The Daring Book for Girls - Andrea J. Buchanan [54]
With just two years of her sentence left, she was assigned to work as a servant to a settler in Hobart Town, Tasmania, along with fellow prisoner Catherine Hagerty. In April 1806, Charlotte, her daughter, Catherine, and several male convicts traveled to Hobart Town on a ship called Venus. When the Venus docked at Port Dalrymple in June, the convicts mutinied, and Charlotte and her friend Catherine joined in with the male convicts to seize control of the ship. The pirate crew headed for New Zealand (even though nobody aboard really knew how to navigate the ship), and Charlotte, her child, Catherine, and two of the male convicts were dropped off at Rangihoua Bay in the Bay of Islands.
Charlotte and her compatriots built huts and lived on the shore of the island, but by 1807, Catherine Hagerty was dead, and the two men had fled. The Venus had long since been overtaken by South Sea islanders, who captured the crew and then burned the ship. Charlotte and her child stayed on Rangihoua Bay, living alongside the Maori islanders. Twice she was offered passage back to Port Jackson, and twice she refused, saying that she preferred to die among the Maori.
What happened to Charlotte after 1807 isn’t entirely clear. Some stories have her living with a Maori chieftain and bearing another child; in other stories the Maori turned on her, prompting her and her daughter to flee to Tonga; still other stories eventually place her in America, having stowed away on another ship. Whatever happened to her, she was quite possibly the first European woman to have lived in New Zealand, and one of New Zealand’s first women pirates.
ANNE BONNY AND MARY READ
Anne Bonny, born in Ireland around 1700, is by all accounts one of the best known female pirates. She was disowned by her father when, as a young teen, she married a sailor named James Bonny; the newlyweds then left Ireland for the Bahamas. There, James worked as an informant, turning in pirates to the authorities for a tidy sum. While James confronted pirates, Anne befriended them: she became especially close with Jack Rackam, also known as “Calico Jack.” Jack was a pirate who had sworn off pirating so as to receive amnesty from the Bahamian governor, who had promised not to prosecute any pirate who gave up his pirating ways. In 1719, however, Anne and Jack ran off together, and Jack promptly returned to pirating—this time with Anne by his side. She donned men’s clothing in order to join the crew on his ship, the Revenge, and was so good at the work that she was accepted as a crewmate even by those men who discovered she was actually a woman.
When the Revenge took another ship during a raid and absorbed its crew, Anne discovered she was no longer the only woman on board: a woman by the name of Mary Read had also disguised herself as a man to be accepted as a pirate. Mary, born in London in the late 1600s, had spent nearly her whole life disguised as a man. Mary’s mother had raised her as a boy almost from birth to keep the family out of poverty. (Mary’s father died before she was born, and her brother, who would have been the only legal heir, also died. Back then, only men could inherit wealth, so baby Mary became baby Mark.) As a young girl living as a boy, Mary worked as a messenger and eventually enlisted in the infantry, fighting in Flanders and serving with distinction. She fell in love with another soldier (to whom she revealed her true gender), and they soon married, leaving the army to run a tavern called The Three Horseshoes. Sadly, her husband died in 1717, and Mary once again had to disguise herself as a man to earn a living. She put on her dead husband’s clothes, enlisted in the army, and went to Holland. She found no adventure there, so she boarded a ship for the West Indies. That was when her ship was captured by the Revenge, and her life intersected with