Pirates, freebooters1, buccaneers2: these terms are familiar to us largely through fiction. Swashbuckling tales of adventure on the high seas and cutlasses swinging beneath the Jolly Roger conjure up a romantic picture of life in the Caribbean in the late 17th and early 18th Centuries — when men were men, women were women and ships had naughty figureheads.
The reality, though slightly different from the Errol Flynn version, was much wilder than anything dreamed of by Hollywood writers. Disenfranchised outsiders, victims of institutionalised exploitation, sexual minorities - everyone found a haven in lawless pirate ports such as New Providence in the Bahamas, where they not only raised merry hell with the shipping, but also founded shipboard democracies that were centuries ahead of their time in tolerance and respect for personal diversity.
Among all the colourful accounts of the Spanish Main, the story of Mary Read and Anne Bonny and their strange partnership with Calico Jack Rackham stands out as an example of the ways in which gender, sexuality and personal freedom were defined — and the ways that these definitions were struggled against — in the early 18th Century.
