Mary Read

Overview

Mary Read was one of two women known by name to have been convicted of piracy under the British Crown during the Golden Age, the other being her shipmate Anne Bonny. Both sailed in the small consort of John “Calico Jack” Rackham, were captured off the coast of Jamaica in October 1720, and were tried separately at Spanish Town that November. Read was convicted and pleaded pregnancy at sentencing; the death sentence was stayed, but she died of fever in Spanish Town gaol the following spring before the child was born.

Origins

Read’s early life is preserved almost entirely through Charles Johnson’s 1724 General History of the Pyrates and cannot be independently verified. According to Johnson, she was born in England around 1685, the illegitimate daughter of a widow who raised her in boy’s clothing to claim a posthumous inheritance from her absent husband’s mother. She served as a footboy, then as a powder-monkey aboard a man-of-war, then as a soldier in a Flanders infantry regiment during the War of the Spanish Succession, before marrying a fellow soldier and operating a Dutch inn called the Three Horseshoes. After her husband’s death she returned to military service, this time on a Dutch ship bound for the West Indies, which was captured by pirates — how she came to be among them in the first place.

The Johnson account is internally consistent and historically plausible in its broad outline (English women did serve in male disguise during the wars of the early eighteenth century, with several documented cases). It cannot be corroborated in detail.

Career

Read’s piratical career, like Bonny’s, was short: she joined Rackham’s sloop in the summer of 1720, and the crew was taken at Negril Bay, Jamaica, in October of the same year. The trial testimony at Spanish Town states that Bonny and Read were the only crew members fit to defend the vessel during the boarding by Jonathan Barnet’s privateer, the rest of the male crew being drunk and below decks — a vignette repeated, again, by Johnson and consistently cited since.

Read was tried jointly with Anne Bonny at Spanish Town on 28 November 1720, convicted, and pleaded pregnancy. The sentence was stayed pending the birth. She fell ill in the unsanitary conditions of Spanish Town gaol and died of fever in April 1721, before delivering. She is buried in the parish church at St. Catherine, Jamaica, in an unmarked grave.

Associates & contemporaries

• Anne Bonny — Shipmate aboard the <em>William</em>; tried alongside Read at Spanish Town.
• John "Calico Jack" Rackham — Captain of the <em>William</em>; hanged 18 November 1720.