Pleading Their Bellies: Impersonation on The High Seas

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Pleading Their Bellies: Impersonation on the High Seas

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The president of His Britannic Majesty’s Vice Admiralty Court seemed delighted. Before him in the dock of a courtroom in St. Iago de la Vega, Jamaica stood Capt. “Calico Jack” Rackham and his notorious band of pirates. The pirates had been captured by a British merchant sloop commissioned by the governor of Jamaica to bring the elusive brigands to justice. They now faced statutory death by hanging.

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“Is there any reason,” asked the president before imposing sentence, “why death should not be pronounced upon you?”

“My lord,” replied two of the prisoners, “we plead our bellies.”

The plea was a common one in 18th century, when the law forbade a pregnant woman to be hanged. However, surely this point of law was not applicable in the present case?

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The Gentle Sex: The notorious 18th century female buccaneer Anne Bonny disguised as a man, in a contemporary engraving.

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But an examination confirmed that the two rough sea-brigands were indeed women, and that they were pregnant. Their names were Anne Bonny and Mary Read, and under law they had to be spared the gallows.

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Another notorious buccaneer, Capt. Charles Johnson, wrote about the two women in his book A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates. It was published in 1724; just four years after Anne Bonny and Mary Read were captured. According to Johnson, the pair had decided upon their murderous maritime careers independently, but fate had thrown together.

Spirited Runway

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The brief factual reports that exist state that Anne’s father was an Irish lawyer who left his wife and sailed from Country Cork in order to establish a new practice in Carolina, an immense domain of land in America. His high-spirited daughter ran away from home with an unscrupulous sailor named James Bonny, whom she married. Deserted by her husband shortly afterward, she joined Jack Rackham and his band of pirates.

Mary, an English girl, had been deserted by her mother; possessing a keen sense of adventure, she disguised herself as a boy in order to fight with the British Army in Flanders.

After distinguishing herself in the wars, Mary wed a fellow soldier. But their union was short lived, as her husband soon died. She once more donned men’s clothes and joined the crew of a ship that was bound for the West Indies.

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That ship was seized by pirates; by chance, Anne was one of Mary’s captors.

Accepted into the Fold

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Normally, pirates did not carry women to sea. Indeed, they had a custom that strictly forbade such practice. But the evidence is that Rackham and his gang accepted Anne and Mary as equals. According to the accounts of two French captives, the women usually wore dresses on board ship: “When …we gave chase or attacked, they wore women’s.”

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At the trial of Rackham and his crew on November 28, 1720, Thomas Dillon, the master of a sloop captured by the pirates, told the court that the women were both “very profligate, cursing and swearing much.”

Because of their condition, the two women escaped the fate of rest of the crew, whose lives were shortened by the hangman’s noose.

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When Anne saw Rackham on the gallows, she is said to have remarked that “had he fought like a man, he need not have hanged like a dog.”

Ironically, Mary died in childbirth. But according to legend, Anne had her baby in jail, was reprieved. And finally returned to Carolina, where she vanished into obscurity.