Anne Bonny & Mary Read: They Killed Pricks by Susan Baker

Posted on by jillianmolenaar

This article was published in the August 1972 issue of The Furies, and was republished a few times thereafter. It uses Mistress of the Seas as its main source of information and comes in strong by insisting that Anne and Mary were lovers whose “story has been mistold and untold” because men are afraid of strong women. This version (which must surely be true, right?) opens with Anne’s youthful life in Charleston, again, cribbed from John Carlova, though Baker makes an early amendment by writing that Anne “publicly undressed her fencing master” with her sword. In Carlova’s original story, this was a private lesson in which Anne and her teacher undressed each other and had sex, but Baker has decided to erase Anne’s heterosexual lust for the fencing master, and this change to the story also elevates her above him with the implication of her publicly embarrassing him.

Baker makes it unambiguous that life in the “17th century” was awful for women, who were treated like objects, and she describes Carlova’s Real Housewives of New Providence as a list of examples to prove it. In Mistress of the Seas, Carlova’s backstory for Henry Jennings’s girlfriend Meg Garrett involved her being transported from debtor’s prison as an indentured servant, but Baker gives her a new biography in which she stabbed her drunk husband in self defense. He died and she was convicted of “Master murder (earlier it was called God murder), which was worse than murder”. I don’t know where this came from, besides Baker’s imagination, because I can’t find anything about “master murder” or “god murder” anywhere except in Anne Bonny biographies that presumably used this essay as a source. One Eye Hoskins (whom Baker calls Hawkins) was originally transported after having “fallen in with thieves,” but Baker has her transported for leaving her husband. Carlova never explained how the midwife Bess Moore (whom Baker calls Beth) got to the Bahamas from her native London, but Baker has her flee after a woman dies during a failed C-section. Zoa (who is now Zola) “got tired of being fair game for every white man and decided to demand money for it”, a backstory never described in Mistress of the Seas. I really don’t even understand why it was necessary to make this stuff up, because plenty of Carlova’s Real Housewives already had backstories that illustrated the tragedies of patriarchy…and which were already perfectly fictional…but moving on…

In this story Anne’s reason for seducing Chidley Bayard and then hooking up with Calico Jack is “To cop some heterosexual privilege”. “Contrary to popular belief Calico Jack was not a ladies’ man”, Baker informs us. Neither is he a pirate but instead “a captain’s paramour” living in New Providence, which Baker says “more than one historian describes as ‘a lively homosexual community’.” Boy…I would love to know who. Guess I never will. Baker grudgingly admits that Anne and Jack had a child together. They flee the Bahamas when Woodes Rogers arrives, apparently because Anne could not be pardoned for attempting to murder her father, which is described (with unattributed quotation marks) as “a woman’s crime against her rightful authority”. And apparently once Woodes Rogers moves into town, it becomes literally illegal for a woman to live without a husband. OK.

Baker uses Carlova’s storyline where Anne fights a duel with a man who gropes her, but while Carlova had Anne instantly dome him with a bullet to the brain, Baker has Anne shoot off his penis. The pirates eventually accept pardons and move back to Nassau, where Baker suggests Anne may have met Mary in a gay bar, because “New Providence, like the rest of the New World had plenty of gay bars.” Mary’s mother is named Moll, and Mary was disinherited by her grandmother regardless of the cross-dressing ruse because she was “wild and unruly”. Baker spends a great deal of time refuting the possibility that Anne ever believed Mary was a man, because apparently “a member of gay culture” like Anne would not be “fooled” by transvestism. Baker suggests instead that they were already (lesbian) lovers in Nassau. She quotes some of Carlova’s made up testimonies (attributed to “historian Johnson”) while also describing him as one of the many historians who has attempted “to belittle a strong woman”. She also uses Carlova’s story in which Anne seduces Chidley’s agent Captain Hudson to steal his ship, with the addition that Hudson is murdered by Mary in an unexplained act of “revenge” (even though it’s implied Anne never actually slept with Hudson, and no other motive for revenge is provided).

After the pirates are captured, Anne and Mary claim to be pregnant but Baker says neither of them actually had a child.

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