Abstract
In 2005, fantasy author Scott Lynch responded to a reader who attacked Lynch’s Red Seas under Red Skies (2007),1 an adventure yarn that prominently features a black pirate who is also a middle-aged, devoted mother of two. The reader claimed, “Real sea pirates could not be controlled by women … It is unrealistic wish-fulfillment for you and your readers to have so many female pirates.” Lynch’s fans responded with outrage and Wikipedia links to the scant handful of she-pirates often referenced by historians: Grace O’Malley, Anne Bonny, and Cheng I Sao.2 But the author’s own reply was more to the point: yes, he agreed, Zamira the pirate is obviously an exercise in wish fulfillment: “Why shouldn’t middle-aged mothers get a wish-fulfillment character … HL Mencken once wrote that, ‘Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.’3 I can’t think of anyone to whom that applies more than my own mom.”4 This is perfectly correct: some women would also like to be pirates in their imaginations; witness Dorothy Parker’s biting poem, “Song of Perfect Propriety” (1926), which was nearly contemporary to the Mencken quotation Lynch references: “Oh, I should like to ride the seas, / A roaring buccaneer; / A cutlass banging at my knees, / A dirk behind my ear” (1-4). Lynch’s rejoinder wisely distinguishes between the historical precedent for female pirates, which is real but slight, and the desire for such a precedent among pirate readers, which seems to be a much wider and deeper phenomenon.
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Notes
O’Malley and Cheng are largely outside the scope of this project, but both were highly interesting, unusual women. O’Malley (Gráinne Ní Mháille, ca. 1530–1603) was the powerful, hands-on leader of the Ó Máille clan, whose shipping business was not above dabbling in piracy; one popular story holds that a mere day after giving birth at sea she led her men successfully in battle against Algerine pirates (Anne Chambers, Granuaile: Grace O’Malley—Ireland’s Pirate Queen, c. 1530–1603 [Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1998], 65). Cheng I Sao (Ching Shih, 1775–1844), a prostitute, became the wife of a pirate captain and eventually a commander in her own right of a huge Chinese pirate feet. See also
John C. Appleby, “Women and Piracy in Ireland: From Gráinne O’Malley to Anne Bonny,” in Bandits at Sea: A Pirate Reader, ed. C. R. Pennell (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 283–98, and
Dian Murray, “Cheng I Sao in Fact and Fiction,” in Bandits at Sea: A Pirate Reader, ed. C. R. Pennell (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 283–98.
Henry Louis Mencken, Prejudices: First Series (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1919), 90.
Jo Stanley has located references to two female privateers, one in 1741 and one in 1805, but there seems to be no further information about these women (Jo Stanley, Bold in Her Breeches: Women Pirates across the Ages [San Francisco: Pandora, 1995], 143). The cross-dressed Mary Anne Talbot may have had a brief, accidental tour aboard a French privateer (
Julie Wheelwright, “Tars, Tarts, and Swashbucklers,” in Bold in Her Breeches: Women Pirates across the Ages, ed. Jo Stanley [San Francisco: Pandora, 1995], 189). Stanley believes there must have been other pirating women, but the fact remains that we have no record that there was widespread public knowledge of any such figures. Kris Lane places Read and Bonny “among only four or five female pirates on record for the early modern period,” but does not identify the other two to three supposedly “on record;” presumably they may be Stanley’s privateers (
Kris Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750 [London: M. E. Sharpe, 1998], 186).
David Cordingly, Seafaring Women: Adventures of Pirate Queens, Female Stowaways, and Sailors’ Wives (New York: Random House, 2007), 82. Cordingly does not indicate who makes this suggestion; it is not one that appears directly in any eighteenth-century source. It is not recorded in the trial documents, and Johnson is quite clear that Bonny’s sexual interest in Read ends once Read reveals her biological secret. Following Cordingly, Jo Stanley intones, “The lesbian imputation put on Read and Bonny may have been a way to devalue them further, though their lesbianism may also have been real and an additional reason for hauling them before the bench” (Bold in Her Breeches, 155). The trial of Read and Bonny, at least as recorded in the 1721 pamphlet, contains no such imputations. Wheelwright finds an 1813 chapbook, The Daring Exploits of Henry Morgan, which calls Bonny Read’s “lover,” but neither Cordingly nor Stanley makes reference to it or any other source for the lesbian rumors they propagate (“Tars, Tarts, and Swashbucklers,” 192).
Ulrike Klausman, Marion Meinzerin, and Gabriel Kuhn, Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1998), 178–88. Undaunted by a complete lack of evidence, the authors declare, “The pictures that show Bartholomew Roberts with a thick moustache are products of fantasy. The only authentic depiction shows a slender, beardless person with a grim look, fashionable knickers, and thigh muscles like Martina Navratilova” (179). On their unacknowledged use of Carlova, see Rennie 266.
Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 120–21. See also Rob Canfield, “Something’s Mizzen: Anne Bonny, Mary Read, ‘Polly,’ and Female Counter-Roles on the Imperialist Stage,” South Atlantic Review 66.2 (2001): 45–63.
See Diane Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 24, 31–45.
As Claire Jowitt has pointed out, Bess is acting fully as a pirate here, attacking ships that surely do not contain Spencer’s corpse and without any privateering documents to authorize her actions (Claire Jowitt, The Culture of Piracy, 1580–1630: English Literature and Seaborne Crime [Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010], 122).
See Katherine Anderson’s analysis of this odd novel, which connects Fanny’s story to Dugaw’s work and the tendency of female soldiers and mariners to justify their heroic exploits in the name of love (Katherine Anderson, “Female Pirates and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Popular Fiction,” in Pirates and Mutineers of the Nineteenth Century: Swashbucklers and Swindlers, ed. Grace Moore [Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011], 100).
Rudolf M. Dekker and Lotte C. van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989), 9. The authors note that marine occupations may be overrepresented in such studies precisely because women were more likely to be found out on ships compared to almost any other occupation (10). On the other hand, Wendy Nielsen suggests, not illogically, that the often desperate need for naval recruits may have been a factor in tempting women to try their hands as sailors and might have made it easier for them to pass as boys (
Wendy Nielsen, Women Warriors in Romantic Drama [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013], 100).
Polly was well received and ran for a decent, but hardly legendary, ten nights at the Little Theatre in Haymarket. For more on its revival, see Peter Reed, “Conquer or Die: Staging Circum-Atlantic Revolt in Polly and Three-Fingered Jack,” Theatre Journal 59.2 (2007): 241, 245–51. The Larpent manuscript held at the Huntington Library gives the title as Polly an Opera: Alter’d from Gay (15th April 1777). No changes were made or asked for, although Colman, as stated in the title, had already made a considerable number of “alterations,” largely cutting various airs, and the published “as acted” version cuts even more. The curtailments seem to be mostly in the interest of time; no thematic or political motivation is obvious.
J. Hillis Miller, “Narrative,” Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd Edition, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995], 72.
See Hal Gladfelder, “Introduction.” The Beggar’s Opera and Polly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), xxxi–xxxii.
See Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), especially 7–82.
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© 2015 Frederick Burwick and Manushag N. Powell
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Burwick, F., Powell, M.N. (2015). She-Pirates. In: British Pirates in Print and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137339928_8
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