A Bonny Read

Having taken an interest in the life of Mary Read – I am thinking about penning a story based loosely on her life – my attention was drawn to the statue planned for Burgh Island.

However, not everyone is impressed. Some by the poor quality of the statue – a position that has some sympathy from me – and some because they think it glorifies criminality. What caught my eye though was the Pink News article.

An eight foot statue of lesbian pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read has sparked outrage among locals in Devon.

Whoa, hold on a minute there. We know relatively little about these two. We do know that they dressed as men. This was not uncommon in a male dominated society where women did it to get work to survive. Read fought with the British army in France and Flanders and settled down with a Flemish husband in the Netherlands. For a while, they ran a pub. Bonny’s life is less well documented. She turned up on Calico Jack’s ship dressed as a man, having run away from home at an early age following disinheritance by her father has he disapproved of the man she had taken up with. So both women were known to have heterosexual relationships.

Following her husband’s death, Read again joined the army. However, peace meant that there was little point remaining, so she took a crossing to the west indies. Her ship was captured by “Calico Jack” Rackham and Read willingly joined the pirate crew – disguised as a man.

She appears to have taken a fancy to Bonny – whom she believed to be a man and both women came out as cross dressers, eventually getting pregnant – presumably by Jack Rackham. It was their pleading the belly that got their executions stayed when they were captured whereas Rackham was promptly hanged. Read died in prison the following April and there is no record of a child so presumably her death was due to complications with the pregnancy. Bonny’s fate is unknown but she is believed to have ended up in Carolina and lived to a great age.

None of this tells us that they were lesbians. None of this tells us that there were any sexual undertones to their cross dressing. As with other women who disguised themselves as men, it was a means to an end. Yet here we have Pink News trying to twist history with its own spin.

It is possible that they were lovers. You might be able to infer that they swung both ways, given Read’s attraction to Bonny when she thought she was a man. You might, but there is no hard evidence to support it. Possible, but we do not know for sure, so claiming as if it is a fact is historical revisionism. A bit like claiming that the light bulb was invented by a black man.

And that’s the point here. We have the likes of Pink News trying to crowbar gayery into history where there is no real evidence of it. Sure, some historical people were demonstrably homosexual. However, this one is tenuous at best.

See also, History Debunked where the BBC are trying to have us believe that there was  a community of black people seeing off the picts during the Roman occupation. This is an outright lie. But that’s what these people do – they lie to try and change our history. We need to stand firm and debunk these claims when they are made.