A brace of hellcats for Calico Jack

Anne Bonny was born in Ireland, the illegitimate child of a prominent lawyer, William Cormac, and Peg Brannan, the family maid. The scandal attending Anne's birth caused her father to leave for Charleston, South Carolina, taking his paramour and daughter Starting anew as a merchant, he amassed a handsome fortune and Ann had many suitors when she reached a marriable age - 13 or 14 in those days - despite tales of her temper, which included one about stabbing a servant girl with a table knife. Though the stories were exaggerated, Anne was fierce enough; when one young buck tried to rape her, she thrashed him soundly.

Eventually, Anne married a pennyless ne'er-do-well by the name of James Bonny, who whisked her off to the pirates lair of New Providence in the Bahamas. Bonny tried to support his new life by turning informer when Governor Woodes Rogers arrived to clear out the pirates. Naturally, Ann recoiled in disgust. Before long she had transferred her affections to the swaggering Calico Jack Rackam, who had suspended his piratical activities for a royal pardon.Reckam courted Ann lavishly, buying her flashy baubles in the Bahamas. He even offered to purchase the lady herself - divorce by sale was common then, though not strictly legal. James Bonny not only refused the offer; he ran to the Governor, who threatened to have Ann flogged if she did not return to her husband. But Ann would not crawl back meekly to a man she hated. Instead she and Rackam resolved to run away - and go a-pirating together.

As luck would have it, a merchant sloop renowned as the fastest in the Caribbean lay anchored in Nassau harbor. Anne slipped aboard and determined the number of crewmen on guard and the hour the watch changed. At midnight, Anne, Rackam and a handful of his old cronies quietly boarded the sloop. Dressed as a sailor, with a sword in one hand, a pistol in the other, Ann surprised the two men on the watch, and told them she would "blow out your brains" if they offered the slightest resistance. The guards made not a sound, and in no time the sloop was beating out to sea and Ann was free at last of her groveling husband.

Anne and Rackam became, if not the scourge of the Carribbean, at least a major nuisance there - plundering coastal traders and even fishing boats. Like all pirate captains, Reckam pressed skilled sailors from captured vessels to fill out his crew. One such hand was a handsome young sailor from a Dutch ship. Anne Bonny took a liking to the Dutch boy - and then discovered much to her dismay, that the youth was in truth neither Dutch nor a boy, but a young Englishwoman named Mary Read.

Mary, like Anne had been born out of wedlock. Her masquerade began when her mother disguised her in the clothing of a recently deceased son in order to deceive her relatives. The ruse worked and Mary herself perpetuated the fraud. Later she entered the King's service as a cabin boy aboard a man-of-war, and went on to serve first as a foot soldier, then as a dragoon in Flanders during the war of the Spanish Succession. Mary proved courageous, but after a while her zeal for combat began to wane. She had fallen passionately in love with her tent mate, a Flamish who returned her ardor and insisted on marrying her.

For the first time in her life Mary donned women's clothing and the newlyweds set themselves up as tavern keepers in Holland. Alas, their happiness was short-lived. Mary's husband died suddenly of a fever, and Mary having found it easier to make her way in the world as a man, disguised herself as a sailor and signed aboard a Dutch ship. When the vessel was taken by Rackam, Mary gamely signed the pirate articles, casting her lot with the brigands.

Just as Mary was confiding all this to Anne, Calico Jack came upon the inimately whispering couple. In a fit of jealousy, he would have killed them both had Anne not told him that Mary was a woman.

Rackam agreed to go along with Mary's disguise, and did so until Mary fell in love with a young sailor whom Rackam had forced into the crew. Then, according to one account, "she suffered the discovery of her sex to be made by carelessly showing her breasts, which were very white."

Despite their romantic side, Anne and Mary were lionesses in battle to the very end. In late October, 1720, Rackam dropped anchor off the coast of Jamaica and the pirates were getting rioously drunk when a British Navy sloop surprised them. Rackam and his mates were to besotted to fight and hid in the hold. But the two women flew like furies at the Navy men, firing their pistols and flailing away with cutlasses and axes. When they realized that all was lost, Mary turned raging on her mates, killing one pirate and wounding others, while screaming at the cowards to "come up and fight like men."

At their trial in Jamaica, Mary and Anne were sentenced-like the eight other members of Rackam`s crew-to be executed. When the judge ask if they had anything to say, the ladies replied "Milord, we plead our bellies." Both women were pregnant. The judge immediately stayed the order for their execution-no English court had the power to kill an unborn child, no matter how guilty the mother.

As Calico Jack went to his death, the unrepentant Anne told him:" Had you fought like a man, you need not have been hanged like a dog." Mary`s lover, being a forced man, was set free. Mary died of fever in prison before the birth of her child. No record of Anne`s execution has ever been found, and there is some conjecture that her wealthy father bought her release after the birth of her child.

			Ever protective of her lover Mary Read takes to the sword to slay a fellow pirate who had dared to challenge her man to a duel
	THE HOLD!