This book was first published in 1724 and went through several print runs before coming out in an expanded deluxe edition in 1728. The text is easily found online and it is also available in countless print editions.
Some people take this book at face value and accept it as the truth. More often, people concede that it mixes fact and fiction. What frustrates me is when writers acknowledge that Johnson’s work is not wholly factual, and then take it upon themselves to judge what is true and what is not true, based on what they personally find believable or unbelievable. I think that is so IRRESPONSIBLE!!! Johnson sometimes contradicts the documentary record, and sometimes he contradicts himself. It makes me extremely uncomfortable when people decide to pick and choose what they believe from him. I do not believe anything Johnson tells me. If he says something that turns out to be corroborated by another source, to me that is a coincidence and in NO way does it make me trust him more.
Johnson divides his book into chapters based on main character, and in any given chapter he avoids talking very much about a character to whom a separate chapter is devoted. So for example he mentions John Rackam in the Charles Vane chapter but then sets him aside because he gets his own chapter later, in which Mary Read and Anne Bonny are mentioned but not by name. On the other hand, the Read and Bonny chapters make extensive use of Rackam as a character in a way that is not reciprocated in his chapter–this being only one way in which the Read and Bonny chapters differ significantly from the other stories in the book…
The Vane and Rackam chapters cover their respective careers in piracy, somewhat abbreviated–both are introduced AS pirates, and we aren’t told how they got there or how long they’ve been at it. Vane’s chapter begins with Woodes Rogers arriving in the Bahamas and their subsequent confrontation. According to Johnson, Vane and his crew fled the Bahamas when Woodes Rogers showed up; then, “Two days after they went out”, they attacked a ship; and then, “A day or two afterwards”, they captured another one. OK, are we keeping track? It’s been 3 or 4 days since Woodes Rogers arrived in the Bahamas. Johnson writes that the pirates spend some time careening and dividing their booty, and then set out again in “The latter end of May 1718”. Which means all of this storyline took place BEFORE the end of May 1718. Ok. BUUUUuuuuuut……..
First of all. In real life, Woodes Rogers showed up in the Bahamas in July. So, Johnson got it wrong. OK, fine. Whatever. Certainly not the first or last book to get facts wrong. It does mean you can’t use him as a reliable source of data, but who cares.
BUT THE BIGGER PROBLEeeeheeeheeeemmmm (sobbing)
In Johnson’s introduction to the book he tells us that in “May or June 1718, Captain Rogers arrived at his government” in Nassau. Again it’s wrong but again who cares. The problem is. Why is Johnson unsure of this? Why doesn’t Johnson know whether Rogers arrived in May or June? WHEN according to him, by the end of May, Charles Vane had already run away from Rogers, so to maintain internal consistency (lol), Rogers literally could not have arrived in June. LAZY!!!! GET IT TOGETHER! You CANNOT rely on Johnson’s version of events, ever.
Soooo ~~~some ppl~~~ are fond of this narrative where Charles Vane is a rebellious rebel who rejects Woodes Rogers because of his ~~*~principles~*~~ and refuses to take a pardon as a way to stick it to the man. That isn’t really the story that Johnson tells us, but it also isn’t NOT the story he tells us. Regardless, it is wrong. The reason (IRL) that Vane ran away from Rogers is not because he didn’t want to take a pardon, but because he ALREADY HAD and had ALREADY RUINED IT. According to Vane’s trial, he accepted a pardon in or before March 1718 from Captain Vincent Pearse or Pearce or Pierce–see also here, here, and here. He expediently reneged on his pardon and then had to run away as soon as the cops came to town, whoopsie.
None of this is mentioned by Johnson who begins the story of Charles Vane with the confrontation with Woodes Rogers. He recounts two separate mutinies against the chronically unpopular Vane, first by his consort Yeats who deserts him in Charles Town and then by Rackam on November 24, 1718. According to Johnson, at this point Rackam assumes command of the ship that escaped Woodes Rogers. However, in his first letter from Nassau on October 31, Rogers writes that the sloop in which Vane left Nassau was “run away with by another set of new pirates” (date of this event not given, but at some point between July and October). Once again Johnson is contradicted by Woodes Rogers, rude much!!
From what I can tell Charles Vane disappears from the documentary record in December 1718 and does not appear again until he is tried and executed in March 1721. According to Johnson, Vane is shipwrecked in February 1719, not on a desert island, but an island pretty heavily trafficked by fishermen, turtlers, and ships collecting water. A ship comes by under the command of a friend of his, Captain Holford. Vane asks for a job on his ship but is rejected because, oh yeah, nobody likes him. This is sooo damn funny to me hahahahahaha
Holford tells Vane he has one month to get off the island, and if he’s still there when Holford comes back, that is it and Holford will arrest him. So when another ship comes by Vane manages to get a job on it, because nobody there knows him. But, this ship crosses paths with Holford, who recognizes and arrests Vane who is brought to trial. What Johnson doesn’t tell us is the timeline for this story…which part took 2 years??? Hrmm…
Nor does Johnson tell us how long Rackam was in Vane’s company. His first named appearance is as Vane’s mutinous quartermaster in November 1718. Johnson places the first day of Rackam’s captaincy at November 24–this is consistent with Hosea Tisdell’s court testimony, except that the court record does not name the quartermaster. I haven’t found any indication outside of Charles Johnson that Vane and Rackam were connected to each other, which doesn’t mean they weren’t, just that I don’t trust it…
The Rackam timeline is also pretty vague. According to Johnson, Rackam & co spent Christmas 1718 on land. Some daring exploits take some amount of time and the next date we get is August 1720, when they are hanging around Jamaica. At this point Johnson basically sums up the events reported in the trial pamphlet and the story gets pretty dry.
In STARK contrast are the very not-dry stories of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, pornographically detailed and unconcerned with the quotidian mundanity of manual labor and organized crime. Both of their chapters begin not just with their births, or even their conceptions, but circumstances that take place LONG before they are born. Compare to the chapters on John Rackam and Charles Vane. Who the fuck are John Rackam and Charles Vane? We don’t know where they’re from, we don’t know what led them to piracy, we don’t know anything about their lives until in media res they come into command of a vessel. Note that Bonny and Read, by the way, are the only people who get chapters in this book despite neither of them being commanders of ships. EVERY OTHER CHAPTER is Captain So-and-So (except for Major Stede Bonnet, who was nevertheless commander of a ship). And yet, despite the fact that Bonny and Read do not measure up to the rest of the book’s subjects in terms of professional accomplishment, they are ~for some reason~ qualified not only for inclusion but for extremely (dare I say…suspiciously) informative biographies such that we not only know them very well, we also know their PARENTS very well, not just where they were born, but WHY they were born, in storytelling ab ovo, lengthy, mythological, epic, verbose literary TORTURE.
Mary Read’s mother’s soap opera life results in her being raised as a boy. At 13 she starts going through various jobs dressed as a boy. (Hmm I wonder what Charles Vane or John Rackam were doing at age 13, and I wonder why we don’t know.) She briefly lives as a woman when she gets married and runs an ordinary with her husband. He quickly dies and with the conclusion of the Nine Years’ War, their business loses traffic and ceases to be profitable. This puts us at 1697 at the earliest, possibly later if Read suffered for a while losing money. We don’t know how old she is, only that as of 1697 she is at least 13. (Though if she was 13, that would mean she was a footboy, a sailor, a soldier, and got married and ran a tavern long enough to experience success and then failure, all within one year–maybe it’s like the Baby Sitters Club and their countless summer vacations and conflicting storylines that all take place in 8th grade…)
She leaves the tavern and goes back to the army, but before this interval of peace ends she goes as a seaman to the West Indies. So this is between the end of one war in 1697 and the beginning of the next one in 1701. At sea, at some vague point, her ship is attacked by pirates and she joins them. She works as a pirate until the King’s proclamation comes out, at which point (sometime between 1717 and 1719) she and her crewmates take the pardon. At this point (the conclusion of her, presumably, first piracy spell) the YOUNGEST she could possibly be, according to Johnson, is 33.
Read gets a job on a privateer with a license from Woodes Rogers. The crew mutinies and they turn pirate. Next thing we hear is that Rackam is her commander, though it is not actually specified that he was instated after this mutiny, so who knows. Anne Bonny now tries and fails to seduce Read. Weirdly, Johnson brings up Anne Bonny assuming we already know who she is, even though her chapter has not come yet, and she was never introduced in Rackam’s chapter. Despite the common interpretation of this story, Johnson never actually says that Anne Bonny disguised herself as a man. Mary Read did for sure. But all he says is that Bonny “discovered her sex to Mary Read.” Which could mean just about anything…he could mean sex as in genitals (Bonny exposes her pussy to Read)…he could mean sex as in femininity (Bonny expresses sensitive feelings to Read)…or he could mean sex as in gender identity (Bonny reveals she is a woman to Read) which is certainly the popular version of the story though I question it.
Now we get to the Anne Bonny chapter, or more accurately, the I’m herE to enquire About Your spooons chapter. The spoon saga takes place well before Anne Bonny is born, but consumes literally half of the chapter. She is not present in the story! She does not EXIST until like 2/3 into the chapter theoretically dedicated to her!
The Tanner, the Lawyer, His Wife, and Her Maid is a very funny story, a Pink-Panther-ish sex farce full of elaborate misunderstandings. The question is. How on earth did Charles Johnson supposedly “know” this story??? The reason the story is funny is because all of the characters are lying to each other. Why does Johnson know the omniscient truth? Who did he theoretically interview to get the facts? Do you trust him to have done that job????????????
The whole storyline was a popular comic trope of the day, enacted most famously in The Marriage of Figaro. Historians often discount this part of the story as BS. I agree. But if this part is BS, then it’s irresponsible not to treat the rest of the book the same way. You are allowed to personally believe whatever you want, but you can’t pick and choose unverified claims as being true or not.
It’s worth mentioning that in their trial both Bonny and Read are listed as spinsters, as in never married, whereas according to Johnson they were both married, Read twice. (If Bonny were a spinster then Bonny would be her maiden name rather than her husband’s name…but Johnson never tells us if Mary Read’s last name is her mother’s, her father’s, her not-father’s, or her husband’s name…) Of course it’s possible there was some careless clerical work, or some deceptive self-representation, but it’s also possible that Johnson didn’t care whether his story was true or not…js
So in the sliver of the chapter that actually covers Anne Bonny’s life, she marries an as-yet-unnamed husband and they move to the Bahamas. She meets and falls in love with John Rackam. Johnson writes that she went “to sea with Rackam in men’s clothes.” He doesn’t specify whether she is pretending to be a man or just wearing pants. She has a baby that is never mentioned again. Rackam accepts a pardon, which ~for some reason~ was never mentioned in HIS chapter. Anne Bonny does not take a pardon, and the additional fact that Johnson writes that she “kept him company” suggests to me that she was on board as his guest/wife/companion/whatever rather than a laboring member of the crew.
The insubstantial account of Anne Bonny’s life is questionably amended by Johnson’s later “Appendix” in the expanded volume of the General History. This is a bonus chapter tacked onto a later printing of the book. In this chapter he more accurately places Governor Rogers’s arrival in the Bahamas at “About the 20th of July 1718”. Johnson writes that Rogers employed various men including James Bonny (who was not named in Anne’s chapter) and John Rackam’s officer George Fetherston, thus beginning an expedition of urban development.
When Johnson gets to describing the activities of Charles Vane, what do you know…he contradicts himself. Previously, Johnson’s story was that Vane refused to engage a ship and quartermaster Rackam led a mutiny against and replaced him. NOW, Rackam is promoted from quartermaster to consort captain. Although Johnson adorably describes them as “Brother Adventurers”, Rackam does not turn out to be the only person on Earth who can tolerate the persistently disliked Vane. They fight over alcohol stores and part ways. That’s very nice. But it’s a completely different story from the one you just told us!!!!!
The appendix is also where the name Calico Jack appears, it did not show up in Rackam’s actual chapter. According to Johnson, Rackam’s “jackets” and “drawers” were made of calico. OK. I guess nobody else’s were…
Rackam and his crew attempt to surrender, fail due to some crossed wires, and then succeed at procuring pardons in Nassau. Now begins the grand romance. James Bonny is a Percy-Weasley-ish character and Anne accepts Rackam’s extramarital overtures. Anne wants to leave James but a pilot named Richard Turnley tattles to Woodes Rogers, who scolds her and an inexplicable never-before-mentioned and never-to-be-mentioned-again woman named Anne Fulworth. OK WTF is going on here. Johnson says that Fulworth “came with her from Carolina, and pass’d for her Mother, and was privy to all her loose Behaviour” and she is NEVER mentioned again. Who the FUCK is this woman. Whether she is a real person or not, WHY BOTHER putting her in the story when she DOES NOTHING??? Why is she an expert on Anne Bonny’s sex life? Is she a midwife or abortionist? Why does she pretend to be her mother? In the (IRL) ad that Woodes Rogers placed in The Boston Gazette he lists Anne Bonny as “Ann Fulford alias Bonny”. What’s going on with that? Do all these names mean the same person? WTF happened here? Mr Krabs, I am so confused…
Well, Rackam and Bonny want to be together, and they decide to elope in a stolen ship. Their first order of business is to take revenge on Richard Turnley who tattled on them to Governor Rogers. Turnley is on a turtling expedition “with his Boy” (mentioned three times, I guess he’s important). So, Rackam, Bonny, and the rest of the crew go to the turtling location, he hides, they look for him and call his name, he does not come to them, so they leave. AWESOME STORY OF REVENGE! I’M SO GLAD YOU INCLUdED IT.
Depictions of John Rackam, Anne Bonny, and Mary Read 