppressing pirates.

He appoints Nassau's first official governor

in over 14 years, Woodes Rogers.

His role--to oversee the Bahamas on behalf of the Crown

and crush the pirates.

[Simon] Woodes Rogers made it his mission

to get rid of all the pirates in Nassau in the Caribbean.

So he comes in, establishes a proclamation

saying to all of the pirates,

you know, if you turn yourself in by September of 1718,

I'll give you a pardon

and you will all be forgiven for all your crimes.

[Blakemore] He turns some former pirates into pirate hunters

when they decide to join him.

He issues pardons to others,

although some pirates refused to join him and sail away.

[Narrator] Those who fled to sea

were hunted down by their former comrades,

men who had taken the king's pardon,

pirates turned pirate hunters.

[Lincoln] It meant that it was much more difficult

for the pirates operating in that area.

Woodes Rogers was putting down piracy on Providence,

and people were feeling perhaps

that the pendulum was going the other way.

[Narrator] King George's second strategy

for restoring order in Nassau

was to encourage families to emigrate

to establish a colony of law-abiding citizens

for the British Crown.

[Cusworth] There were a number of Caribbean islands

that were really interested in having women come over

to grow the White population,

and they needed women to kind of establish families there.

And so women were kind of encouraged or sent for

or they were women who were prisoners,

and they were brought over kind of as part of their sentence.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

[Narrator] One of the women who seizes this opportunity

is Anne Bonny.

[Blakemore] So, Anne Bonny was born in Ireland

and then moved to the Carolinas with her father,

who was a lawyer and then a merchant.

[Simon] By the time Anne Bonny has arrived in Nassau

with her husband, James Bonny,

their marriage is really on the rocks.

This was especially so when James Bonny began working

as a pirate hunter for Woodes Rogers.

♪ ♪

In the meantime, Anne Bonny was known to hang out

in a lot of taverns and befriend a lot of pirates,

sometimes have affairs with pirates.

♪ ♪

All of this is going to change when she meets Jack Rackham.

[muffled voices]

[Narrator] The man Bonny falls for, Jack Rackham,

has recently retired from piracy,

choosing to accept a pardon from Woodes Rogers.

But for years prior to their meeting,

Calico Jack, as he was best known, was notorious

for both his adventures at sea and in the taverns of Nassau.

[Simon] Jack Rackham already had kind of his own reputation.

He was known as Calico Jack Rackham

because he liked to dress very nicely.

[Blakemore] The nickname Calico Jack comes from calico,

which is a material originally made in Calicut in India.

Pirates who were plundering some of these trade routes

are the first people who are not elite

who get access to these commodities.

So it seems to be a part of the way

in which pirates can flaunt their position

and enjoy some of these commodities

that aren't necessarily accessible to everybody

at this time.

[Narrator] One historical account claims Rackham

has command of his own ship,

having staged a mutiny against the previous captain.

[Simon] This is very common on pirate ships.

The crew had equal say

in terms of what the laws would be on their ship,

and if they felt that a captain was not doing his job,

which usually meant that they were not capturing enough ships,

they were not making enough money,

that they could vote him out.

[Lincoln] Pirates were able to, if you like, fire their captain.

I mean, this was the big thing for being on a pirate ship,

if you didn't like your captain

and enough people thought he was useless,

you got yourself another one.

[Narrator] As captain, Rackham targets

merchant and passenger transport vessels,

gaining control of several large ships.

[Simon] They actually were quite successful

under Rackham's captainship.

[Narrator] But it all pales in comparison

to one particular prize

he spots just beyond Port Royal, Jamaica,

probably the most impressive boat Rackham has ever seen

grace the Caribbean.

[Simon] In 1719, Jack Rackham's most successful capture

is a ship called the Kingston.

[Narrator] The Kingston is huge, promising a rich cargo,

a major score for Rackham and his men.

The pirates pull up to their target,

and the pirate captain signals for his crew to attack,

effortlessly defeating the unsuspecting sailors

of the Kingston.

The pirates seize the vessel for themselves,

Rackham's most valuable prize to date.

♪ ♪

But the attack has been witnessed from the harbor.

♪ ♪

Port Royal is no longer a safe haven for pirates,

but a reformed settlement where the criminals

who plague the sea are publicly executed.

Furious merchants set bounty hunters after Rackham.

Their mission-- to capture or kill him.

February 1719.

The bounty hunters catch up with Rackham

on a small island off the coast of Cuba.

Caught unprepared and nursing vicious hangovers,

the pirates abandon the Kingston

and flee into the woods.

♪ ♪

Reflecting on this close call,

Rackham decides to give up piracy for good

and take the king's pardon.

He steals a Spanish sloop and makes his way back to Nassau.

Upon landing, Rackham goes straight to Woodes Rogers,

seeking peace.

[Simon] Jack Rackham goes in and says,

"I've seen the error of my ways, and I'm done with piracy."

And so he gets his pardon,

and this allows Jack Rackham to lay low in Nassau.

[Narrator] Retiring to pursue

more restful pursuits in Nassau,

Rackham spends his days

stumbling between taverns and brothels

until one night,

whilst sat within a favorite watering hole,

he sets his gaze on a woman unlike any other...

...a woman who would alter the course of his life.

[Narrator] Jack Rackham and Anne Bonny

soon begin an affair.

[Simon] It's pretty much love at first sight.

She wants to marry Jack Rackham. Jack wants to marry her.

The problem? She's still married to James Bonny,

and a divorce is very, very difficult to obtain.

♪ ♪

James Bonny denies a divorce,

and so Jack Rackham offers to buy Anne Bonny.

[Narrator] In the Caribbean of the 18th century,

women could be sold to their new husband

as a means of divorce,

a practice known as wife selling.

[Simon] There was a very uneven ratio between men and women,

so a lot of wives were purchased.

And sometimes if you were in a bad marriage

and you wanted to remarry, that person could buy the woman.

Now, Woodes Rogers had actually outlawed

the practice of wife selling, so what he does

is James Bonny goes to Woodes Rogers and says,

"Jack Rackham is trying to buy my wife, Anne Bonny."

[Blakemore] But Woodes Rogers is very angry

and tells them that they mustn't do it.

And it is this that inspires Jack and Bonny

to go and steal a ship and take to the seas.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

[Narrator] August 22, 1720.

Rackham and Bonny recruit a small group of co-conspirators.

♪ ♪

As night falls, they steal a ship

known as the William from Nassau Harbor.

♪ ♪

It's a brazen move which voids Rackham's pardon...

...immediately putting his life in danger.

But it's a gamble he's willing to take for love.

♪ ♪

Rackham and Bonny will need

all the speed the William can muster.

They know it won't be long before pirate hunters

are on their trail.

They set out towards Jamaica,

attacking merchant vessels along the way.

♪ ♪

But Bonny's presence amongst this rabble of pirates

is considered to be highly unusual.

[Mélanie Lamotte] Piracy was an extremely masculine world.

It was extremely rare for female pirates.

We know of approximately, I think, 40 female pirates

in the Golden Age of Piracy.

♪ ♪

The 17th and 18th centuries, this time period,

people were extremely superstitious,

and they believed that it was bad luck

for women to be aboard a ship.

And also captains were afraid

that the presence of women aboard

would create conflicts between the sailors.

♪ ♪

[Narrator] As the captain's lover, Bonny is accepted

as a valuable and capable member of the crew.

♪ ♪

But before long, she begins to find herself

drawn to another sailor on board.

♪ ♪

[Simon] It's believed that

in A General History of the Pyrates

that Captain Charles Johnson, the author,

said the two of them fell in love with each other.

♪ ♪

Actually what he writes is that Anne Bonny had recognized

a male crew member, fell in love with him.

[Narrator] But the object of Bonny's desire

harbors a dangerous secret.

♪ ♪

The pirate ultimately revealing

her true female identity--

Mary Read.

[Simon] Now, how does Mary Read meet them?

How does she join up with them?

Mary Read's story is that she was an illegitimate child

and that she was raised as a boy in London

in order to avoid scandal.

It was less scandalous to have an illegitimate boy as a child

versus an illegitimate girl.

And according to the story,

when Mary Read was about 13 years old,

her mother told her, you're actually female,

and now we've got to put you to work as a domestic servant,

like pretty much all women do.

And Mary Read goes back into her male clothing,

and then she actually leaves,

and she heads down to the European continent.

♪ ♪

[Narrator] Read, disguising herself as a man,

joins a merchant ship destined for the West Indies.

But how did she manage to hide her identity for so long?

[Lamotte] Mary Read was actually cross-dressing,

like she was dressing as a man to not be recognized.

And she went by another name.

[Cusworth] It would have been pretty dangerous

to be a woman on the ship.

It was a hard life.

[Lamotte] It would have been a very difficult profession

for a woman.

And, yes, in terms of sexual assaults,

there is evidence of women, mostly from slave ships,

being assaulted by members of the crew.

A lot of women, when they arrived in the New World,

were actually pregnant.

The sailing world was a very harsh world.

They wouldn't sleep a lot,

and they would have to face a lot of risks

and also attacks by enemy ships and other pirates.

It would have been a scary world for a woman.

[Cusworth] A number of these women

were kind of going incognito dressed as men,

and that might have been to protect themselves.

♪ ♪

[Hanna] They're always sort of surprised about how easy it was

for them to get away with being dressed as men

and how come people didn't suspect them.

And I think there's an important element of this,

which is how important clothing was in the early modern period.

Clothing was the primary demarcator

of one's social status or gender,

that you were supposed to wear the clothing of your job

or employment or your gender norm.

And that clothing was so powerful and important

for people to understand who you were

and recognize you right away.

So, when they wore men's clothing,

that clothing was so powerful that you can imagine

people would never imagine they could be

anything other than men.

And it's very hard for us today to grasp that

because I don't think we have the same obsession with clothing

being the sort of indicator of reality

the way it was at the time.

[Iszi Lawrence] There were more women dressed as men

than we have evidence for.

I mean, we have famous incidents in the 18th century

of women like Hannah Snell, who were a part of the navy

for four years before they got discovered.

So, a lot of women, if they wanted to flee their husbands,

if they wanted to make a life or career for themselves,

you're gonna go to sea.

[Narrator] Mary Read masters the fashions and behaviors

needed to convince her fellow sailors

she was, like them, a man.

By the time she meets Rackham and Bonny,

she's been at sea for several years,

passing undetected as a regular sailor.

There are different accounts

of Read's shift to a life of piracy.

Some claim she had already turned pirate,

while others say it happened

when Rackham plunders the merchant ship she's aboard.

[Narrator] According to legend,

Mary Read reveals herself to be a woman

but only to Anne Bonny.

The pair grow closer,

with Bonny vowing to keep her identity secret.

[Blakemore] Calico Jack, Bonny, and Read

sail to the coast of Jamaica.

And they spend a couple of months there

plundering local shipping.

Some of these are quite small vessels.

They even plunder a canoe.

But there's also some quite large merchant vessels

carrying a variety of valuable commodities.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

[Simon] Jack Rackham, in the meantime,

saw that Anne Bonny had fallen in love

with another male crew member.

♪ ♪

[Narrator] The stories say, in a fit of jealous rage,

Rackham threatens to cut his love rival's throat.

♪ ♪

Read reveals her true identity.

♪ ♪

Bonny and Read now sail together,

openly as women and as pirates.

[Simon] But there's actually nothing in the story

written about the two of them having a relationship.

This idea was actually a 20th-century concept.

There were plays written about them that began to speculate

that maybe they had a romantic relationship.

This was written about in feminist writings,

and now it's become considered to practically be fact

about the two of them.

What their lives also did is it really highlighted

what the realities could have been for women at sea

and shows that women could have been very competent

on a pirate ship because they were.

♪ ♪

[Narrator] Bonny and Read prove to be determined fighters.

No one, it seems, is prepared for the extraordinary sight

of this fearsome pair of women warriors.

[Simon] Anne Bonny and Mary Read were also

in an interestingly fortunate position.

They were not forced to be pirates.

They were not under any threat by any members of the crew.

They had not been sexually assaulted.

They were not captured.

They were respected, equal members of the crew

for the most part.

Now, how would they have managed to survive this world at sea?

It was extremely difficult. It's very masculine.

It's physically difficult.

They will be smaller.

They will be lighter than the men,

and so this means that they're going to be able

to climb up the mast, probably do more repairs.

They're going to be faster and more lithe in a fight.

They're going to have their own skills that they can bring,

such as repairing and cooking and that sort of thing.

They actually would have been very, very useful members

of the crew.

♪ ♪

They wore male clothing in battle

not to disguise themselves,

not because they were cross-dressers,

but because it was practical.

It's easy to fight in a loose shirt and trousers,

just like the men do.

And also, it was a way for them

to not be noticed right away in battle.

They wore their hair very long.

And supposedly rumors say that they would fight

with their shirts open, exposing their breasts to people,

thus intimidating people

and sort of freezing men in their tracks,

not expecting this at all.

[Hanna] The idea that when a female pirate

sort of displays herself

by opening and displaying her breasts,

it was shocking because they said,

"You're wearing men's clothes. How is it possible?"

[Blakemore] I think one of the significant things

about Bonny and Read is the fact

that they don't hide their gender.

They are not afraid to be seen as female pirates.

And in fact, in some ways, that makes them more bold

and more brave because they are flaunting these expectations

around female behavior without pretending to be male.

♪ ♪

One of the vessels they capture

is a canoe crewed only by Dorothy Thomas.

[Simon] They knew that she had identified them

and that she could go and report them to the authorities.

And being a woman, this would be considered so outrageous

that authorities would believe Dorothy Thomas

and they would probably take it very seriously

that a woman had been harassed by pirates.

[Blakemore] Bonny and Read urge the pirates

to kill Dorothy Thomas.

They say, if we let her go, she will be evidence against us.

But Calico Jack apparently refuses to kill Dorothy Thomas,

so she is set free.

[Narrator] Bonny and Read were right to be concerned.

Dorothy Thomas reports the incident

directly to the governor, Woodes Rogers.

[Simon] September 5, 1720,

Woodes Rogers issued a proclamation for the arrest

of Jack Rackham on the William,

which contained two female pirates,

and he named Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

Woodes Rogers has put a large bounty on Jack Rackham's head.

And so naturally, this is going to attract pirate hunters,

and a very well-known and very successful pirate hunter

named Jonathan Barnet decides to take up the challenge

and go hunting for them

alongside another man named Jean Bonadvis.

[Narrator] Bonadvis and Barnet are seasoned privateers.

Having spent years sailing among the intricate coves

and inlets of the Caribbean,

there are few criminal hideouts they can't find.

[Simon] So, the two of them have a small fleet

of their two ships, and they go sailing

around the parts where Jack Rackham

was known to be spotted.

♪ ♪

[Narrator] Unaware they're being hunted,

the pirates skirt the coast of Jamaica,

targeting ships as they go.

This includes a fine merchant vessel,

now giving them a flotilla of three crafts

helmed by a crew brimming with confidence.

Rackham pilots his fleet to a cove in Negril Bay,

where the pirates break out in a drunken celebration

of their recent success.

As the party rages and the liquor flows,

nobody notices a new arrival in the bay.

It's Bonadvis and Barnet, the pirate hunters.

[Simon] Bonadvis and Barnet wait until it's dark,

and then they hail Rackham's ship.

Now, Rackham and his crew at this point are very drunk.

They'd actually managed to capture a small ship,

and they were celebrating

by drinking all the wine that they stole.

The only two people who had not been drinking

were Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

[muffled voices]

When Barnet hails them,

Jack Rackham basically taunts him,

saying that we will accept no quarter,

we will take no mercy, we will give no mercy.

[Narrator] The pirates manage to load their cannons,

firing on the hunters, but they barely do any damage.

[Simon] And then Barnet fires a cannon into Rackham's ship.

[Narrator] Rackham and his men realize

they're doomed to lose this battle.

The pirate hunters prepare to board.

[Simon] Now, Rackham and the men are so inebriated

that they would not be able to fight back,

and so Rackham orders everyone to go and hide below deck.

The only people who don't do this

are Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

They actually shout orders against Rackham's,

saying, "No, you must stay."

Mary Read supposedly said,

"If there is a man among ya to fight, then you must fight."

And supposedly she even fired her gun into the hold,

killing two of the crew members,

out of anger that they would not fight.

♪ ♪

So Jonathan Barnet, Jean Bonadvis,

and all of their crew

end up fighting against just Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

♪ ♪

[Blakemore] Ultimately, they are unsuccessful,

and they are all captured and imprisoned

and brought to Port Royal for trial.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

[Simon] In November of 1720, the entire crew was put on trial

in St. Jago de la Vega, Jamaica.

[Blakemore] Pirate trials have become a very common sight

in the Caribbean and North America at this time.

English law had changed to allow local governors

and naval officers to hold a piracy court.

[Narrator] This is in order to create real stability

and security for the British,

who are intent on making the sea safe for trade.

Those pirates who had rejected or breached their pardons

would face the full force of the law.

[Blakemore] So, the defendants would have been brought

before the tribunal.

This legislation authorizes English officers

to prosecute piracies anywhere in the world.

[Simon] You have the persecution.

You have, of course, all the pirates on the stand.

You have a jury.

All the crimes are laid out, and they bring witnesses.

[Blakemore] The victims, if they survived,

would often have presented the evidence to the court,

especially giving the detail

of what had been stolen from them, the value,

because they want to reclaim some of these commodities.

[Narrator] Rackham, Bonny, and Read are put on trial,

facing a litany of charges for their crime spree,

offenses which could lead to hanging.

[Blakemore] One of the really interesting things

about the trial is that Calico Jack and several sailors

are tried on one day,

Bonny and Read are tried by themselves on a separate day.

Clearly, the judge and the court

feel that these women are of a different status.

They need a different procedure to deal with the trial.

♪ ♪

[Narrator] Bonny and Read are kept behind bars

whilst Rackham and some of his crew are put on trial.

[Simon] Dorothy Thomas, she was the chief witness.

She was able to see everything in detail.

She was able to talk about their character.

♪ ♪

We have other witnesses who had actually

spent time on board ships,

so they knew exactly what Jack Rackham had been doing

and what goods they had stolen and how they'd been treated.

The hostages had been treated pretty decently on the ship.

They weren't beaten or injured,

and they were usually let go after just a few days.

We don't really know why,

but they offered the best information.

[Blakemore] At the end of the trial,

the defendants were given an opportunity to plead their case,

although they weren't given legal representation

or advice to do so.

And there were only really two defenses that were possible.

One was to claim that you were yourself a victim

who had been forced to board the pirate ship

and that you never intended to commit piracy.

And in fact, there are some men put on trial

with Calico Jack's crew who claimed that they'd simply

been invited aboard the ship for a drink

and they had not been involved in any of the piracies.

The other defense would be to claim

that you were legally authorized.

And indeed, it seems that Calico Jack at various times

tried to claim that he was authorized

to attack Spanish shipping,

but, of course, this was a time of peace,

so the commission was meaningless

and could not defend him.

[Simon] Jack Rackham and the men were allowed to plead,

and, of course, they all pled not guilty.

[Narrator] But their defense is feeble and unpersuasive.

The court finds Rackham and four of his accomplices

guilty of piracy, robbery, and felony.

They are sentenced to hang.

[Lincoln] Calico Jack is allowed to say farewell to Anne Bonny

before he's executed, and she's totally unsympathetic.

She just says, if he'd fought like a man,

he wouldn't be hanged like a dog.

And I think this is a phrase

that has kind of echoed down the centuries

about Jack Rackham unfortunately.

[Simon] At the end of November 1720,

they were all hanged at Gallows Point in Jamaica,

which today is known as Rackham's Cay.

♪ ♪

[cheering]

[Narrator] As a grim warning to other would-be pirates,

Rackham's corpse is left to rot in plain view.

♪ ♪

[Simon] Anne Bonny and Mary Read's trial is conducted

a few days after Rackham's death,

in mid-November of 1720.

This one is a little bit more unusual, in that they're women.

The high court of admiralty doesn't really know

what to do with them.

Women don't go on trial as often as men.

Women often, if they are caught committing a crime,

they'll spend time in jail,

but then they'll be let go after a certain amount of time.

It's already quite rare that the two of them

were put on trial in front of everybody.

♪ ♪

Once again, it's the same witnesses

who speak out against them, in particular, Dorothy Thomas.

When asked how Miss Thomas was able to recognize

Anne Bonny and Mary Read,

she said it was, quote, due to the largeness of their breasts.

So she was able to see them up close

to see that they were actually women.

[Blakemore] Yes, these women were on the ship.

Yes, we knew that they were women,

even when they were dressed in men's clothes.

Yes, they were wielding guns and swords

and swearing more than any of the other pirates in the crew,

so it does give us some taste of their character

and their boldness and how much they broke the rules

of the society that they lived in.

♪ ♪

When it comes to the end of the trial,

Bonny and Read were permitted to plead their case,

but the record, whoever wrote down this trial,

which is published soon afterwards,

simply said they said nothing material.

So we don't know whether that means that they said nothing

or they said nothing that the court thought was important,

and their voices are erased from the record.

[Simon] Anne Bonny and Mary Read were found guilty of piracy.

But there was a big twist.

When they were asked if they had anything to say,

they both, according to the trial transcript,

pled their bellies.

[crowd exclaims]

[Blakemore] Which was a plea of pregnancy,

because if you were pregnant,

the court would stay your execution

at least until the baby was born.

[Hanna] This was a strategy that many women followed,

would be to plead their bellies,

either to lie or to attempt to get pregnant.

It happened quite a bit.

[Blakemore] Both women were then examined

and found to be pregnant.

Given that their voyage lasted around two months,

they were probably pregnant

for the whole time that they were at sea.

[Simon] And this really changes everything

because in the 18th century,

a pregnant woman would not be executed.

Instead, they are granted what is called a stay of execution,

meaning you won't be executed

until after the birth of the child.

[Blakemore] And they were imprisoned.

♪ ♪

[Narrator] Five long months pass.

Anne Bonny and Mary Read await the birth of their babies

and the hangman's noose.

[Simon] Ultimately what happened to them is quite tragic.

Mary Read dies in jail in April of 1721.

It was recorded that she died of jail fever,

which is what we call typhus today.

♪ ♪

[Simon] Now, Anne Bonny,

we don't actually know what happened to her.

[Narrator] Anne Bonny's fate remains a mystery to this day.

[Simon] There's no record of her being executed.

There's no record of what happened to her child.

[Lincoln] Although rumor has it

that her father came and collected her,

managed to get her out of prison,

and took her back to American colonies,

where she married again and had innumerable children,

and died at a ripe old age, which may or may not be true.

[Simon] The reason why we can speculate this

is because in English law in the 17th and 18th centuries,

while, yes, women could be sentenced to death

and many were, about 95% of them were actually let go.

Only 5% of women sentenced to death

actually had their punishments carried out,

so it is very likely that Anne Bonny

probably was not hanged as a pirate.

[Blakemore] Some people in the Carolinas even claim

to be descended from Anne Bonny.

But again, there is no historical evidence

that this ever actually took place.

[Simon] In 2021, there was some new evidence unearthed

that suggested Anne Bonny may have lived out

the rest of her life in Jamaica because of a death record

of Saint Catherine's Parish, Jamaica,

that listed a woman named Anne Bonny in January of 1731.

So it is possible Anne may have been sent free

or at least lived out the rest of her life there.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

[Narrator] Remarkably,

Jack Rackham, Anne Bonny, and Mary Read

only sailed together for two months.

And yet, over three centuries later,

their adventures live on in history and legend.

[Cusworth] There were probably a significant number

of other women that we just don't know about, right,

that have been forgotten to history.

[Lamotte] But the main reason why female pirates

were written out of history

because all, they would hide their identities,

and they would change their names,

they would dress as men, they would behave as men.

So unless people found out that they were women,

then they would just be erased from history.

[Simon] In fact, Anne Bonny and Mary Read are anomalies

when it comes to female pirates.

The story of Anne Bonny and Mary Read really demonstrates

that there was the possibility that women in the 18th century

could forge their own paths.

[Blakemore] Within, I think it's four years of their voyage,

The General History of the Pyrates is published

as one of the most important accounts that historians have.

And Bonny and Read are the only two non-captains

who get their own chapter.

So I think that's the essence of the legend,

is these two women breaking

the contemporary ideas about femininity

and about the role of women in society

to go on a pirate voyage.

And in all of the accounts,

it's very clear that they are the boldest aboard this ship,

they are at the forefront of the action.

They would probably have made better pirates

if they weren't with Calico Jack.

[Lincoln] I mean, I think actually they'd just gone

completely off the rails.

They were young, and they wanted fun.

If you were a woman, even in the Bahamas,

it was quite restrictive.

And so I imagine that it was just a lot more fun

to be on a pirate ship than to be doing some embroidery,

you know, in your home.

[Simon] People really enjoy listening to the story

about Anne Bonny and Mary Read

because it is quite a romantic story.

Whether or not it's fact or fiction,

what we know about them before they were pirates

and what their relationship was,

it still creates a very interesting narrative.

It's very romantic in a sense.

You do have a woman who joined up on a pirate ship for love.

[Lawrence] Not only do we have an amazing pirate story

with the real pirates at the Golden Age of Piracy,

we also have the tragedy that love isn't enough,

that punishment comes in, that men don't stand up for you,

it's only the women that fight.

We have this huge feminist wave,

and we also have now historically queer culture

coming to the fore.

The fact that these people, that they've always been amongst us,

that all of this history is real and celebrated

with actual people, and it was written down.

It matters to us now more than ever.

♪ ♪

[Narrator] By the 1720s,

pirate hunters are winning their war for the seas.

The English Crown firmly controls Nassau,

the Caribbean no longer providing such easy pickings

for men like Jack Rackham.

Many of the most feared pirate captains

have been hunted down and executed,

but the Golden Age of Piracy isn't over yet.

♪ ♪