Here we have yet another book with chapters devoted to individual famous pirates. There is one for Calico Jack and another for “The Female Pirates”.
In this version of the story Mary Read and her older brother seem to have the same father. She is already born and is “a small child” when her father disappears at sea. When she works as a footboy, the other servants bully her for unexplained reasons, which is why she left to join the navy. The navy is too hard so she joins the army. After her husband dies she leaves for the West Indies from Calais.
Anne Bonny as a child “had a hard and cheerless home life, which did nothing to improve a naturally fierce temper.” She does not move to Carolina with her parents; instead, she marries James in Ireland when she is 18 and the two of them run away to Carolina.
Calico Jack is introduced to us as “a tough young man”, “jeering, sarcastic”, and “quarrelsome”, of whom Charles Vane “was secretly afraid”. They don’t get along and they often fight. After Jack ousts Charles and becomes captain, he hears about the Royal Pardon and sneers at it. According to Rogers, the capture of the ship transporting felons was on New Year’s Day 1719. Jack has “a wife and family” in Santiago de Cuba, and it is while visiting them that he narrowly escapes from the coastguard. He “was a fearless rascal but not a very intelligent one.”
It’s unclear if Jack’s wife in Santiago de Cuba is supposed to be Anne or somebody else. Anne and James live happily together for a while until she meets Jack (whom she does not know is a pirate) in Charlestown, where their entire affair takes place. Thus it is the governor of South Carolina who threatens Anne after Jack tries to buy her off of James. Anne Fulworth is said to be elderly, and she accompanies Anne “to speak for her if necessary”. That very night Anne and Jack steal John Haman’s ship (out of Charlestown!). Anne alternates between sailing with Jack and living “in a little home they had got together in Jamaica.” Rogers is disappointed in her for not falling in love with a pirate “of Morgan’s calibre”. Lol.
After Mary retires from her transatlantic pirate trip, she works on a plantation before going privateering for Woodes Rogers. When the privateer crew turns pirate, Mary develops a “habit of firing her pistol into the hold to hurry” her shipmates. Her contempt for them results in her leaving them to join Calico Jack’s crew.
Rogers specifies that Jack’s crew hung out with the turtlers on November 2nd, 1720. Captain Barnet is fitted out to pursue Jack by the governor of Saint Domingue. For some reason, after Jack was caught, Mary was vaguely “arrested ashore”.
Depictions of John Rackam, Anne Bonny, and Mary Read 