Mary Read: The 61-Day Pirate, Pleading the Belly and Centuries of Myth

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Most of what is told about Mary Read comes from Captain Charles Johnson's 1724 A General History of the Pirates, which says her mother dressed her as a boy to collect a crown a week from a grandmother, that she soldiered in Flanders, married a fellow soldier and ran an inn called the Three Horseshoes near Breda. Historians find no record of the inn or the soldier. Two real candidates exist: a Mary Read born in Bristol around 1681 whose father John was a pirate in Madagascar, and a literate Mary Read who signed the 1708 Brayholt petition to Queen Anne seeking pardons for Madagascar pirates. On August 22, 1720, Read, Anne Bonny, John Rackham and about a dozen men stole the sloop William from Nassau harbor.

Governor Woodes Rogers named both women in a proclamation printed in the Boston Gazette, undercutting Johnson's tale of a hidden identity. On October 22, 1720, exactly 61 days after the theft, pirate hunter Jonathan Barnet caught the crew drinking off Negril Point, Jamaica, and they surrendered after a shot brought down the boom. Rackham and the men were hanged. Read and Bonny claimed to be pregnant, winning a stay, but no birth is recorded, and Read died of a fever in her cell in April 1721 and was buried in St. Catherine Parish. Her afterlife followed: a character in John Gay's 1729 opera Polly, a Victorian tragic heroine, and since the 1970s a feminist and queer icon.

• Captive Dorothy Thomas testified the women wore men's jackets and trousers, carried cutlasses and pistols, and were plainly women.
• Johnson's story of Bonny falling for a disguised Read and Rackham threatening to cut Read's throat has no basis in the record.
• The first hint of a romance between Read and Bonny appeared in a single sentence of a 1725 knockoff of Johnson's book.
• Magnus Hirschfeld mentioned Read in 1914, and a 1972 article by a lesbian separatist group reshaped her image.
• A 2020 statue of Read and Bonny meant for an island in Devon was installed in 2023 at Lewes FC.