Wives and Children Ashore: What Became of the Families Pirates Left Behind

The pirate of popular imagination is a man with no ties to anyone, free of the world ashore. The real record is messier and more human: pirates had wives, common-law partners, and children, though what survives about those relationships is much thinner, and often grimmer, than any sentimental image of a woman waiting faithfully in a port town for her man’s ship to return.

John Dann: The One Clean Case

Few pirate marriages are documented as solidly as that of John Dann, coxswain to Henry Every during the 1695 raid on the Mughal ship Ganj-i-Sawai. Arrested in Rochester in July 1696, Dann turned king’s evidence and was pardoned. He married Eliza Noble in 1699 and by 1700 had become a partner in Coggs & Dann, a goldsmith-banking firm on the Strand in London — a striking second act for a former pirate. The firm went insolvent in 1710; Dann himself died in 1722. It is a rare case where a pirate’s post-piracy domestic life is traceable almost year by year.

Blackbeard’s Disputed Marriages

Blackbeard’s domestic life is a better example of how thin the record usually is. In 1718, Royal Navy captains and Governor Walter Hamilton of the Leeward Islands separately reported rumors that Edward Teach had a wife in Bath, North Carolina, and, in a separate account, a wife and children left behind in London. Neither contemporary report names the North Carolina woman. The name most often attached to her today, Mary Ormond, comes only from a family letter written two centuries later, with no contemporary marriage record, will, or witness testimony to support it; at least one modern historian has argued the name may be a later invention rather than a recovered fact. The commonly repeated claim that Blackbeard had fourteen wives has no documentary support at all.

When a Crew’s Women Went to the Gallows Together

Not every story of pirates and the women connected to them ends in rumor and ambiguity. In October 1718, Richard Worley’s pirate crew was travelling with roughly thirty female convicts taken from a captured transport ship; several of the women had paired off with Worley’s men, some reportedly hoping for marriage. When a Royal Navy force defeated the crew off South Carolina, the women were hanged in Charleston alongside the pirates they had partnered with. It is a far starker ending than the legend of pirate wives usually allows for, and one of the few points in this history where the fate of the women involved is actually recorded.

Women Who Became Pirates Rather Than Pirates’ Wives

Some women in this history were not left ashore at all. In May 1729, Mary Critchett, one of six transported convicts aboard a sloop off Virginia, took part in seizing the vessel and personally guarded the hatch over its captured crew. She was tried and convicted of piracy at Williamsburg and sentenced to hang, though no surviving record confirms whether the sentence was carried out. Her case is a useful corrective to the idea that women only ever appear in pirate history as the partners men left behind.

A Thinner Record Than the Legend Suggests

Put together, what survives is not a pattern of loyal wives in every port but a handful of very different, often incomplete stories: one pirate who married well and left piracy behind entirely, one whose marriages are more rumor than record, one crew whose women shared their men’s execution, and one woman who took up piracy herself. The honest version of this history has far more gaps in it than the folklore does.

Sources consulted: Wikipedia’s entries on Henry Every, Blackbeard, and Mary Critchett; the National Park Service; csphistorical.com; and scholarship by Marcus Rediker (Villains of All Nations) and Colin Woodard (The Republic of Pirates).