"Anne Bonny and Mary Read: Female Pirates and..." Topic

… MARITIME WOMEN

"In 1720, the pirate John Rackham rallied together a group of twelve men and two pregnant women, named Anne Bonny and Mary Read, and stole a small sloop in Nassau. This fledgling cruise took several fishing vessels and a handful of merchant sloops over the course of two months before their capture and trial in Jamaica. The court condemned and hanged the male members of the crew. They also found the two women guilty of piracy, but the revelation of their pregnancies resulted in the postponement of their executions, at which point both women disappear from the historical record.

According to period evidence, the paragraph above presents an accurate and concise description of the brief careers of Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Most other accounts of these two, be they fiction or non-fiction, tend to include romantic and sensational stories in their histories of these female pirates. When addressing the issue of women and pirates during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, most discussions center on the history of Bonny and Read. Many participants at modern pirate festivals and "Renaissance Faires" use these two women to justify wearing bust boosting corsets and thrilling headgear. Since many people enamored themselves in the romantic mythos of Bonny and Read for three centuries, the broader topic of women and pirates also suffered from the mixing of fact and fiction.

In recent years, primarily after the year 2000, a small number of historians and researchers began to reject the typical romantic and sensational narratives about Bonny, Read, and general female involvement with pirates. Through new dissections of the evidence, the more recent generation of scholars revealed that the work of past historians featured glaring errors and flawed conclusions. For Anne Bonny and Mary Read, this new scholarship helped strip back the fiction and unverified facts in their histories and helped bring more consideration to the complex relationships between women and pirates during the Golden Age of Piracy. While the following concentrates on reestablishing the historical foundation for the history of Bonny and Read, it will also address the other pirate women during this period, the manner in which females interacted with pirates, and establish context for the roles of women in the maritime world…"

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Part II here
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Amicalement
Armand

This is a great paintjob about Anne Bonny…

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Amicalement
Armand

I rather doubt she was anywhere near that pretty though…