Almost everything popularly told about pirate Mary Read comes from one unreliable book
Mary Read sailed with John Rackham and Anne Bonny, one of very few women pirates of the golden age. The famous tale of a girl raised as a boy who became a soldier traces to a single 1724 book that historians distrust. What records confirm covers barely a year of her life.
The firm facts start in August 1720. Read joined Rackham's crew in the Bahamas, alongside Bonny, and on 22 August they took the sloop William, belonging to John Ham, out of Nassau. The crew raided merchant ships across the West Indies until former privateer Jonathan Barnet caught them after a brief fight off Jamaica on 22 October 1720. Rackham and the men were tried and executed. Read and Bonny both declared themselves pregnant and had their executions postponed.
Bonny's later fate is unknown. Read died in prison at Spanish Town around late April 1721, probably of a fever, though the cause was never recorded. She is not listed among Nassau's colonists before 1713.
Her origins are a genuine puzzle. No primary document, not even her trial record, gives her age or birthplace, and England produced many Mary Reads in the late 17th century. One candidate was born in Bristol around May 1681; her father left to become a pirate in Madagascar, and in 1698 her mother wrote asking for his money without reply. Another Mary Read put her mark on the Breholt Petition of 1708, a plea to Queen Anne signed by 48 relatives of Madagascar pirates in hope of a general pardon, gathered by the writer Penelope Aubin. It failed. The pirate may have been one of these women, both or neither.
The colourful childhood rests entirely on Captain Charles Johnson's 1724 collection of pirate lives, which is notoriously unreliable. Johnson placed her birth in London and said her mother, abandoned by a seafaring husband, had a son who died in infancy, then a daughter, Mary, whom she dressed as a boy. The story has been retold for centuries, but little evidence supports it.
Source: Mary Read
