Mary Read
Mary Read was tried for piracy in Jamaica in 1720 alongside Anne Bonny, and escaped the gallows by pleading pregnancy. Almost everything known of her comes from Captain Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates, published in 1724, which is part reporting and part invention and cannot be checked. By that account she was born in England around 1685, the illegitimate daughter of a widow who dressed her as a boy to pass her off as a dead legitimate son and keep a grandmother's allowance. She kept the disguise: as a footboy, then aboard a warship, then as a soldier in Flanders in the horse and foot, where she fought well and fell in love with a Flemish comrade. She revealed herself, married him, and they kept an inn near Breda called the Three Horseshoes. He died, and she put the clothes back on and went to sea. Her ship was taken by pirates in the Caribbean, and she joined Calico Jack Rackham's crew, where she found that another member was also a woman. The court record is the part that is documented. Rackham's sloop was taken off Jamaica in October 1720 by a privateer, and the trial in November heard evidence that when the men had gone below drunk, Read and Bonny fought on deck alone, and that Read called down for them to come up and fight like men. Both were convicted and both pleaded their bellies. Read died of a fever in prison in April 1721. Bonny's fate is unrecorded, which has left three centuries of speculation to fill the gap.
- Lived: 1695 CE – 1721 CE
- Nationality: English
- Roles: pirate
