Anne Bonny, Pirate Bitch: Misbehavior Understood

(Attention readers:  Salty language and racy stuff here, so don't read it if you are easily offended or know your parents would rather you not. Honor system!)

Damn. Anne Bonny had it going on.  She misbehaved in a big way!

Sometimes I feel guilty for misbehaving. Misbehavior, as I see it and do it, is gleefully departing from social norms in such a way as to raise eyebrows and reap certain negative judgment. Why spend such a short time on this plane of existence without kicking some outlaw ass for a while just to get it out of your system? And, it is pee-in-pants hysterical to mess with the Bible-thumping-prune-faced-pursed- lipped-string-of-pearls-clutchers out there.

I believe that the degree to which one misbehaves is directly in proportion to how much time one thinks is left to bite off a generous piece of this life and wash it down with a good, no spectacular, bottle of wine...

Consider middle class life expectancies of the 1700's. Most people, let’s say women because men had a whole other scene to deal, would expect to die in the cradle of neglect-because-it’s-not-male, croup, thrush, typhoid, plague or exsanguination by lice. But if you make it past puberty, (huzzah!) maybe, just maybe, you could enjoy a timely death in your late 20's of small pox, syphilis and/or/including childbirth.  That is if your man, who "owned" you like he owned his ox or donkey, didn’t beat you to death for misbehaving or sell you into indentured servitude.

Given the choice, it'd been a pirate's life for me.

It was for Anne Bonny, female pirate.

Born illegitimate in Ireland to a lawyer and the maidservant, who misbehaved in the eyes of the pious so dramatically, they were forced to board the next slow stinking ship to the Americas where they settled, and prospered, in Charleston. That’s where Anne, anger management issues showing early, got a rep at age 13 for misbehaving in a colossal piece of foreshadowing by stabbing a servant girl in the stomach with a table knife.

Must’ve been having a bad day.

Rumor had it she also nearly killed a dude with her bare hands in her later teens.  The idiot attempted forcible relations with her landing him in hospital within an inch of his life. He must not have known about the anger management issue Anne had.  She met her first husband, purported to be a gold-digger bottom-feeder sailor and part-time pirate, and moved with him to what was the hub of piracy in those days,  Nassau.  Ever alert for any opportunity to indulge her predisposition for misbehavior, she ditched him in favor of a higher-roller in their pirate social circle, eventually landing on the dashing testosterone-exuding Captain Calico Jack Rackham, literally. Probably on top. For this misbehavior, Anne, was sentenced to a nice public adultery flogging, and would’ve “tasted the cat” except she blew the joint and went to the sea with Rackham as the first full-fledged woman pirate. In a real stupid Men-from-Mars-Women-from-Venus misstep Capt’n Jack offered to buy her from her husband invoking a lovely legal convention called "divorce by purchase."   I bet she nearly stabbed him in the stomach for the insult. Probably would of but weighing killing him against screwing him, screwing won.

In fact, the screwing would eventually save Anne’s life.

They say that Bonny and Rackham, who teamed up with a second female pirate named Mary Read, misbehaved quite effectively pillaging up and down the Eastern Seaboard and the Caribbean for years. Apparently Anne fought and fucked with the ferocity and competency of any man onboard. And it is rumored that Anne really misbehaved and played on Mary Read’s team, sporting in that naughty girl-on-girl category as well. If Rackham was anything like modern men, this fantasy-turned-reality misbehavior had to be a sheer delight. Yo ho ho!

In fact the only three people onboard who were able to stand and fight when they were surprised by the Governor of Jamaica’s ship intercept were Rackham, Bonny and Read. I suspect they were engaged in misbehaviors that would make grown men, like even Larry Flynt, blush at the time. The rest of the crew was too drunk to watch or fight. They were all taken prisoner.

For their gross misbehavior against the Realm, all were sentenced to hanging. But, avast! Anne and Mary turn up preggers, thank you Jack Rackham, champion sperm donor! The girls “plead their bellies” so they didn’t get strung up under English Common Law.

Rackham? Not so lucky even though he in all probability was the father of both pirate fetuses.

Anne, who had ever-higher standards about with whom she fought and fucked, knew when to cut her losses and didn’t mince words. She said to Rackham as they shuffled in shackles next to each other in prison, "Sorry to see you here, but if you had fought like a Man, you need not have been hang'd like a Dog."

Bet it was the hormones talking.

Rackham hanged, Read died in childbirth, and lo and behold, Anne Bonny’s now rich plantation owner lawyer Daddy bailed/ransomed her out, brought her back to Charleston, and married her off to some guy named Burleigh. In addition to birthing Rackham’s’ ill-begotten spawn, she produced 8 more kids! This Burleigh dude must’ve figured out the real deep, um, motivation that made Anne Bonny settle down and toe the line. Do I have to actually spell it out? You know what it was…Misbehavior!

Keep us happy in the sack, and we can be inclined to keep the misbehavior where it belongs.

I believe Anne lived fast and hard because, at a very young age, all she saw around her were the exigencies that would snuff her life out in a heartbeat. I will always wonder, if she had known she was going to live 82 years, would she have misbehaved in such a celebrated way.

She saw two choices: Submit to that brutal unacceptable 1700’s life of a pious god-fearing woman/thing, or fight it.

She fought like a bitch.

Misbehavior understood.