Anne Bonny and Mary Read: How a Jamaican Trial Became a Pop-Culture Legend

In October 1720, two women dressed in men’s clothing were captured with Calico Jack Rackham’s crew off the coast of Jamaica. Three hundred years later, Anne Bonny and Mary Read are probably the most reproduced images of female pirates in existence — and most of what people now picture when they picture them was invented long after the courtroom in Spanish Town emptied out.

What the 1720 Record Actually Says

The bare facts are these: Bonny and Read were tried alongside Rackham’s crew after capture, and both “pleaded their bellies,” claiming pregnancy, which under English law delayed execution. Rackham and most of the male crew were hanged; Bonny and Read were not. Read died in prison the following year, apparently of fever, and no court record documents what became of Bonny afterward — no execution, no release, nothing. Almost everything known about their earlier lives comes from a single source, Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates (1724), whose trial-related details are corroborated by surviving Jamaican court records but whose biographical color — parentage, childhood, how each woman came to sea — is considered far less reliable by historians.

The Image That Launched a Thousand Costumes

Much of their modern visual identity comes from a single 1724 engraving by Benjamin Cole, printed in Johnson’s book: the two women standing on a shore, cutlasses raised, ships at anchor behind them. That one image became the template copied and adapted in illustration after illustration for the next three centuries, and it is still recognizable in the costume-shop version of a “female pirate” sold today.

From Courtroom Curiosity to Feminist Icon

Through the 20th and 21st centuries, novels, children’s books, stage productions, and video games — including, among others, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag — have recast Bonny and Read as proto-feminist heroes who defied the gender roles of their era by force of will. There is a real story in that defiance; both women genuinely did go to sea and fight disguised as men in a period when that was against both law and custom. But many retellings go well beyond what the 1724 account supports, inventing romantic backstories and emotional beats that have no basis in either the trial record or Johnson’s original text.

What Got Invented Along the Way

The most persistent addition is a romance between the two women, often framed as a secret bond discovered mid-battle — a scene with no source earlier than modern fiction. Johnson’s book does describe one dramatic moment between them, but of a different kind: it claims Read killed a man in a duel to protect a lover of her own. Bonny’s popularly cited biography — an illegitimate daughter of an Irish lawyer, famous for a fiery temper and red hair — comes entirely from Johnson’s less-verifiable early chapters, not from any independent record. And the claim that Bonny was eventually hanged, which still circulates widely, has no documentary support whatsoever; it is simply not known what happened to her.

A Record Worth Being Honest About

None of this makes Bonny and Read any less remarkable. Two women did go to sea as pirates, did fight, and were tried for it in a Jamaican courtroom in 1720 — that part is solid. But the fuller, more romantic story that pop culture has built on top of those facts is, by now, mostly pop culture’s own invention.

Sources consulted: Wikipedia’s entries on Anne Bonny and Mary Read; Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates (1724); and standard historical treatments noting the limits of Johnson as a source for pre-trial biography.