Two Day Magazine

Calico Jack Rackham and the Pirate Anne Bonny

Given the sympathetic light in which Hollywood has always shown the outlaws of the Old West, and as of very recently, once again, the pirates of the 17th century, one might almost expect future cinematographers portraying today’s human traffickers and identity theft conmen, in the rosy light of hindsight, as loveably roguish scamps and dashing adventurers. Not wishing to burst the bubble of those swept up by the current collective swashbuckler fairytale, I’d like to relate a true story of two (or maybe three) of the more likeable examples of the sea-faring vicious thugs and gang-bangers. After some contact with these unsavory yet appealing subjects, you may feel, ethically, rather sullied. I do. And as you may wish to retain your Errol Flynn/Johnny Depp daydream; before we proceed, let’s see how a brief tour of the center of the world of piracy suits you. Afterwards, we’ll know what you might think of the real Calico Jack, and maybe a little of what the real Calico Jack would have thought of you.

Imagine a queer June morning in 1692 in the Caribbean sea port of Port Royal, near what is now Kingstown, Jamaica. Although throughout the British Empire, most subjects of the Crown are at prayer, a majority of the rough neck wharf-rat inhabitants of this haven for sailors and smugglers are recovering from last night’s revelry, if not still celebrating. Called “the Wickedest City in World”, it is estimated that the city of Port Royal (so overrun with pirates that they were once used as the town’s private navy) is about 50% outlaws: buccaneers, prostitutes, and smugglers.

A strange tension hangs in the tropical breeze. An eerie chorus of ghastly moans rises and every dog in town suddenly begins baying at the noon day sun as though it were the full moon. Nervously, citizens genuflect. Seafarers knock on wood to ward off the Evil Eye. The mare drawing the Governor Nicholas Lawe’s coach to church suddenly rears screaming in its harness. Far off, on one of the many buccaneer vessels a monotonous fiddler’s jig, the player punch-drunk on rum and fatigue, is drowned out by the low moan of the church organ. The governor Nicholas Lawes takes his pew as the congregation sings the last lines of the hymn, a direful warning of the punishment of the wicked on the Day of Judgement.

Suddenly, the black shadow of many beating wings outside blot out the light of stained glass windows. A terrible swarm of screaming crows and water-birds flee the green hills and beat desperately against the wind for open sea. Suddenly, from far away, the sound of women screaming invades the church. The parishioners, in a panic, drop to their knees and pray to be saved. The day they knew would inevitably come had arrived. With a sickening lurch, then entire church drops several feet into the earth. Above the screams of many, and the sudden roar of the sea and rending of timbers and a chorus of cynical, malicious laughter rises, and draws nearer.

Grown men in the chapel scream in terror as the prow of a pirate ship suddenly smashes into the church in a wave of shattered stained glass and sea water. Hanging from its rigging, black-hearted buccaneers laugh at the trembling of the congregation weeping in the pews below the vessel’s flapping sails. Even as some of their shipmates are tossed into the grinding chaos of flying bricks and timbers by the rogue wave, the buccaneers laugh with rum-sotted ghoulishness at the sight of the World (for which they had so little love that they would turn to piracy) in the twisting agony of its own End.
As the church roof and walls are torn away, the destruction of the town is revealed. Buildings slouch drunkenly into the rising sea. Some houses, with women and children screaming from the windows, sink vertically into the earth. As if in a painting of doomsday, the earthquake shakes the bloated bodies of the buried out of the churchyard, and this hideous bobbing flotsam spreads across the waters that have risen to engulf Port Royal’s narrow streets. Merchant sloops and cargo ships are pitched onto the town, some splitting open against homes and workshops, the rum and gold in their holds gushing out to mingle with the blood that flows in the streets. Citizens and horses attempting to flee the water on foot are sucked down into the earth up to their necks, and are crushed to death by the black sand.

 A carnival of plunder, drunkenness and rape follows for days after the disaster. Cheering, the innumerable thieves, cut-throats and vicious uncharitable bastards of Port Royal swarm through the wreckage of one of the richest cities in the world, (ignoring the cries of the trapped and the wounded) despoil the shattered homes of riches, and empty the pockets of the hundreds of dead as their bodies float by. Certainly, many virtuous but disadvantaged citizens of Port Royal took advantage of the ruin of Port Royal to fill their pockets with their first jingling fistfuls of robbery. Certainly, many chaste and pious young people indulged their long-repressed lusts. The world was ending. Get it while you can.

If amid this hell-broth of genuine pandemonium, carnage and death, something in this nightmarish scene nevertheless strikes you with a grisly sense of fun, you may make a pirate after all; you perverse black-hearted fiend, you.

But Port Royal was not utterly destroyed by the earthquake. Merchants and seamen of all sorts returned, and much was the same as it had been in this wealthy, wicked trading hub. This was odd. It wasn’t as if, at the time, there was a fear that Port Royal might be cursed by the Devil. Nothing of the sort.

Port Royal was the confirmed vacation bungalow of the Prince of Darkness himself. In the sense of the phrase moral compass, 18th century travelers could now, with certainty, find Evil Incarnate on the map. Skeptical materialists of the day were reminded of the destruction of this notorious ‘Sodom of the New World’ as clear proof of the existence of Divine Retribution.

Without notable contradiction, the Reverend Cotton Mather, the prominent church leader in the western world (famous for his role in the Salem Witch Trials, another dark chapter in the history of the western hemisphere) called the destruction of Port Royal “an instance of God Almighty’s severe judgment.”

So after this disaster, what kind of reckless, morally destitute desperado would intentionally seek out such an undisputedly godforsaken cesspit of calamity, inequity and vice?

Meet Calico Jack Rackham. Yes, the man on the rum bottle. Jack first sailed with the pirate Charles Vane, becoming captain by usurping Vane’s command after a mutiny. Calico Jack (named thus for the expensive material he wore) was notoriously bold among pirates for his willingness to attack ships near to shore, which was a way of flirting with capture by the English navy. What is remarkable about Calico Jack’s career was that when it ended in his arrest, his crew had not one but two female pirates among it. This was highly unusual, as most women who found themselves on the all-male pirate ships were seldom invited to join the crew, and were usually treated with significantly less hospitality.

The first exception to this trend in Calico Jack’s unusual crew was Anne Bonny, a scarlet haired beauty whom Jack had stolen from her husband as a trophy. The second was Mary Read, who was had been part of a pirate crew, previously, disguised as a man. Their story has it that Mary revealed the secret of her gender to Anne, and as such the two bonded for a little female solidarity, but Jack began to wonder why this beardless youth was paying so much attention to his copper-haired prize, and challenged this rival to a duel. Mary revealed her secret to Jack to save herself, and found herself with a lover in the form of her former opponent.

What seemed natural to many in the time of Anne Bonny and Calico Jack was that the destruction by earthquake of the lawless place where these brigands made port was widely considered understandable, even just -- bad things happening to bad people -- although roughly half of the citizens of Port Royal who lost their lives in the catastrophe of 1692 did not fill their pockets by loot and plunder. As juvenile as we may feel, indulging in the fantasy of the swashbuckling freebooters of the Spanish Main , it is equally unflattering to realize that, even today, some think of the arbitrary destruction of an earthquake in which thousands perish is divine punishment for the collective sin of some post-Biblical Sodom .

In the wake of the Haitian earthquake of January 2010 in which at least 200,000 were killed, television evangelist Pat Robertson suggested on his program “The 700 Club” that the recent disaster was Divine Retribution for what he interpreted as the Haitian people having made a pact with the Devil to gain liberation from the French in 1804. With these sentiments that echo the tone of Cotton Mather following that other Caribbean earthquake, we are reminded that the superstition, bigotry, vanity and mule-headedness of some of us has changed very little.

The short life of our pirate threesome was a life lived on the razor’s edge of danger, a life which certainly burned bright with riches and adventure, for having burned itself out quickly. What is also remarkable in this fantasy on the high seas is the loyalty the two she-pirates rivals for Jack’s attentions demonstrated for one another… if not for Jack. After a number of successful raids in 1720 Jack weighed anchor for Port Royal , to spend their ill-gotten gains.

When in the service of Sir Nicholas Lawes, Captain Jonathan Barnet (no relation) came alongside the pirate sloop and boarded her, he found Calico Jack and his crewmen hiding in the hold, while Mary Read and Anne Bonny repelled Barnet’s men, fighting back-to-back on deck with drawn swords. In the end, the women were overpowered, but Calico Jack ultimately defended the lives of his shipmate lovers, in a manner of speaking. Although Sir Nicholas found them all guilty, Mary and Anne both were both found to be carrying Jack’s children, and both avoided the gallows, as the crown could not send the mothers to the gallows without punishing the innocents they carried. “If he had fought like a man,” said Anne of Jack as he was sentenced to death, “he need not have been hanged like a dog.” Mary did not enjoy her good fortune, and died while still in prison. But Anne sailed off into the shadows of time, and for all that history can attest, she may still haunt the bone-strewn sands of the Caribbean.

And this, in spite of what Mather might wish, must pass for justice done in the case of the notorious pirates Rackham, Bonny, and Read. It may not have been Divine, nor even terribly fair, but whatever we think, for all the inadequacies of human justice, then or now, it is certainly more exact than the thought of the wholesale slaughter of random thousands for the perceived inequity of some or even most of an entire population at the dreadful hand of some vengeful Deity as haunts the imagination of the Reverends Robertson and Mather.