x Way-hey and up She Rises: Female Pirates of History | GeekGirlCon

Way-hey and up She Rises: Female Pirates of History

Maybe I should save this topic for Talk Like a Pirate Day, but September 19 is a long way away, and I have things to say!

Pirates are one of those perennial geeky favorites, like ninjas, whose popularity has outlasted their relevance, and whose popular depiction is–how shall we put this?–questionably accurate at best. They’re also subject to the kind of gatekeeping familiar to geeky women everywhere: “everyone knows” that the high seas were the domain of men. Why, women were considered so unlucky that they were never allowed on boats, right?

Wrong.

Pirates, according to one San Francisco Bay View article, have never been quite who we think they are:

In the “golden age of piracy” – from 1650 to 1730 – the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: Pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can’t?

“Pirate” is one of those malleable political labels, like “terrorist,” that authorities have applied so widely as to strip it of all meaning.

Without erasing the role of piracy in oppressive systems (it’s likely that Blackbeard was a slave trader, and used slaves on his ships, for instance), it’s also true that pirates existed outside of mainstream society, and certain pirate communities were a haven for people who found that society hostile–escaped slaves, defiant women, sailors who mutinied against their tyrannical captains, and other outcasts–and could be far less oppressive than “legitimate” navies such as the British merchant navy.

For that reason, it can be very difficult to sort truth from propaganda.

Teuta

Bust of Queen Teuta in the Museum of Shkodra
Image source: Wikipedia.

The earliest recorded female pirate was probably Teuta of Illyria, who ruled as queen regent for her stepson from 231 BC to 227 BC. She ruled over a region of the Balkan Peninsula that extends into modern-day Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Albania. At the time, Illyria was surrounded by aggressive neighbors (including the Roman Empire), and the queen regent encouraged piracy as a way for her people to fend off invasion.

Under her reign, the Illyrians expanded to capture the cities of Dyrrachium and Phoenice, and made successful raids on many Roman ships. When the Romans sent ambassadors to negotiate, she informed them that this was legitimate trade under her law, and to say that talks broke down is an understatement–one ambassador was killed, the other imprisoned.

This triggered two years of war with the Roman Empire, at the end of which Teuta was forced to pay annual tribute to Rome and forbidden to sail an armed ship again.

Reading this history, the thing that strikes me is that, if it had been Roman generals plundering ships and annexing Phoenice, their actions would probably just be described as conquest. History is written by the victor, indeed!

Charlotte Badger is often described as a pirate, but reading her biography it’s hard to figure out why. These are the facts: in 1796 she was convicted, Les Miserables-style, of theft for attempting to feed her hungry family, and transported to New South Wales in punishment. After conceiving a child in prison, she managed to get her sentence reduced, and was sent on a ship called Venus, along with fellow convict Kitty Hagerty, to be a servant in a household in Tasmania. According to the account of the captain of the Venus, Charlotte (with Kitty as her sidekick) was a rowdy passenger who drank, dressed up as a man, and incited the crew to riot.

After the mutiny, the other mutineers left Charlotte and Kitty in New Zealand (where Charlotte may eventually have married a minor Maori chief), and used the Venus to plunder ships and Maori tribes along the New Zealand coast.

The truth, once again, seems muddy. Charlotte conceived a child in prison–but accounts mysteriously leave out the father. The captain of the Venus was known for abusing women for the amusement of his crew. Charlotte’s life seems to have been one of deprivation and cruelty, possibly of rape and sexual assault (though naturally that’s unclear). She finally succeeded in hitching a ride to relative safety along with some mutineers who later became pirates, and for that she is labeled pirate herself.

Some women, on the other hand, thoroughly earned the name pirate, and reveled in it.

Bonney,_Anne_(1697-1720)

Anne Bonny from a Dutch version of Charles Johnson‘s book of pirates.
Image source: Wikipedia

Anne Bonny and Mary Read, both born around 1700, are among the best-known female pirates (particularly if you played Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag), and the only two women convicted of the crime during the Golden Age of Piracy. Bonny is said to have stabbed a servant girl when she was 13 years old, and eventually ran away from her wealthy father with her second pirate husband, Jack “Calico Jack” Rackham. Read was disguised as a boy by her mother (after her older, legitimate, brother died, in order to keep receiving support from his paternal grandmother), and kept up the pretense in order to join the British Navy–and later to survive being taken by a pirate crew.

After joining various pirate crews, Read eventually fell in with Anne Bonny; the two are said to have been lovers.

Together, Bonny, Read, and Calico Jack stole the Revenge from Nassau harbor and used to terrorize ships around Jamaica for several months. In 1720, a “King’s ship” waylaid the drunken crew; Bonny and Read were the only ones to put up a fight. Bonny is supposed to have said to her husband Calico Jack when she saw him in prison, “Sorry to see you there, but had you fought like a man, you need not have been hang’d like a dog.”

(If you’re interested in Anne Bonny and Mary Read, a brand new comic called Dreadful Sirens just started, depicting their adventures. I haven’t read it, but according to Comics Alliance it’s a “smutty, hilarious, entertaining romp.”)

Ching Shi

Ching Shih.
Image source: Wikipedia.

 

Arguably the most successful pirate in history was a woman, Ching Shih, who at the height of her power commanded over 300 junks and somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 pirates, and was known to the British admiralty as the “Terror of South China.”

Like many female pirates, she married into piracy; in fact her pirate name means “Widow of Zheng,” and after Zheng’s death she married one of his lieutenants to make her continued rule easier. When she took command, she told the captains, “Under the leadership of a man you have all chosen to flee. We shall see how you prove yourselves under the hand of a woman.” She vastly increased the size and power of what had been her husband’s fleet, and instituted a strict code of conduct. It was displayed in every ship in her fleet, listing items such as:

  • Obey all orders (on pain of death)
  • Hand over all booty to superior officer (on pain of death)
  • Do not rape (on pain of death)
  • Do not have consensual sex with a captive unless you marry her–and then you damn well better be faithful (on pain of… you get the picture)

Ching Shih is remarkable in that, when the authorities finally caught up with her, she negotiated a surrender that allowed her to keep all her loot and retire to a life of comfort as the owner of a brothel and gambling den.

In researching this article I came across far too many fascinating pirate women to count. Their stories are wildly different: some reveled in their pirate name, while others were forced onto a bitter path of revenge; some lived up to the hard-drinking, bloody stereotype, and others chose to counter that in ways large and small.

I’d become disillusioned with pirates as a geeky fixation (just like ninjas, and zombies, and so on), but learning snippets of the real history has actually rekindled my interest. Sometimes truth is better than fiction!

Winter Downs
“Rock On!”

Winter Downs

Manager of Editorial Services at GeekGirlCon.

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