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.

Henry Avery, The Pirate King

No pirate was ever so well known in his day as Captain Avery of the Fancy, who has been the inspiration for many pirate myths and characters. Operating in the last years of the 17th Century, Avery and his fleet terrorised the Atlantic and Indian oceans until 1696, and became the focus of the world's first global manhunt.As always with pirates, little is known of their early life, but what is known of Avery is he was born  near Plymouth on the 23rd of August, 1659. He served in the Royal Navy during the Nine Year's War, and afterwards became a slave trader off the African coast. In 1693 he became a mariner again, as first mate on the Spanish warship of forty-six guns, the Charles II. But after the ship's owners failed to pay their wages, so on the evening of the 7th of May, 1694, Avery led a mutiny against the captain, put him ashore with five or six loyalists, and sailed the ship for the Indian Ocean to begin their pirate career.

Henry Avery, the Pirate King

In 1695, The Fancy sailed to the Arabian Sea, where a 25-ship convoy of Grand Mughal vessels was making the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, including the treasure-laden flagship Ganj-i-sawai and its escort, the Fateh Muhammed. Avery joined forces with several other pirate vessels, and found himself in command of a small pirate squadron, including a sloop captained by English pirate Thomas Tew. As the pirates gave chase, the smaller vessels in the squadron gradually fell behind, and at some point Tew was killed in an engagement with a Mughal ship. Avery had more success, and captured the escort ship the Fateh Muhammed and then the Ganj-i-sawai, having broken the ship's mast in a broadside. The bloody hand-to-hand battle on deck waged for several hours. The pirates took heavy losses but the spoils were astronomical. Avery had captured up to £600,000 in precious metals and jewels, making him the richest pirate in the world, equivalent to around £52.4 million in present day money. Avery and his crew then tortured and killed a great number of the passengers and raped women of all ages. Some women stabbed themselves with daggers or jumped overboard, committing suicide to escape this fate.The plunder of Emperor Aurangzeb's treasure ship had serious consequences for England, with Avery's attack damaging relations so terribly that the very existence of English trade in India was threatened. When the damaged Ganj-i-sawai finally limped its way back to harbour in Surat, news of the pirates' rape of the Muslim women was considered an unforgivable violation of the Hajj. The local Indian governor, Itimad Khan, immediately arrested the English subjects in Surat and kept them under close watch, partly as a punishment for their countrymen's depredations and partly for their own protection from the rioting locals. Aurangzeb was livid, and quickly closed four of the company's factories in India and imprisoned the officers, nearly ordering an armed attack against the English city of Bombay with the goal of forever expelling the English from India.
To appease Aurangzeb, the East India Company promised to pay all financial reparations, while Parliament declared the pirates hostis humani generis ("enemies of the human race"). In mid-1696 the government issued a £500 bounty on Avery's head and offered a free pardon to any informer who disclosed his whereabouts. When the East India Company later doubled that reward, the first worldwide manhunt in recorded history was underway. The Crown also promised to exempt Avery from all pardons and amnesties it would subsequently issue to other pirates. 
Avery meanwhile sailed to New Providence, and under the name of Henry Bridgeman and claiming to be an unlicensed slave trader, offered the Governor £860 to let them stay and not ask questions. New Providence was underfunded and underpopulated, and at serious risk of French attack, and so the Governor agreed. As the manhunt for Avery escalated, the Governor by now having realised who he was, covered for him in exchange for the Fancy, as well as fifty tons of ivory tusks, one hundred barrels of gunpowder, several chests of firearms and ammunition, and an assortment of ship anchors. As the heat mounted, and the governor himself coming under suspicion, he had the Fancy destroyed to remove the key piece of evidence that Avery was in his town.
Regardless the Governor was forced to either put a warrant out for Every's arrest or, failing to do so, effectively disclose his association with the pirate. Preferring the former choice for the sake of his reputation, he alerted the authorities as to pirates' whereabouts, but was able to tip off Avery and his crew before the authorities arrived. Avery's 113-person crew then fashioned their hasty escape, vanishing from the island with only twenty-four men ever captured, six of whom were executed. His last words to his men were a litany of conflicting stories of where he planned to go, doubtless intended to throw pursuers off his trail.

Avery's crew split up, while Avery was spotted in Dublin harbour in June 1696, with about twenty other men in the sloop Sea Flower. They aroused suspicions while unloading their treasure, and two of the men were subsequently caught. Avery, however, was able to escape once again. His fate after this encounter is unknown.