Pirates: Anny Bonny

Anne Bonny was born in around 1698 near Cork, Ireland.  She was thought to have been the illegitimate daughter of William Cormac, a lawyer, and his maidservant, Mary or Peg Brennan.  Cormac raided Anne as a boy, but found his legal practice to be so affected by the shame of his affair that he took Anne and her mother to South Carolina.  Here William became a successful merchant and purchased a plantation.

Anne was noted for her quick temper and headstrong ways, prompting accounts of her stabbing a servant girl when she was only 13 years old.  Although it was unclear if this report was merely legend, it served to illustrate her fierce nature.  In 1718, Anne married a sailor named James Bonny.  This deeply displeased her father, and Anne was disowned, much to James’s disappointment – he had hoped to win possession of his wife’s family estate.  Anne is thought to have started a fire on her family’s plantation in retaliation for her expulsion.  Anne and her husband then travelled to New Providence (now Nassau) in the Bahamas.  This was a well known pirate base, and while Anne’s husband was working as an informant for Governor James Woodes Rogers, Anne Bonny was mingling with pirates at the local drinking establishment.

It was here that she met John ‘Calico Jack’ Rackham, a noted pirate.  Rackham and Bonny began an affair, with Rackham offering to buy Anne from her father in a divorce-by-purchase.  However, James Bonny refused to release his wife, instead complaining to the Governor.  Bonny was brought before the court and sentence to be flogged and returned to her husband.  Instead, she and Rackham eloped.  Anne soon became pregnant and Rackham took her to Cuba, where the child was born.  Soon afterwards, Bonny rejoined Rackham’s crew, and they took part in a series of attacks on shipping in the Caribbean.

During this time, the crew captured a ship which contained a woman named Mary Read.  Famously, Read also joined Rackham’s crew, and became, with Bonny, one of the most notorious female pirates in history.  Bonny and Read also became close friends, and were thought to be amongst the most fearsome members of the crew, indulging in all the activities enjoyed by their male counterparts.

Governor Woodes Rogers issued a proclamation, printed in the Boston Gazette on the 5th September 1720, announcing that Rackham and twelve others “including two women, by name Anne Fulford alias Bonny and Mary Read” had stolen a 12-ton, six gun sloop named the William.  They were also now wanted for various other acts of robbery and piracy.  A heavily armed privateer commanded by Captain Jonathan Barnet captured Rackham’s ship off Negril Point, Jamaica.  The pirates were imprisoned at Spanish Town. 

Bonny and Read were tried on the 28th of November in a separate trial to the male crewmembers.  There were found guilty and sentenced to death – however both ‘pleaded their belly’, i.e. suggested that they were pregnant, and were spared execution.  Although there is no historical record of Anne’s release or execution, it was thought that Anne’s release was secured by her father, and that she returned to Charles Town.  It was here that she gave birth to her second child by Rackham.  She subsequently married a local man, Joseph Burleigh, on 21st December 1721, and went on to have as many as eight children.  Anne was buried on 25th April 1782 in South Carolina at the age of 84.