Female Pirates

Chinese women, too, captained pirate ships. The most noted was Ching Shih, the widow of the pirate Ching Yih, who built up a great fleet that defied not only China’s Imperial Navy but British warships as well. After he died in a storm, his wife proved herself to be a powerful, businesslike commander. She kept careful records of her illegal operations and pretended to respectability by calling her looting “the transshipment of goods.” At her peak she led a fleet of 800 large junks and about 1,000 smaller boats. Her crews included some 80,000 men and women. She could be as brutal as the worst of men. When her fleet raided and plundered coastal towns, she often burned them to the ground and kidnapped the inhabitants for ransom – or simply massacred them. She gave pirates rewards for returning from raids with the severed heads of victims slung around their necks.

Ching Shih’s regime ended when quarrels among her pirates led to bloody clashes and the breakup of the fleet. In 1810, at Canton, she surrendered herself and the remnant of the fleet still under her control. She then disappeared from public view. It was rumored that she shifted her business talents to the less dangerous trade of smuggling.

Ching Shih was not the only woman who dressed as a man and stalked the seas for loot. A century later another woman pirate in China won great notoriety. It happened in the 1920s, when China, beset by civil war, was unable to muster a strong defense against piracy. Many Western cargo ships were victimized by pirate crews under the command of Loi Chai-san, called “Queen of the Macao Pirates.”

Macao is a small peninsula on a river estuary about 40 miles west of Hong Kong. Smugglers and pirates made it their base of operations, and Loi Chai-san, a small, harmless-appearing woman, acquired great wealth by relentless sea raids and through ransoming her captives. How and why she disappeared from history no one knows.

One of the earliest female pirate captains about whom legends sprang up is Alwinda. She enters Scandinavian history in the fifth century A.D., before the Viking era, as the daughter of a Swedish king. Confronted with an arranged marriage to Alf, the Prince of Denmark, she refused his hand and, with a group of female friends dressed as men, commandeered a ship and sailed off into the Baltic. At sea, they encountered a pirate crew that had just lost its captain. Not at all scared by fierce pirates, Alwinda behaved so imperiously that the men elected her their leader. Soon they were terrorizing shipping on the Baltic so badly that Prince Alf’s father, the King of Denmark, determined to get rid of them. He sent his son out to track them down. His ship clashed with Alwinda’s in a bloody battle that cost the lives of almost all the pirates but their captain. Alwinda surrendered, and when she removed her helmet, Alf recognized the woman he had desired to wed. And now, imbued with a new respect for Alf’s fighting qualities, Alwinda changed her mind, agreed to marry him, and left the sea forever. Eventually she became the Queen of Denmark.

Much later, in the sixteenth century, the Irish pirate Grace O’Malley (known as “Grace of the Cropped Hair”) preyed on shipping routes for 25 years. She was the daughter of a famous Irish family of sea rovers, who used their ships for fishing, trading, and piracy.

Born around 1530 in Connaught in the west of Ireland, at age sixteen Grace married a local chieftain, had three children, and soon lost her husband, probably through a clan fight. Grace then took command of the O’Malley fleet of some 20 ships. She married again, to another local chieftain. Grace and her sailors attacked and plundered merchant ships off the Irish coast so often that the merchants of Galway pressed the English governor of the province to send an expedition against her. She forced the expedition to retreat. In 1577, while raiding lands of an English lord, she was captured and jailed for 18 months. The lord justice denounced her as “a woman that hath been a great spoiler, and chief commander and director of thieves and murderers at sea to spoil this province.”

Upon her husband’s death in 1583, the widow Grace, under Irish custom, lost the right to her husband’s lands. Refusing to accept financial hardship, she plundered other people’s lands. The governor called her a rebel and a traitor and ordered a powerful force to Clare Bay, where it took possission of the O’Malley fleet.

Grace appealed by letter to Queen Elizabeth and then made a personal visit to the Queen. She claimed she had been forced to fight on land and sea to defend her property from aggressive neighbors. Elizabeth responded by ordering the governor to grant Grace “some maintenance for the rest of her living of her old age.”

Now nearly seventy, Grace placed command of the O’Malley fleet in her sons’ hands. She died around 1603.

Of Charlotte de Berry, a seventeenth-century pirate, not much is known beyond a few bare facts. She was born in England in 1636, and early on she determined she would go to sea. She married a sailor and, dressed as a man, followed him into the navy. One day her ship was seized by pirates bound for Africa. When the pirate captain attacked her, having discovered she was a woman, she fought back and cut off his head with her sword. The pirate crew was glad to get rid of a vicious captain and made this tough young woman their leader. Under her command they cruised the coast of Africa, capturing ships laden with cargoes of gold. How her life ended is unknown.

There may well have been more women who sailed the seas under pirate flags. but since those who did this had to dress like men, fight, drink, swear, and carouse like men, some no doubt escaped being unmasked as female, even in quarters as cramped as those on an eighteenth-century ship. In the case of women soldiers posing as men, there is solid evidence that some fought through wars without ever being found out. In modern times, several women have sailed around the world solo, proving ther courage and their hardiness.

About 300 years ago, two women wrote vivid pages in the records of piracy. They were Mary Read and Anne Bonny, who for a time served on the same pirate ship and fought side by side.

Mary Read was born out of wedlock in Plymouth, England, around 1693. Her mother brought her up as a boy. At thirteen, Mary worked as a male servant. But seeking adventure, she quit and, dressed as a man, went to join the Royal Navy. Maintaining the disguise – a man’s jacket, long trousers, and a scarf tied around her head – she soon switched to the army, and fought bravely in Flanders. In spite of her good record, she was not promoted, for in those days commissions were mostly bought and sold. Discouraged, Mary switched to a regiment of marines. There, she fell in love with a handsome officer and revealed herself to be a woman. The delighted young man promptly married her.

When discharged from the service, the couple set up a tavern and did well. But Mary’s husband died soon after, and the business went downhill. Once again she put on men’s clothing and rejoined the army. Ever restless, she deserted within a few months and found a berth on a Dutch merchant ship in the West Indies trade. She did so well as a sailor that the crew never realized she was a woman. On her very first voyage, the ship was captured by English pirates. Thinking her the only Englishman aboard, they pressed her into their crew. Mary would always declare she became a pirate only under compulsion, intending to quit when the chance came. Maybe. But the records show she played as hardy and daring a role in the capture of ships of all nations as her fellow pirates did. None of them suspected her true sex.

In 1717, when the English Crown declared a general amnesty for pirates who would quit the illegal life, Mary left the sea and went to live on an island in the West Indies. When she ran out of money, she signed onto a privateering expedition. It was aboard this ship that Mary Read met Anne Bonny.

Anne had been born in Ireland. Her father, William Cormac, was a prominent lawyer who had the child by his maid, Peg Brennan. To conceal the truth from his wife, he dressed the child in male clothing and pretended she was a relative’s boy he would raise to be his clerk. But his wife was not fooled, and to escape her fury, he sailed with the maid and the child for South Carolina, where he prospered as both a lawyer and merchant. Although Anne, a red-haired beauty, was considered to be a fine catch for some wealthy man, she ignored her father’s wishes and at sixteen married James Bonny, a poor young sailor. Infuriated, her father disowned her. Whereupon the young couple left for Nassau on New Providence island in the Caribbean, a hangout for pirates. Here, Anne met the pirate captian “Calico Jack” Rackham, so nicknamed because of his taste for flashy clothing made of calico material. She fell in love with the pirate, deserted her husband, and went off to sea with Rackham. He was a small-scale pirate who raided fishing boats and local merchant ships. When their ship met resistance, Anne fought as well as any sailor in the crew. One day they took the ship Mary was sailing on, and still dressed as a man, Mary joined Rackham’s crew.

Anne Bonny soon recognized that the newcomer was a woman, and the two, becoming fast friends, let Rackham in on the secret. On one of their pirate cruises a merchant ship was overtaken and a furious fight began in which almost every sailor aboard the [merchant ship] was killed. Among the few who surrendered was a young navigator. Mary fell madly in love with him and soon told him she was a woman. A passionate love affair began. One day Mary’s lover quarreled so fiercely with another crew member that they decided to fight a duel when next they reached land. Soon their ship anchored off an island, and the duel was set for the next day. Mary, fearing her lover might be killed, picked a quarrel with the same pirate and got him to agree to meet her in a duel early the next morning, two hours before the time he was supposed to fight her lover. Slipping away before dawn, she met her opponent on the beach and, fighting better than any man he had ever encountered, killed him with her cutlass.

Rackham’s piracy came to an end in 1720 when his ship was caught off the island of Jamaica by a fast sloop of the Royal Navy. A bloody battle began; when it was plain the pirates were losing, most of them, including Calico Jack, scuttled belowdecks. Only two stayed on top – Mary and Anne. Madly firing pistols and slashing savagely with their cutlasses, they fought on. When they saw they could no hold out any longer, Mary ran to the hatch and screamed down to the pirates below to “come up and fight like men!” But the crew only shrank back, and the enraged Mary fired both her pistols into them, killing one and wounding several others. It was too late to turn the tide; the battle was over. The captives were taken to Port Royal, Jamaica, given a quick trial, and all, Mary and Anne included, were sentenced to be hanged. When the judge asked if anyone had anything to say that might mitigate the sentence, Anne and Mary replied, “Milord, we plead our bellies.” It was the truth. Both women were pregnant. The court put off their execution until the birth of the babies, as the law specified in such cases.

On the day Captain Jack was to hang, Anne was allowed a last brief visit with him. Her only words were, “I’m sorry to see you there, Jack, but if you had fought like a man, you need not have been hanged like a dog.”

Mary Read cheated the gallows, ironically, by falling prey to a fever in prison and dying before her child could be born. Anne was luckier. Some influential planters, who had done business with her father in Carolina, managed to get the Jamaican authorities to release her. Then she disappeared. (Meltzer 54-61)