"My lord, we plead our bellies, " the pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read said when the judge asked if they had anything to say in their defense. The ladies knew that no unborn child could be killed under English law and hoped that by their plea they would escape the gallows.
The cruelest female pirate on record was Maria Cobbham, who with her husband Captain Jack Cobbham terrorized the Atlantic at the beginning of the eighteenth century. This pretty Englishwoman liked to wear a British naval officer's uniform that she had stripped from a person she killed. Killing was more important than looting to her, and she perfected a large assortment of sadistic methods. One time Maria tested a new pistol by tying a captured captain and his two mates to the windlass for target practice; not long after, she repeatedly stabbed an enemy captain to death while her husband held him down-to see if a little knife she had stolen would kill; on more than one occasion, she tied up in sacks entire crews of ships and tossed them overboard. There is a persistent story that even her husband grew disgusted with Maria Cobbham and poisoned her, but no one really knows what became of her. Captain Cobbham, however, died a wealthy old gentleman, living the rest of his life in a mansion on the French coast that they had bought with their booty.
Anne Bonny and Mary Read, however, are the female pirates best known in history, no doubt because they served on the same ship and were eventually brought to trial in Jamaica. More is known about them than those prominent pirates of the French Revolution,
Sometime in her early teens,Anne,always a strong girl an d big for her age, eloped with a pirate named James Bonny who turned informer when Bahamas governor Woodes Rogers, once a pirate himself, offered pardons to all who cooperated with him in clearing pirates from the Caribhean.
Disgusted with her groveling weakling of a husband. Anne tried a wide variety of men and finally took up with Calico Jack, a pirate named for the striped pants he always sported. Calico Jack dressed her in man's clothing, and they went pirating together aboard a merchant ship that he, Anne,and his men stole from the Nassau harbor.
Aboard one of the many ships which Calico Jack and Anne captured was a young Dutch sailor with whom Anne became friendly, the sailor soon confiding to Anne and a jealous Calico Jack that she too was a woman in a man's clothing. Mary Read, as she called herself, had also been born out of wedlock. Her mother had passed her off as a boy in her early years. Believing that life was easier for men. Mary saw no reason to reveal the fraud in later years and had served disguised as a man in both the British Navy and Army, For a while she changed her ways and married, but she took to sea as a Dutch seaman when her young husband died.
Both female pirates were captured in October 1720, when a British naval sloop surprised Calico Jack's pirates off the coast of Jamaica. The pirates, including Calico Jack, were all drunk and hid in the hold while the two women fought their attackers like hellcats. with pistols, cutlasses, and axes, all the while screaming to their mates: "Come up and fight like men"
Calico Jack is reported to have exclaimed as he went to the gallows with his men, "If instead of these weaklings I only had had some more women with me!" But Anne expressed the sentiments of both women when she said to him as he passed by:
"Had you fought like a man, you need not have been hanged like a dog!"
Neither of the female pirates opposed capital punishment for pirates. "As to hanging," Daniel Defoe wrote of Mary Read, "she thought it no great hardship, for, were it not for that, every cowardly fellow would turn pirate, and so infest the seas that men of courage must starve: that if it was put to the choice of the pirates, they would not have the punishment less than death, the fear of which kept some dastardly rogues honest: and that the ocean would be crowded with rogues, like the land, and no merchant would venture out: so that the trade, in a little time, would not be worth following." Nevertheless both "pleaded their bellies, " were indeed found to he pregnant, and were spared the gallows. Mary Read died of a fever in prison before her baby was born, and Anne Bonny possibly went free with her child a year later, her wealthy lawyer-father buying her release, although history leaves no reliable record of her later life.
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