 Hello, welcome to Clock Talk, I'm Crystal here. Culture of women today, what are we gonna talk about? Well, we're gonna introduce a different lens on women, a hidden history of women warriors. Cool, what does that mean? Well, what about piracy? Nobody ever thinks that they were female pirates. Well, indeed there were, and we're gonna unravel that one with a famous historian we have here. I'm so excited to have him to present his knowledge and to share the space with me to talk about women pirates, so join us. So, let me introduce our distinguished guest. He is the Dan and Maggie Distinguished Chair of Democratic Ideas at UH right now. In fact, I'm taking a course with him and that's why I pulled him over. Let me introduce the world-renowned visiting professor, Dr. Professor Marcus Redaker. Marcus, welcome. Hello Crystal, I'm very pleased to be with you, thank you. Thank you for coming all the way from Pittsburgh. That's right. So, you are the acting distinguished professor of Atlantic history at University of Pittsburgh. That's right. This is your background. So, let's get a little bit of your background before we unpack the women pirates. So, you grew up in the South. I did. And so, you have a lot of influence growing up from a working class family. Now, I am fascinated by the fact that you say you dropped out of school and you worked in a factory before you found your niche in history. That's right. Can we talk a little bit about that before we go into the minutes? Sure, sure. Dropped out of college, I guess I was 19 years old, and went to work. Because I wasn't a serious student, I had been a basketball player, I had had a severe injury, but what I really wanted was real world experience. And so, I went to work in a factory, which is what all the members of my family had always done. This was a factory of about 3,500 workers in Richmond, Virginia. And as it happens, a lot of my most serious education began there. I began to read much more seriously. And then finally, I went to night school and finished up my university degree and then went on to graduate study. Now, were these factories with women and men separated? Were you worked together? We worked together. This was a factory owned by DuPont. And there were two parts to it. On one side, they made textile fibers like nylon and Teflon. And on the side that I was on, we made cellophane. Huh, wow. And I worked shift work around the clock. Wow, can I ask you what the wage was at the time? Do you remember? It was actually very good because I had one of those jobs that has now really disappeared. I was an American industrial worker. That species is almost extinct. So I made quite good money and got a lot of overtime. Okay, oh, you got more than you bargained for maybe. Now, when I take your class, the first thing you like to ask us to unpack each book is, you know, what are the backgrounds of these authors? How were they influenced before they wrote this? So I'm gonna ask you, what a little bit of your influence was in your fascination or interest in the world of pirates? Yes, well, as you said, I grew up in a working class family and that had a big impact on my decision to study history from below, as we call it, meaning emphasizing the history of ordinary working people who are usually left out of the national stories. Another big influence on me were the movements, the social movements of the 60s and 70s, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and those kinds of movements also demanded a new kind of history. For example, the civil rights movement wanted a history that took race and slavery seriously and the women's movement is another major impact. Of course, that has led to a lot of history of the more numerous part of humanity. Right, what about personally? Was your mother an influence in the way you project your perception on women or your wife or women in your life? Yes, there are a lot of strong women in my life that's always been very important but in terms of my specific family, I was the first one to have the opportunity to go to college. So no one really knew quite what lay beyond. When I became a professor in 1982, it was something that my family actually had a hard time understanding. I couldn't quite figure out what I actually did. But I think my interest in women's issues is very strongly influenced by the rise of women's movement in this country. Okay, so let's go into the world of piracy because a lot of people don't know and you're saying that there is a fascination based on some books that you've written that have inspired people to even think about writing screenplays, which unfortunately my ignorance to the world of piracy is reduced to films like the Pirates of the Caribbean. And maybe some other people feel that way too. So let's go into unpacking that world and what time are we talking about that you focus on? Yes, I write about what's called the Golden Age of Piracy and that's basically from the 1650s to about 1730. But I more specifically have written a book about the third generation of these pirates. They were active in the 17 teens and 1720s and they were especially important because they created a crisis in the Atlantic trading system by capturing the ships of Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal. There were several thousand of these pirates. But what I found to be most interesting was that it wasn't only about robbery at sea. It was unbelievably fascinating to see how pirates organize themselves in their daily activities. For example, in a time when poor people really know where in the world had any democratic rights, pirates always elected their captain and they could depose their captain if they saw fit. They also divided up the plunder that they took in very equal ways in contrast to how the merchant ships and naval ships of that day were organized where the captain would make 60 or 80 or 100 times more than the common sailor. Sailors, pirates divided up their plunder in shares. The captain got two share, the common sailor got one. So it was very egalitarian. And I think this is one of the things that actually attracted a lot of common sailors to join the pirates because they saw that they were really gonna live in a very different sort of social world and a world that was really all about liberty. In other words, another impact on the pirate ship was that captains didn't have the power to flog a sailor with a cat and nine tails the way it was so common on other kinds of ships. So they limited the disciplinary violence of the ship captain. So in some ways the pirate ship was like an antithesis of the normal ship of the day in which the lives of the common sailor were very, very hard. Low wages, very poor quality food and extremely violent discipline. On a pirate ship, it was the opposite. Really? We have a photo, I think it was a painting, a rendition of a pirate ship back in those days. Is that a typical portrayal of what it was? Yes, this is actually a fairly famous painting of a small group of pirates on their way to attack a very big ship. And this sort of sums up the courage that these people had in taking on what were really the most powerful empires of their day, the Spanish empire, the British empire. And they captured literally thousands of ships like that and they plundered them of all their gold and silver and other commodities. And so how did the women come on? I mean, that's not a representing of the entire typical pirate ship but now it's quite small. How do you even have the democracy within such a small space? Well, that wasn't really a pirate ship. That was a boat. What they would do is they would lower a small boat from their much larger ship and they would then make the attack that way. But basically what pirates did was an average pirate ship would have 80 to 90, maybe 100 sailors on board. Some of those people became pirates through the act of mutiny. Okay. If we could have the next image. This is a very famous pirate captain named Bartholomew Roberts who is probably the most successful pirate of the golden age. You can see he had a whole flotilla of ships. He's actually here on the west coast of Africa where he's disrupted the slave trade. Where was he from originally? He was originally from Wales in Great Britain. He had been a mate on a ship and he rose to be probably the most powerful pirate of them all. Now, the British government wasn't gonna stand for this. So if we could have the next image, we'll see that they ran a concerted campaign to annihilate pirates. They hanged pirates by the hundreds. This is the hanging of a man named Steve Bonnet in Charleston, South Carolina in 1719. And my argument in this book, Villains of All Nations, is that pirates were annihilated and hanged in such large numbers, not only because they were attacking the property of ship owners, but also because their democratic and egalitarian ships posed a challenge to the way ships were normally organized. So a threat to the way the system was, as always. Exactly, exactly. It's interesting that you, because your other very well-known book on slavery, the slave ship compared to the pirate ship were so different. Completely different. So they're different microcomps. Perfect, I'm so glad you see that because the pirate ship was a space of freedom, a space of liberty. So some people began as mutineers, but the vast majority of people who joined the pirate ship do so from a vessel that has been captured. So the pirates would take a ship and before they would even begin to plunder it, they would call all the sailors and the captain up on board on the main deck and they'd say to the sailors, how does your captain treat you? And if they said, if the sailor said our captain doesn't treat us well, he'd beat us, that captain was in big trouble. Oh wow. Well, he was in big trouble. Some were executed, some were flogged. They would tie up the captain in the same place where he would flog his own sailors and then they give that captain a beating. So the pirate was kind of an avenger of the common sailor. Yes. And he represents that rebellious, kind of self-empowering position of the underdogs having a chance to overthrow. Precisely, precisely. And they caused a major crisis and believe me, the authorities of these various empires wanted to take them out as quickly as they could. Hence all these bodies hanging in chains at the entrance to every harbor. Anytime a merchant ship came in, you would see the remains of pirates there as a warning from the government, don't you dare turn pirate because this is what we'll do to you. So what about the glorifying of pirates? Like the images of the skull and the flags of the black and... Exactly. Well, the famous black flag, the skull and crossbones, comes from this generation of pirates and that is called the banner of king death. Yeah, so the message was, we run up the black flag and suppose you are on a ship that the pirates want to capture, the message to you is, surrender immediately or we will kill you. Okay. So the flag is kind of an instrument of terror to force people to give up and people did overwhelmingly give up because you don't want to fight these people. They have very fast ships, they're very skilled sailors and they're going to capture you sooner and later, you better just give up early. So don't fight it. Don't fight it because if you happen to kill some of them before they capture you, when they come on board, they're not going to be in a good mood about it. Well, the image of a pirate, we don't want to mess with them. So where do the women come in? Why are these two famous women? Yes, these two women, their names are Mary Reed and Anne Bonny. They are actually quite famous in the history of piracy. Mary Reed was one of these people who was aboard a captured ship. The pirates came on board. Now she was dressed as a sailor. Okay. She dressed as a man. She had actually had a lot of experience fighting in wars in Europe. She had been a soldier, Mary Reed. Very tough, very expert on weapons, the use of weapons. So she was on board this vessel that was captured and the pirates did what they usually did at the end of their asking the sailors how the captain treat them. They would say, who wants to come with us? And so a group of people would join the pirates. And if you spoke badly about your captain, you had better go with the pirates. So Anne. And Mary Reed joined up from a captured vessel. Okay. And dressed as a man. And when she went on board, people thought she was a man. Until boom, boom, boom, boom. Okay, wait, this is all, we hope the audience can tell you they're captured and they go on to the pirate ship. What happens to these women? We're gonna take a break, but if you wanna know about the lives of female pirates aboard these ships, don't go away. Hello, I'm Dave Stevens, host of the Cyber Underground. This is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that's just gonna scare you out of your mind. So come join us every week here on thinktecawaii.com 1 PM on Friday afternoons. And then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube. Just look up the Cyber Underground on YouTube. All our shows will show up. And please follow us. We're always giving you current, relevant information to protect you. Keepin' you safe. Aloha. Aloha, I'm Wendy Lo. And I'm coming to you every other Tuesday at two o'clock, live from thinktecawaii. And on our show, we talk about taking your health back. And what does that mean? It means mind, body, and soul. Anything you can do that makes your body healthier and happier is what we're gonna be talking about. Whether it's spiritual health, mental health, fascia health, beautiful smile health, whatever it means, let's take healthy back. Aloha. Back on Quark Talk, I'm Crystal here with Professor Marcus Rattaker, talking about the fiercest sea robbers. And we're talking women here. Now we just mentioned before the break, Anne Bonney and Mary Reed, two well-known female pirates from the Anglo-American piracies from the 18th century. Now Marcus, let's get right into these characters because I did a little research and apparently, so they dressed as men, but they were born illegitimate and they were raised as boys, or at least to appear as boys. So that influenced that. Yes, so these women pirates, Anne Bonney and Mary Reed, were like almost all other pirates in that they came from very poor backgrounds, poor working-class people. And in both their cases, Anne Bonney, originally in Ireland, and then in Charleston, South Carolina and Mary Reed in London, they had both been dressed as boys. And I guess they liked it because they went on to become soldiers and sailors and really fearsome pirates. Now let me tell you the story of Anne Bonney. It turns out, even though she was an illegitimate child, her father was quite a wealthy man and she was living with him in Charleston, South Carolina. And she didn't like that wealthy lifestyle one bit. She was a rebel. Okay. Their story was told of her that one day, a man tried to rape her. And what happened to him was that he was given such a beating by Anne Bonney that apparently he couldn't walk for many days. So this was a woman very skilled in the arts of self-defense from an early age. And in defiance of her father, she ran away with a poor seaman, went off to sea, went to Jamaica and there she joined a pirate vessel captained by a man with the great name Calico Jack Rackham. That's not the same Jack in Pirates of the Caribbean. It might be based on him because of the style of dress because Calico Jack was a very flamboyant in the way that he dressed. And I think Jack Sparrow might have been based on him. So anyway, Anne Bonney discards that other sailor she had followed and she gets on board Jack Rackham's ship. She's dressed as a man. And he doesn't know she's a woman. He does know, but nobody else does. Then they take on board Mary Reed. So now by a wild coincidence, you have two women dressed as men on the same ship and they become very interested in each other and then they finally let each the other know their secret. Now there's a lot of gender play here. Not only are we talking about the superficial cross-dressing, but we're talking about the interesting human relations of being attracted to somebody, not knowing what they are or thinking. This is like Tame of the Shrew. I mean, this is. Exactly, exactly. And you want, we need to remember too that the ship in this day and age, the deep sea sailing ship, was a hyper masculine environment. So these women were really in a tough spot. So how did they gain the respect of their fellow pirates? First of all, by being very good at the work they did, they were strong, they were bold, they were the first to volunteer to attack another vessel. And so this gained them a lot of credibility with their fellow pirates. And I'll give you one example of just how tough they were. They were in the Caribbean and the crew were drinking. Pirates liked to drink. So a lot of the crew were really drunk. Anne Bonney and Mary Reed were not. And then they see a British warship nearby. The captain, Calico Jack, and most of the rest of the pirates run down into the hold of the vessel to hide. Whereas Anne Bonney, Mary Reed, and one male pirate start working the cannon to fire at that vessel to try to keep them off. Well, it didn't work. They were captured and the whole crew of them taken into Port Royal Jamaica to stand trial for piracy. And they are convicted and sentenced to death. Isn't this where they find out one of them is pregnant? Actually, they were both pregnant. They were both pregnant by Jack? No, not by Jack. Anne Bonney was pregnant by Jack. Mary Reed had her own lover on board the pirate ship. See, they still don't make do. They do. And there's a story about her too. Pirates had a tradition that if two people got into a scrap to prevent violence from breaking out on the ship, one of them would challenge the other to a duel and then they would go on shore and have a duel with pistols. Okay, so Mary Reed's lover got into a scrap with a really rugged pirate. And the other pirate challenged him to a duel and Mary was sure that her lover was gonna be killed. So what did she do? She then picked a scrap with the same rugged pirate, challenged him to a duel, and scheduled it on shore one hour earlier than the duel that was supposed to take place with her lover. She then went ashore with that other pirate in the duel, shot him dead, and she saved her lover's life in that way. So anyway, they're both captured. They're both pregnant and that means they can't be hanged. Oh, so that's the main reason. Under British law, that's why they were not hanged with Calico Jack and all the rest. So the time comes when Calico Jack and his shipmates have all about the rope around their neck. Like that photo we saw earlier. Yes, exactly. Actually, is there a photo of the women that you have in the image? Yes, let's see the women. This is not a very realistic picture, but we've got Anne Bonney and Mary Reed and you see the ships in the background and notice that they're armed. They've got their cutlasses. And then we can see a more romanticized image next. The next one? Yeah. Okay, here we are. I don't think they went around bare-breasted. But they didn't have bras, I'm sure. No, they didn't. But most sailors never really undressed, so you wouldn't know. That's a sexual rendition of this. Exactly, it's sexualized in an effort to sell copies of the book. Interesting. Okay, so at the hanging of Calico Jack Rackham, who we will remember went down into the hold of the ship to avoid fighting, Mary Reed and Anne Bonney are standing there to watch the hanging and Calico Jack looks over at Mary for a look of sympathy. And Anne Bonney responded, Jack, don't look at me like that, because if you'd fought like a man, you wouldn't be hanged like a dog right now. I love it. You are humanized. You are recreating this in a very filmic portrayal. How do you even get their resources to find out about this information? Well, it turns out these pirates were very popular in their own day, and several people wrote books about them. And one man in particular, a man called Captain Charles Johnson, wrote a history of the pirates based on interviews, among other things, with people who had been pirates. So the stories of Anne Bonney and Mary Reed were told to him, he wrote them down, and now they exist in books that we can go and read. But a lot of times, the legend of these women are preserved in ballads and photos like that. But after a while, when things changed, when the history of women changed, and there was more celebration of the feminine, then they turned into a very ugly portrayal of the pirates. Exactly. And it is very important that these were, as you said at the outset, women warriors. And there is a tradition in Great Britain of ballads celebrating women warriors. And it turns out historians are discovering that a lot more women dressed as men and went to sea, went to war, did all kinds of things that people had never before known them to have done. So in my view, Anne Bonney and Mary Reed are heroes. Yes, more than heroes though. I think about all the implications in the layers because of their gender on the ship as cross-jessing women warriors who were lovers and mothers and pirates. And I don't know what your speculation is, but I read somewhere where they implied that there was some kind of monage or twang going on between these two women. And Jack was, what do you think? What's your take on that? I think probably not because Jack was a jealous person. He was also afraid of inspiring jealousy in his fellow pirates. So if he had not one but two women and they didn't, that wouldn't have sat well. But it is important that in the end, Anne Bonney and Mary Reed came out as women on board the ship. And when they did, there was kind of a scandal, but in the end, their fellow pirates accepted them because they were just as tough as they were. But that's impressive, but they had to prove themselves at whatever toughness meant. I mean, they had to swear, they had to be able to kill, they had to lift hard things. Whatever it meant to be tough in those days, in those terms. But so what I wanna know is how sexuality played out in this piracy world and whether it was a tool for them or whether it was a curse. Well, for Anne Bonney and Mary Reed, do you mean? Well, particularly. I think the main thing that, the main lesson we can draw from their lives is that like these other poor sailors who were overwhelmingly male, they managed to create a life of genuine freedom on the high seas in a way that very few women were able to do in that time. But it was also true that very few poor people could elect their own leaders. See, the other thing is, Anne Bonney and Mary Reed were real leaders on board the ship. They were always in the boarding party, they were always leading by example. And I think this is one of the things that makes them really interesting for our own time. I think somebody should make a film about them. I think so too, and I'm surprised there haven't been anything done on that. I wanted to draw back to the larger picture of the history of women and what context. Did you have a slide or an image of something? Yes, there's another image that appeared in a book of pirates published in 1725. And this is an allegory of piracy, meaning a sort of symbolic rendering of pirates in which you have a woman, an armed woman beneath the Jolly Roger, the black flag that was frequently not just a skull and crossbones, but an entire skeleton. At the left, you see bodies hanging. Those are the pirates who had been killed. At the right in the background, you see some burning ships. And you see this woman pirate striving up from below, over these figures below. In other words, she is power. She has got a sword in one hand and a torch in the other. But she's obviously female. That's the striking thing. She is very, very female. Well, Mark, with our small limited time left, there's one more image I wanted to leave with everyone. And as people see that, I just want to remind people of the beauty of the types of books you've written. Now, what is the significance of this painting? Yeah, this is a very famous painting by Eugene Delacroix, the great romantic artist in Paris. And I am convinced that he based this great painting on the previous painting of a woman holding a flag above her head and that that was actually a model. So my point is that Ann Bonny and Mary Reed inspired that allegory of piracy and that allegory of piracy inspired one of the greatest artists in all of world history. And I hope that you were inspired by all this information that you've just taken from Marcus. And if you want to know more about this, this is all extracted. There is a chapter in this book, Villains of All Nations, The Atlantic Pirates of the Golden Age, correct? Right. By Marcus Reddaker. And I just wanted to give a shout out to Marcus. You should Google him, really, because all of his books are so rich. You've got the slave ship, the famous Many-Headed Hydra that is co-written by Peter Lindbergh. And he's gonna be here too to talk about it. And we're talking about it in school. And just so many, so many rich details on history from the Atlantic. And Marcus, I really appreciate you coming and sharing this. This is just the tip of the iceberg for people who want to know more about women in history. And we appreciate that. And thank you for sharing these stories. That's right, thank you for having me on. Thank you. Crystal.