Calico Jack Rackham, Anne Bonny and Mary Read

Who was Calico Jack Rackham?

John Rackham was a pirate captain, probably English, of the Golden Age of Piracy. Nothing reliable is known about where or when he was born. According to Johnson’s 1724 book, he was quartermaster, an officer chosen by the crew, under Charles Vane, and no record names him before 1720.

In November 1718 Vane refused to attack a French warship, and his crew voted him out as a coward. Johnson says they made Rackham captain instead. Most accounts say that in 1719 he sailed to Nassau and accepted the King’s pardon from the governor, Woodes Rogers, claiming that Vane had forced him into piracy. The 1724 book that made him famous tells this part differently, so the details are uncertain.

Who were Anne Bonny and Mary Read?

Anne Bonny and Mary Read are the best-known women pirates in history, and they were real. Both sailed in Rackham’s crew in 1720, and both were tried for piracy in Jamaica.

In Nassau, Rackham and Anne Bonny became partners. A 1724 book, A General History of the Pyrates by “Captain Charles Johnson”, says she was already married to a penniless sailor; a later volume of 1728 names him as James Bonny. The governor’s proclamation called her “Ann Fulford alias Bonny”. Nobody knows for certain who wrote that book; the writer Daniel Defoe and the publisher Nathaniel Mist have both been suggested.

The same book gives Mary Read a dramatic life story: raised as a boy, a soldier in Flanders, married to a Flemish cavalryman, then the keeper of an inn near Breda in the Netherlands, before going to sea. None of this appears in any record. The trial papers give neither woman’s age nor where she came from.

What happened on the William’s last cruise?

On 22 August 1720 Rackham, Bonny, Read and about a dozen men stole a small sloop, the William, from its owner, John Ham, in Nassau harbour. On 5 September Governor Rogers declared them all pirates. His proclamation named Anne Bonny and Mary Read as women, and a Boston newspaper printed it in October.

The William went after small craft rather than treasure ships: fishing boats off Harbour Island and small vessels along Hispaniola and Jamaica’s north coast.

Jamaica’s governor, Sir Nicholas Lawes, sent Captain Jonathan Barnet after them. Barnet was a former privateer, a private sea captain once licensed to attack enemy ships, and now commanded an armed trading vessel. Around 22 October 1720 he found the William at night off Negril Point. Nine men from a small turtle-fishing boat had just come aboard to drink punch with the pirates. After a short exchange of fire, the pirates called for quarter, meaning they surrendered in return for their lives. No deaths are recorded.

What happened at the trials?

The prisoners were landed at Davis’s Cove near Lucea and taken to Spanish Town. From 16 November 1720 Rackham and ten of his men were tried at the Admiralty court, which judged crimes at sea, and all were sentenced to death. On 18 November Rackham was hanged with four others at Gallows Point, Port Royal, and four more were hanged at Kingston the next day. His body was hung in chains on a tiny island at the harbour mouth as a warning to sailors. The spot later became known as Rackham’s Cay. The nine turtle fishermen were tried separately in January 1721, and some of them were hanged too.

Bonny and Read were tried on 28 November. Witnesses described them clearly. Dorothy Thomas, a woman the pirates had seized from her canoe, said they wore men’s jackets, long trousers and handkerchiefs tied round their heads, and each carried a machete and a pistol. Two other witnesses, John Besneck and Peter Cornelian, said the women wore men’s clothes only when chasing or attacking a ship, and women’s clothes the rest of the time, and that Bonny handed gunpowder to the men. A third, Thomas Dillon, said Bonny had a gun in her hand. Both women were sentenced to hang. Both then said they were pregnant, and the court put off their executions.

What happened to Anne Bonny and Mary Read?

Mary Read died in prison in Spanish Town and was buried on 28 April 1721. The cause is not recorded; the 1724 book says she died of a fever. No burial of a baby was recorded, so we cannot tell whether she really was pregnant.

Anne Bonny’s fate is unknown. The 1724 book says only that her hanging was put off again and again and that she was never executed. A woman named Ann Bonny was buried in the parish of St Catherine, which includes Spanish Town, in December 1733, and that may have been her, but nobody has proved it. A popular story says she went home to Charleston, married and lived to old age. It goes back to a 1960s novel and was built up in a book published in 2000, but no documents support it.

Why was he called Calico Jack?

The nickname does not appear in the 1721 trial record. It is first found in Johnson’s General History, probably not until its second volume of 1728. Calico was a cheap cotton cloth from India, and most people assume Rackham wore clothes made of it. That is a reasonable guess, but no one from his own time explains the name.

Was the skull-and-cutlasses flag really Calico Jack’s?

Probably not. Today a white skull above two crossed cutlasses is sold everywhere as “Calico Jack’s flag”, but no source from 1720 describes any flag flown by Rackham. The trial record mentions only a white pendant, a long narrow flag.

The pirate historian Benerson Little traced the design back to a German book by Hans Leip published in 1959, the earliest place it is labelled with Rackham’s name. Little suggests the flag in the 1935 pirate film Captain Blood may have inspired it. Books, films and souvenirs spread it from the 1960s. Real pirate flags of the 1720s did sometimes show weapons: those of Bartholomew Roberts showed a figure holding a sword.