The sculpture you see here shows two decidedly feminine figures, standing shoulder-to-shoulder as they face the sea, their hair whipping in the breeze. It is an utterly modern imagining of two real-life woman pirates from the early 1700’s, and says even more about 2020, when this artwork was unveiled, than it does about the actual appearance of Anne Bonny and Mary Read.
Bonny and Read had much in common with each other. Both were born at the end of the 17th century as illegitimate daughters. Both were dressed as boys during their childhoods — to escape the worst of their shameful illegitimate past and to avoid poverty. Anne was called Andy at times, and Mary was called Mark. And both found their ways into a life of piracy in the Bahamas.
These were not virginal women — they took on a variety of lovers. Bonny’s contemporary and biographer writes that she was “not altogether so reserved in point of Chastity,” and the fact that she left her first husband for her lover “Calico Jack” Rackham, another pirate, demonstrates her strong will. Both Bonny and Read were ruthlessly violent: Bonny allegedly murdered a servant girl when she was just 13, and Read was similarly inclined to aggression. In their years of piracy they dressed like men when they were fighting, holding machetes in one hand and pistols in another.
In the fall of 1720 they were finally caught along with the rest of their fellow pirates, and the pair resisted surrender. Mary Read taunted her fellow privateers for failing to be true men. Anne Bonny’s last words to her lover as he was facing execution were “if you had fought like a man, you need not have been hang’d like a dog”.
What do these two figures in the sculpture evoke? Surely not the brutal, fierce, cross-dressing warriors that Anne and Mary surely were. Rather, they appear feminine, unarmed — and their relationship with each other paramount. The artist that here remembers Bonny and Read wants us to think of how fate, as blustery as the wind, determined their paths and diverged them from the traditional course of history.
Source(s): “If there’s a man among ye: the tale if Pirate Queens Anne Bonny and Mary Read,” _The Smithsonian_, by Karen Abbott, August 9, 2011. _Independent_, “Female pirate livers whose story was ignored by male historians immortalized with statue,” Maya Oppenheim, Nov 19, 2020.
