The Two Women Tried for Piracy at Saint Jago de la Vega in November 1720 Who Pleaded Their Bellies and Avoided the Gallows

John “Calico Jack” Rackham had taken over the small pirate sloop William from Charles Vane in November 1718 after Vane refused engagement with a French warship. Rackham operated through the Caribbean for the next two years, taking small trading vessels off Hispaniola, Jamaica, and the southern Bahamas. By summer 1720 his crew of approximately 14 men also included two women: Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

Anne Bonny

Anne Bonny was born around 1697 in County Cork, Ireland, the illegitimate daughter of a Cork lawyer and a household servant. The father, exposed by the affair, took mother and child to Charles Town in the South Carolina colony around 1700. He prospered as a plantation owner. Anne grew up wealthy and reportedly unmanageable. She married the small-time sailor James Bonny around 1715, moved to the pirate-friendly Bahamian port of New Providence in 1718, and around early 1719 became involved with Rackham. She left James Bonny — the marriage may or may not have been formally dissolved — and joined Rackham’s crew dressed as a man.

Mary Read

Mary Read was born around 1690, probably in London, also illegitimate. She had been dressed as a boy by her mother from infancy as part of an inheritance fraud (the mother passed Mary off as her dead older legitimate son to extract maintenance from her in-laws). She enlisted in the British Army as a man, served in the Nine Years War, married a Flemish soldier, ran a tavern in Breda for several years until his death around 1717, and then took ship for the Caribbean. Her merchant vessel was captured by pirates en route, and she — still dressed as a man — joined them. By summer 1720 she was on Rackham’s William.

Bonny and Read appear to have recognised each other’s biological sex within days of meeting on Rackham’s crew. Both continued to operate publicly as men. Rackham learned the truth from Bonny within a month and accepted both; the rest of the crew may or may not have known.

October 1720

In autumn 1720 the new Bahamas governor Woodes Rogers sent a small armed sloop, the Snow-Tyger under Captain Jonathan Barnet, to intercept Rackham. Barnet caught the William anchored off Point Negril on Jamaica’s west coast on 22 October 1720. Most of the William’s crew were ashore on the beach, drunk. Barnet boarded the sloop largely unopposed.

The only members of the William’s crew putting up serious resistance on deck were Bonny, Read, and one unnamed sailor (possibly the helmsman). The contemporary trial deposition by Captain Barnet records the women as having “fought to the last and made the most resistance” while Rackham and the rest of the crew remained either asleep or visibly drunk in the hold. Read, according to one trial witness, fired her pistol into the hold where the men were hiding, screaming at them to come up and fight like men.

The boarding party overpowered the resistance within twenty minutes. The entire William crew was taken in chains to Spanish Town, the colonial capital of Jamaica.

The trial

The piracy trial of the William crew opened at Saint Jago de la Vega (Spanish Town) on 16 November 1720 under the Admiralty Court president Sir Nicholas Lawes. Rackham and the male crew were tried first. They were convicted on 17 November. Rackham was hanged at Gallows Point near Port Royal on 18 November 1720 and his body was tarred and exposed in a hanging cage on a small islet at the harbour entrance (still called Rackham’s Cay) as a deterrent to other pirates.

Bonny and Read were tried separately on 28 November 1720. Both were also convicted. When asked by the judge whether they had anything to say before sentence of death was passed, both pleaded “quick with child” — they were pregnant. Pregnant women under English common law could not be executed until after the birth.

The court ordered a physical examination by the Spanish Town midwives. Both pregnancies were confirmed. Sentences of death were formally pronounced but execution was suspended.

What happened to each of them

Mary Read died in the Spanish Town jail on or around 28 April 1721, probably of typhus contracted in prison, possibly complicated by the late stages of pregnancy. She was approximately 31. Her child did not survive.

Anne Bonny disappeared from the prison record. The trial transcript noted her conviction and the pregnancy plea but no further entry records execution, release, escape, or transfer. The Captain Charles Johnson 1724 General History of the Pyrates — the principal early historical source for both women — recorded that “Bonny made the customary plea of belly, and was respited; what became of her since we cannot tell.” Modern historical research has not closed this gap with primary documents.

The most plausible 21st-century reconstruction is that Bonny’s father — the Charles Town plantation owner — negotiated her release through his network of West Indies commercial contacts and brought her home. A South Carolina family genealogy compiled in the 1930s claims her as a great-great-grandmother who died in 1782 at age 84 in Charleston. The genealogy is not independently verifiable.

A Spanish Town legend that she remained in Jamaica and ran a small inn outside Port Royal until the 1750s is also documented but also unverifiable.

She had been on a pirate ship for approximately 18 months. She had been on trial for piracy for 12 days. She had been condemned to death. She had walked out of the prison record. Captain Johnson, working three years later from the original 1720 records, did not know what had become of her. Modern researchers still do not.