The Last Two Pirates Standing Were Women

In October 1720, the pirate‑hunter Jonathan Barnet caught up with a stolen sloop off the coast of Jamaica, in a bay now known as Bloody Bay. It was around ten o’clock at night. The pirate crew had been celebrating a recent prize. The men were drunk on stolen wine below deck.

When Barnet’s men boarded, they found two people fighting. Both were women.

The Horror

Anne Bonny — an Irish‑born planter’s daughter who had run off to sea with John “Calico Jack” Rackham — and Mary Read — who had spent much of her life passing as a man in the army, the navy, and then aboard pirate ships — were the only members of the crew still on their feet.

Read screamed down through the hatch at the men hiding below: “If there’s a man among ye, come up and fight like the man ye are to be!”

Nobody came up.

She fired her pistol through the hatch into the hold, killing or wounding one of her own crewmates. The men still didn’t come up.

Bonny and Read fought alone on deck until they were overwhelmed. Rackham surrendered. Everyone was arrested and taken to Spanish Town, Jamaica, for trial.

John “Calico Jack” Rackham — best known for his Jolly Roger design of a skull above crossed swords — was sentenced to death with the male members of his crew. His last request was to see Anne one more time.

She came. Captain Charles Johnson’s 1724 General History of the Pyrates records her words: “I am sorry to see you here, Jack, but if you had fought like a Man, you need not have been hang’d like a Dog.”

Rackham was hanged on 18 November 1720. His body was covered in tar, placed in an iron cage, and gibbeted on a small islet at the entrance to Port Royal harbour — still known today as Rackham’s Cay. Every ship entering Jamaica saw his corpse swinging over the water.

Anne Bonny and Mary Read were both sentenced to death. Both “pleaded the belly” — they claimed they were pregnant, and under English law pregnant women could not be executed until after they had given birth.

Mary Read died in prison in April 1721, probably from fever (typhus) and complications of pregnancy. Parish records from St Catherine, Jamaica, note the burial of “Mary Read, pirate.”

Anne Bonny did not die on the gallows. But she did not appear in the execution lists. After the trial, she simply drops out of the Jamaican records. No execution entry. No burial entry. No prison record. No grave. No clear trace at all.

Later family traditions and modern researchers have suggested that her wealthy father in Carolina managed to buy her release and bring her home. One reconstruction has her remarrying a man called Joseph Burleigh, having several children, and dying under the name Anne Burleigh in South Carolina in 1782, in her early eighties. None of it can be proved beyond doubt. The one solid fact is that the woman who told the most infamous pirate in Jamaica that he died “like a dog” stepped out of the official record and never stepped back in.

The Modern Relic

Port Royal — once the “wickedest city on Earth” — partly slid into the sea in the 1692 earthquake and is now a quiet fishing town on the tip of the Palisadoes, facing Kingston. Rackham’s Cay, where his tarred body swung in an iron cage, is still visible from the harbour.

The Jolly Roger flag he made famous — skull with crossed cutlasses — is still the universal symbol for piracy, printed on everything from bottle labels to Halloween costumes. The man who popularised it was hanged like a dog.

Anne Bonny, who told him so, may have lived out her days in a house with a different name on the door, dying in clean sheets under a name that never appears in a pirate chronicle. For the most famous female pirate in history, the most piratical act may have been the last one: disappearing.

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