LHMP #547e Johnson 1724 A General History of the Pyrates Part 5

Only two events in Read’s narrative can be tied with certainty to a specific date: her husband’s death around the date of the Peace of Reswick, which occurred in 1697, and her capture and trial in 1720. The following highly speculative timeline is worked backwards and forwards around these dates. Note that this timeline attempts to make sense of the General History narrative, without otherwise evaluating its likely accuracy.

• Est. 1675: Read's mother marries a sailor, gets pregnant, her husband leaves and never returns. The child was a boy.
• Est. 1677: Read's mother gets pregnant while her husband is still absent. She has been living with her husband’s family and leaves to conceal the pregnancy. Her first child dies and Mary Read is born.
• Est. 1679: Mary and her mother are living in the country (“for 3-4 years”)
• Est. 1680: Mary and her mother return to London to her husband’s family. Mary is passed off as a boy and claimed to be her dead half-brother in order to claim monetary support from her mother-in-law.
• Est. 1690: Mary is 13 and knows her history. Her putative grandmother has died. Mary is put into service but quits to become a sailor (in male disguise). (This is a reasonable age for an adolescent to go to sea in that era.)
• 1697: Mary’s military career has included sailor, cadet in a regiment of foot in Flanders, regiment of horse in Flanders (when she falls in love with a comrade), discloses her sex to her comrade, Mary begins living as a woman and they marry, they manage a dining establishment in Breda, her husband dies around the time of the Peace of Reswick (1697). (The timeline is based on a very rough estimate for each of the described stages in her career.)
• Est 1702: Mary tries to continue the business on her own but eventually returns to male dress and the army for economic reasons. She goes to Holland for this. (In this year there was a campaign in Holland as part of the War of Spanish Succession, making this date plausible.)
• Est. 1705: Seeing no hope of advancement in the regiment, Mary takes sail to the West Indies. This date is a guess, but there’s a long time-gap until the next clear timepoint. Mary’s ship is taken by English pirates and she joins them. She remains on the pirate vessel for “some time.”
• Est. Early 1718: The pirate crew that Mary is part of takes the King’s Pardon. This is the date of the initial offer of the pardon.
• Est. Late 1718: Mary and others take the governor’s offer to turn privateers against the Spanish (which occurred in this year) but then turn pirate instead.
• Est. June 1719 (possibly later): Mary joins Rackham’s crew. (The narrative indicates she joined after Bonny, who supposedly joined around this date.)
• Est. Early 1720: Mary is attracted to a fellow pirate, reveals her sex to him, and becomes his lover. She pre-empts a duel he plans by killing his opponent first.
• July 1720 (calculated): The earliest possible date that Mary could have become pregnant, if she was in fact pregnant at her trial but had not yet given birth by the time she died. (This is purely conjectural, as the fate of a hypothetical child would not necessarily have been recorded and there’s no evidence that the pregnancy was real.)
• September 1, 1720 (from the trial record): Mary agrees to turn pirate with Rackham. (This need not be in conflict with the General History’s much earlier date of her piratical career if it’s simply an arbitrary date used by the court.)
• September-October 1720 (from the trial record): Various acts of piracy by the Rackham crew, culminating in their capture in late October.
• November 28, 1720: Mary is tried and convicted. She pleads pregnancy but per the General History she declines to name the father, who is said to have been acquitted. (But note that none of Rackham’s crew were acquitted.)
• “Soon after her trial” (April 28, 1721 per parish records): Mary dies of an illness. There is no mention of a child.

By this timeline, Mary Read would have been in her mid-40s when she died. If her military career in Flanders was more compressed than I have estimated, then perhaps 5 years could be shaved off that, but a limit is placed by the reference to the Peace of Reswick and the reference to her age when she first went to sea. Possibly the most implausible element in this timeline is the dozen or more years when she is initially supposed to have been a pirate prior to taking the King’s Pardon. Given the brief and chaotic careers of more solidly documented pirates, this long an uninterrupted stint seems unlikely.

An Analysis of the Plausibility of the General History’s Account of Mary Read’s Life

The first key question regarding Mary Read’s supposed biography is: if this information is true and correct, how would Johnson have become acquainted with such extensive details going back well before Mary was born? (Much of the following discussion will apply to both women, but I’ll discuss issues specific to Anne Bonny later.) The author of the General History makes a carefully vague claim that “there are living Witnesses enough to justify what we have laid down concerning them,” but note that he doesn’t claim that these living witnesses provided him with the content, simply that they could “justify” the story. And those witnesses could only “justify” the parts of the story that were presented publicly during the trial in Jamaica.

Could the details have come directly from Mary herself? There are some narrative nods to this scenario in the text, as when an event prior to Mary’s birth is commented as “whether [this happened] Mary could not tell.” But direct reporting is either impossible or highly implausible. Travel times between Jamaica and England alone rule out direct interview. By the time news of the capture of two women pirates traveled to London, even if an intrepid investigator had jumped on the next ship to the Bahamas, when he arrived, she would have already been dead for months.

Could someone already in Jamaica have interviewed Mary while she was in prison and elicited this highly detailed story from her? And then delivered it to Johnson without leaving any other documentary trace? While not technically impossible, it seems far more likely that someone who went to the trouble of acquiring this highly newsworthy story would have taken credit. Sensationalist news was quite popular in the 18th century. This hypothetical researcher would have been aware of the value of the story. Furthermore, in the second edition there are accounts attributed to just such third-party reporters, which are carefully framed as letters written to the Johnson. But there is no such framing for Mary’s story.

Could the information have been elicited from Mary’s shipmates? In addition to the problem that they wouldn’t necessarily know all the details of her earlier life, they were all dead. Hung within days of their trials and before the trial of Bonny and Read that might have roused sufficient interest for such an interview.

The claim that the detailed backstory came out at the trial is given as “some may be tempted to think the whole Story no better than a Novel or Romance; but since it is supported by many thousand Witnesses, I mean the People of Jamaica, who were present at their Tryals, and heard the Story of their Lives, upon the first discovery of their Sex.” This can’t stand as demonstrating a source of any information that wasn’t included in the trial record. While it’s clear that the content of the trial records were incorporated into the General History, the latter includes vastly more details.

Given the amount of detail that did appear in the trial records, it would be at the very least odd that no trace of the women’s pre-piratical lives is recorded there, if it had indeed been presented at trial. Furthermore, the questions during the trials were focused on the specifics of the piracy charges. There was no context for asking about “the story of their lives.” Newspaper accounts in England that covered criminal histories or crossdressing narratives would often go into this sort of narrative history, but there is no trace of such an account being taken down and published in Jamaica.

Overall, it isn’t simply that no documentary basis for the stories is given, but that a demonstrably false basis is offered, purely in support of the assertion that the stories are “true.” Some introductory material in the second edition makes claims about the source of additional material included in volume 2, saying that the author had access to the journals of pirates (brought away by someone who had been their prisoner) and of ship commanders. This claim is not specific to the Bonny and Read accounts and also clearly doesn’t apply to the material in the first edition (volume 1). As noted previously, some of the volume 2 additions are in the form of letters to “Captain Johnson” claiming that they heard he was planning a second edition and wanted to provide him with material to include in it but no such framing is presented for the backstrories of Bonny and Read.

Is it possible that Johnson spent the approximately 2.5 years between having access to the detailed trial records and the first publication of the General History to do intensive on-the-ground investigation in England, Flanders, Holland, and the Caribbean to turn up records of births, residence, enlistments, shipboard activities, etc. necessary to piece together this full narrative? In addition to spending that time writing the full text of the work? (And, if the theory that Defoe is the author is correct, also spending that time writing several other books?) I feel comfortable saying that this is not plausible, simply in terms of the amount of work involved and the types of information that would be available even in the best circumstances. In fact, many of the details given in the narrative are not ones that would be available from documentary sources and where any persons involved who might know them were no longer alive. But let’s go through a few of those items in detail.

The story of Mary’s birth and the circumstances under which her mother decided to raise her as a boy might hypothetically have been told to Mary before she left home, but by definition were not known to anyone else, as the point was to conceal Mary’s illegitimate birth and true sex. This is information for which Mary would be the only plausible source and we’ve already dismissed the likelihood that the narrative came from her. This sort of narrative of gender disguise for the purpose of deceit is common in 17th century drama, as is the motif that cross-dressing was initially imposed on a child rather than being chosen as a deliberate strategy. It is far likelier that the story of her birth and cross-gender upbringing were invented retroactively based on motifs common in popular culture. (Klein’s “Busty Buccaneers and Sapphic Swashbucklers” offers an extensive discussion of the intersection of Bonny and Read’s biographies in the General History with existing pop culture narratives, and to a large extent I am simply presenting her conclusions on this point.)

Mary’s various stints in military units align well with trial records of passing women in the Low Countries in the 17th century. (See Dekker and van de Pol.) Thus, while the events are quite plausible, there is also a clear context in which they might have been borrowed from existing accounts of other women. The motif of a passing woman in the military falling in love with a comrade (or joining up to accompany a lover) is common in 17th century broadside ballads. Once again, the personal and private details describing this incident, if true, are ones only Mary would have known and could only have been reported directly by her.

The events around the disclosure of Mary’s sex and her marriage to the trooper offer another context for doubt. “[T]hey exchanged Promises, and when the Campaign was over, and the Regiment marched into Winter Quarters, they bought Woman’s Apparel for her, with such Money as they could make up betwixt them, and were publickly married. The Story of two Troopers marrying each other, made a great Noise, so that several Officers were drawn by Curiosity to assist at the Ceremony, and they agreed among themselves that every one of them should make a small Present to the Bride, towards House-keeping, in Consideration of her having been their fellow Soldier.”

As Dekker & van de Pol document, real-life passing women in the military typically received harsh treatment when discovered, at a minimum including banishment, but often including corporal punishment. It was rare for such a woman to be celebrated and praised, except in fictionalized and literary versions of the genre. Conversely, if it had been the case that “the Story of two Troopers marrying each other made a great Noise” this is exactly the sort of romanticized circumstance that was turned into ballads and broadsheets and news items. So while it’s not impossible that Johnson could have come across such a story, tying it specifically to Mary Read would have been much more difficult without her personal testimony and additional details. To some extent, the level of concrete detail about the couple’s post-military career (“they immediately set up an Eating House or Ordinary, which was the Sign of the Three Horse-Shoes, near the Castle of Breda”) and the reference to financial difficulties after the death of the husband and slack trade after the Peace of Reswick lends credence to the hypothesis that this incident is taken from an actual report of someone, but not necessarily Mary.

The hypothesis that Mary’s military career and subsequent marriage might have been borrowed from an actual pre-existing report could make sense of one aspect of the timeline. The Peace of Reswick (1697) is firmly nailed down in time. (See Wikipedia: The Peace of Ryswick (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Ryswick) was a set of peace treaties signed in late 1697 ending the Nine Years War. The UK was a party to the treaty, in alliance with the Dutch Republic as part of the Grand Alliance.) Incorporating this event as part of her history means that the 23 years before Mary’s capture as part of Rackham’s crew must be accounted for in some fashion. The two activities attributed to her during that 23 years are serving in the military in Holland and serving as a pirate up until that crew takes the King’s Pardon. This period is glossed over is a much lower level of detail that other parts of her life.

If (hypothetically) the entirety of Mary’s supposed military career was borrowed wholesale, and if that is the only basis for pinning her life to specific dates prior to the 1710s, then not only does the length of her piratical career begin to look more plausible, but her age at capture could be significantly lower than the full General History timeline would require. Of course, if we accept the hypothesis that the General History incorporated large chunks of unrelated material to fill out Mary’s biography (and potentially Anne’s as well), then the assumed veracity of any part of that story goes out the window.

Mary Read’s narrative includes two potentially erotic encounters while part of Rackham’s crew. Both narratives include the significant element that Mary’s gender disguise is complete and that everyone assumes her to be a man. As we’ve seen from the trial records, this is contradicted by eyewitness accounts not only that she only wore male clothing during combat, but that, when in male dress, she was identifiable as a woman from “the largeness of [her] breasts.”

As Klein notes, an essential component of “acceptable” sapphic cross-dressing narratives was the function of successful gender disguise in erasing the possibility of a woman knowingly desiring another woman, while salaciously toying with the specter of both male and female homoeroticism. Thus when “Anne Bonny took her for a handsome young Fellow, and for some Reasons best known to herself, first discovered her Sex to Mary Read” the narrative dodges the image of male homoeroticism by having Anne reveal herself to be female before making a move on the “handsome young fellow.” Immediately, “Mary Read knowing what she would be at, and being very sensible of her own Incapacity that Way, was forced to come to a right Understanding with her, and so to the great Disappointment of Anne Bonny, she let her know she was a Woman also.” That is, the narrative erases the possibility of any actual erotic encounter between the women (“her own incapacity”), negates the possibility that Anne might desire Mary as a woman (“great disappointment”), although it doesn’t entirely negate the possibility that Mary was negotiating for a sapphic encounter.

However, we come back again to the question “if this were a true account, how could the information about these events and the interior thoughts of the two women come to be known to the Johnson?” Even more than the episodes around Mary’s birth and childhood, and the supposed soldier-marriage in Flanders, this is an encounter that—based on the framing within the narrative—could not be known to anyone except the two women. Anne supposedly let Rackham in on the secret of Mary’s sex to quiet his jealousy, but if he was murderously jealous, would she have revealed to him that the encounter came about because of her own sexual advance? We’re going down a speculative rabbit-hole here, but only because we’re looking for internal consistency within a fictionalized narrative. Within that narrative, the matter continued to be kept secret from the rest of the crew. So at the very most, we have three people who had some access to it, one of whom was executed within days of his trial. The possible scenarios for direct reporting by Mary have already been reviewed, and similar scenarios for direct reporting by Anne will be considered later.

Mary’s second erotic encounter is framed as occurring after the previous events. Mary is said to have fallen for a young man pressed into service on Rackham’s ship. There are various points where Mary’s story attempts to frame her as the “good girl” in contrast to Anne’s “bad girl.” Thus Anne falls for the pirate Rackham and is promiscuous, while Mary falls for the pressed man and insinuates herself into his affections, not only by revealing her sex to him, but by implying that she, too, is dissatisfied with a pirate’s life. They become “mess-mates and strict companions”—a typical arrangement for men on shipboard, but with unavoidable homoerotic undertones. “When she found he had a Friendship for her, as a Man, she suffered the Discovery to be made, by carelesly shewing her Breasts, which were very White.” That is, when he showed homoerotic interest in her, she short-circuited that by divulging her sex, just as she had with the soldier in Flanders. There is a detailed anecdote about how Mary was so devoted and protective of her lover that when he was due to fight a duel, she pre-empted it by challenging and killing his opponent first.

The outcome of this relationship provides another unresolvable conflict with the documentary record. When Mary “pleads her belly” at her trial, the General History says she indicated this man was the father of her child while refusing to name him. (As another part of framing Mary as the “good girl,” she is made to claim that she considered herself married to her fellow pirate and that “she had never committed adultery or fornication with any man.”) But where the story trips up, not only in the absence of any of these details from the trial record beyond the claim of pregnancy, is in claiming that her lover was acquitted. None of Rackham’s crew were acquitted—not even the 9 men who claimed they had only been briefly on board for hospitality (and who could not have included Mary’s hypothetical long-term lover in any case). Of the 8 trials detailed in the official report, only one included any persons acquitted of piracy (and that for faults in the evidence), and that was for activities while traveling from Africa to the Caribbean and with no contact with Rackham or his crew. While there may well have been other trials than those recorded in this specific document, this one focuses strongly on pirates captured in the same timeframe and region as Rackham. So the entire set of incidents involving Mary’s supposed lover is riddled with holes and impossibilities.

Now that the General History is covering events around the trial itself, the contradictions with the official report are very evident. The General History says, “one of the Evidences against her, deposed, that being taken by Rackam, and detain’d some Time on Board, he fell accidentally into Discourse with Mary Read, whom he taking for a young Man, ask’d her, what Pleasure she could have in being concerned in such Enterprizes, where her Life was continually in Danger, by Fire or Sword; and not only so, but she must be sure of dying an ignominious Death, if she should be taken alive?—She answer’d, that as to hanging, she thought it no great Hardship…[followed by a political tirade].” This is a specific claim about a conversation said to be part of the trial deposition, but no such deposition is included in the official trial record.

The General History’s account of Mary Read concludes with: “Being found quick with Child, as has been observed, her Execution was respited, and it is possible she would have found Favour, but she was seiz’d with a violent Fever, soon after her Tryal, of which she died in Prison.”

Note that Mary was not “found” pregnant, but only claimed to be so—an extremely common dodge among women condemned to death. The trial record indicates that a follow-up investigation would be performed, but if it was, it did not become part of the official record. It could be hypothesized that, in lieu of a formal investigation of the pregnancy, Mary was simply held for the length of a full term. The record of her death from illness comes almost 5 months to the day after the date of her trial. Given that, the veracity of her pregnancy claim could be moot.

In summary, the combination of the implausibility that the author of the General History could have had access to many of the reported details of Mary’s past history, the presence of common pop culture motifs and narratives in that reported history, and the number of outright contradictions from more reliable sources point to the vast majority of the information on her that appears only in the General History being either outright invention or adaptations of existing unrelated narratives, whether based in truth or completely fictional.

With that said, let’s move on to the chapter in the General History about Anne Bonny.