As done for Mary Read, here’s a highly speculative timeline structured around key events in the General History narrative, though there are fewer anchor points to specific dates. (Both women’s narratives make reference to things like the King’s Pardon, but in ways that don’t align well with the known timelines.) I’ve included some details from the 2nd edition which elaborate on events but don’t add substantial changes to the timeline. Many of the dates are vague estimates based on trying to coordinate descriptions in the General History to documented historic events.
England
Covering topics relating specifically to England or generally to the region equivalent to the modern United Kingdom. Sometimes lazily and inaccurately used generally for the British Isles, especially when articles don’t specifically identify the nationality of authors.
LHMP entry
The LIFE of ANNE BONNY.
Only two events in Read’s narrative can be tied with certainty to a specific date: her husband’s death around the date of the Peace of Reswick, which occurred in 1697, and her capture and trial in 1720. The following highly speculative timeline is worked backwards and forwards around these dates. Note that this timeline attempts to make sense of the General History narrative, without otherwise evaluating its likely accuracy.
The LIFE of MARY READ,
The General History of the Pirates
And now we’re ready to see what the General History says about Bonny and Read, three years after these events. The text I have is the second edition. My understanding is that the first edition also contained the material on Bonny and Read in the main text, but that only the appendices were new to the second edition.
Sorting Out Rackham’s Crew
Given the wide variety of numbers given for Rackham’s crew, it might be useful to digress a moment and try to sort things out.
I was inspired to tackle this set of material because of the flood of sapphic “pirate romances,” many of which are reworkings of the myth (and I use “myth” advisedly) of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, while others spin off from the Hollywood version of the broader myths of the Golden Age of Piracy derived from the anonymously authored General History of the Pirates. As often happens, I was curious to know the original primary source materials that set these myths in motion. Moreover, I was curious to try to determine what parts of that source material might have any basis in fact.
The typical focus on researching female same-sex desire in the early modern period centers around medical and legal records, the motif of physiological anomaly (the enlarged clitoris myth), and attempts to identify covert homoerotic themes in women’s writing. In contrast, pornography and popular culture (ballads and pamphlets) present a different view, even though they can rarely be interpreted as self-reporting of the women involved.
The author notes a lack of attention paid to mid-17th century literary pornography, a telling absence in considerations of gender-related shifts in this era, while also noting that feminist analysis of pornography focuses mostly on contemporary issues and treats the genre as monolithic and inherently misogynistic.
This article addresses the ticklish topic of the “sapphic incest motif” in erotic art and drama around the turn of the 20th century. Multiple themes braid together within this general context. The rhetorical use of “sisterhood” in support of feminist and sapphic communities. (It isn’t too far a stretch to assert the existence of sapphic communities at this point.) The use of actual or fictional family ties to defuse potential sapphic readings, as with actress Charlotte Cushman’s Romeo playing opposite her real-life sister’s Juliet.
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