Anne Bonny

Anne Bonny (born Anna Cormac) was an Irish pirate born in Kinsale, County Cork in 1700. Very little is known of her life, but it is known that she was the bastard daughter of a lawyer, William Cormac, and his maidservant, Mary Brennan, conceived while Cormac's wife was ill and living with her Mother in Law.  Brennan also had a suitor, a young man who worked as a tanner in the town. The tanner used to call on the house when Cormac was out, and on one occasion, slipped three silver spoons into his pocket. Brennan soon noticed they were gone, and confronted him. Alarmed, he hid the spoons under Brennan's bedsheets. When Mrs. Cormac recovered from her illness and returned to the house, Brennan told her of the missing spoons. The tanner was called for, and claimed it was a jest, and told Mrs Cormac the spoons were in Brennan's bed. The matter was then settled, however Mrs. Cormac then realised that Brennan would surely have found the spoons if she had been sleeping in her own bed. She then left her husband, and Cormac and Brennan (who was pregnant) moved to Kinsale where Bonny was born.
They moved to Carolina when Bonny was 12, and her mother died shortly after. Her father failed to establish himself as a lawyer and joined a more profitable merchant business.
Bonny is said to have been a comely lass with red hair and a hot temper, and is said to have badly beaten a young man who tried to rape her, and he lay ill of it for a considerable time. Her father expected a good marriage for her, however at a young age she married James Bonny, a poor sailor and small-time pirate who hoped to inherit Cormac's estate, but Cormac disowned his daughter. The two moved to Nassau, a haven for pirates in the Caribbean. When Woodes Rogers arrived to quell the pirate fleets, James Bonny became his informant.

Once in Nassau, Bonny quickly tired of her husband and left him. It was then she met Captain "Calico" Jack Rackham, and became his lover and accomplice aboard the ship Revenge. She had a son by him in Cuba, who would take the name Cunningham, and once recovered, she returned to sea with Rackham. Reports say that Bonny was a competent pirate and skilled in combat, and Woodes Rogers included her name in a list in a 'Wanted Pirates' circular in the continent's only newspaper, The Boston News-Letter. It was then that she met "Mark" Read, a pirate in Rackham's crew, who she took a fancy to. After endeavouring to mate his better acquaintance, Mark revealed himself to be a woman, Mary Read. She revealed herself to Rackham also to calm his jealousy, but her identity remained a secret to all others.

When Rackham's crew was attacked by pirate hunter Captain Jonathan Barnet in 1720, most of the crew including Rackham were dead drunk, and only Read, Bonny, and one unnamed other stood on deck to fight the hunters. They were overwhelmed and taken to Jamaica for trial. Like Read, Bonny was pregnant at the time of her trial, and was able to "plead the belly" to stay her execution. Her last words to Rackham were, "I am sorry to see you here, but if you had fought like a man, you need not have been hang'd like a dog."

There is no historical record of what happened to Bonny after her imprisonment, only that she was never executed. Some speculate that her father ransomed her, or that she escaped, or that she lived out her days in jail, but nobody knows for sure.