In the 1700s, two women Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Calico Jack Rackam made their mark in history when they sailed under the pirate Calico Jack Rackam dressed as men.
Anne Bonny, born in 1700 near Cork, Ireland, was the daughter of her father's affair with the maid. When he did not want his scandal to affect his practice, he made his little girl dress as if she were a boy training to be a lawyer's clerk. Bonny’s father kicked her out of the house at the age of fifteen once she married a penniless sailor, James Bonny, and moved to New Providence where she met Jack Rackam. He was voted captain after challenging the previous leader about an attack on a French "frigate," which Rackam and his men successfully plundered near Jamaica. The pirate courted Bonny and persuaded her to leave her husband behind for a life out at sea with him. She accepted and soon became pregnant with Rackam’s child, staying in Cuba with friends before being able to return to the crew.
Shortly afterwards, the couple captured the merchant ship on which Mary Read hid her identity in men's clothing. After her older brother died and being the child of an affair, Read's mother dressed her as a boy to get the inheritance money from the mother-in-law. Later, Read got a job as a footman to a French lady, then went to Flanders and enlisted in the army as a cadet. She fell in love with one of the other soldiers, confessed the truth of her gender and feelings, and married once the campaign was over. In 1697, her husband passed away and soldiers left. Read dressed as a man again, joined a foot regiment, and sailed to the West Indies until pirates captured the ship. Bonny thought Read to be nothing more than a Dutch boy, but later on she found out she was an Englishwoman and let Rackam in on the secret.
When they stole the ship William from Nassau Harbor, the governor of New Providence made a proclamation of the missing sloop and Jack and his crew. Captain Jonathan Barnet discovered the William hiding in Negril Point and managed to damage the ship, board her, and capture the pirates during the darkness of the night. The captives were given to Major Richard James to be taken to the Spanish Town jail and await their trials.
Trials were held in 1720 in New Providence after the two women, Jack Rackam, and the crew were captured. On November 16, the men were found guilty and sentenced to death. They were hung at Gallows Point and Kingston the following day with Rackam's body in a cage for all to see.
About two weeks after the men were tried for piracy, the women faced their own. Read and Bonny were tried in the third and fourth degree of piracy and robberies and sentenced to death until they revealed their trump card: they were pregnant. Soon afterwards, Mary Read died in prison before her child was born and buried on April 28, 1721. As legend has it, Anne Bonny was released, left the Caribbean and piracy behind, and began a new life with her child.