Yo ho, yo ho, it was a pirate’s life for her.
Mary Read spent much of her life dressed in male clothing, engaging in the traditional male activities of the time like soldiering, sailoring and eventually, pirating.
It seems she was born to it. With her sailor husband was lost at sea and pregnant with another man’s child, Mary’s mother escaped to the English countryside in 1685 to hide out before giving birth. Accompanying her was her young son, her husband’s only heir, only to die in the countryside shortly before Mary was born. Determined not to miss out on his inheritance, she dressed Mary as a boy and presented the baby to her mother-in-law as her grandson. The con worked and the grandmother supported Mary and her mother until she died when Mary was 13.
Needing to work, Mary adopted the persona Mark Read and found work as a footman and a sailor before joining the British military. When she fell in love and married a fellow soldier, she shed her Mark identity and for a time happily ran an inn in the Netherlands. Her husband’s death found her back in the breeches for a stint in the Flemish army before she boarded a ship for the West Indies to try her luck in the Caribbean.
The next series of events led her to the pirate’s life. When her ship to the West Indies was taken by pirates, she joined them. The King gave her a pardon in 1718 for her pirate ways, so she worked for a time as a commissioned privateer. The lure of the wrong side of the law proved too strong when in 1720 she joined the crew of pirate John “Calico Jack” Rackham. All as Mark Read.
The buccaneer Mark Read participated in all things pirate, including battles, duels, drinking, swearing and ruthless behavior. By all accounts she was ready, willing and able to match the actions of the men aboard. The accounts also suggest that she was infatuated with Calico Jack’s companion Anne Bonny and that the two became close. To avoid a jealous confrontation, Bonny revealed Read’s actual gender to the crew.
When the pirates stole a sloop in the Bahamas, both Read and Bonny were included in the arrest warrants as enemies of the crown. Docking the stolen ship near Negril, Jamaica, the crew celebrated their success with a drunken party, leaving them inebriated and unable to fend off capture when they were discovered. Most of the crew surrendered but Read and Bonny fought their pursuers until they too were taken into custody.
The entire crew was tried, convicted and sentenced to hang. Read and Bonny, both claiming to be with child, were thrown in prison with temporary stays of execution. While the rest of the pirates were hanged, Read died in prison after a feverish illness before giving birth. Bonny was eventually released and disappeared from historical records.