In 1994, Philippine pirates robbed a ship in the China Sea, including a woman.
In 2006, the presence of two or three armed females on a Malaysian pirate ship was reported. Both facts were considered surprising and unique. But the reality is quite different.
Despite the fact that women are scarce in certain areas, History tells us about important scientists, astronauts, politicians, historians, warriors, gladiators, guerrillas, quite a few writers, painters, doctors, spies and not a few actresses, models… A list in which, obviously, female characters from the other side of the law also sneak in, such as gangsters, bandits, mafiosas and, of course, pirates.
sea wolves
There have always been women on board as fishermen, merchants, Navy employees… but there were also those who were part of pirate crews or the population of the ports and refuges of corsairs and filibusters. Although the geography of piracy, male or female, is universal, not much is known about bandits in West Africa, the Indian subcontinent, or Oceania, and there have been very few in the Arab world. On the other hand, we know more about those of China and Southeast Asia. And, of course, there have been in colonial America and, above all, in Europe.
The social extraction of female piracy, of the pirates themselves and of the other women in that environment, is also varied. Many of them were proletarians, expropriated peasants, lumpen, common criminals, prostitutes, servants and, of course, ex-captives and ex-slaves. Some were simple adventurers, without apparent cause to embark on piracy. There were also nationalists, contrary to the foreign domination of their country, persecuted, exiled, renegades and heretics. Others had a bourgeois origin, because they were the daughters of merchants, lawyers or civil servants. Without forgetting those who came from the nobility, come to less or not, and it is even known of princesses and queens who ended up exercising such a risky trade. In short, there have been female pirates at all times and from all walks of life.
Artemis, Queen and Corsair
In antiquity, the Mediterranean and the North Sea were classic scenes of corsair activity. Many societies, with their kings and queens, lived off agriculture, trade and… piracy. In the 5th century BC, Herodotus refers to the queen and corsair Artemis I of Halicarnassus, who allied with Xerxes II at Salamis to fight against the Greeks. The Persian king would say of her that she was the best of her captains. Commanding the galleys of her kingdom, Caria (Asia Minor), Artemis would use Greek or Persian banners depending on her interests. A century later, one of her namesakes, Artemis II of Halicarnassus, in addition to ordering the construction of the famous Mausoleum, which was listed among the Seven Wonders of Antiquity, would be known for using the most rudimentary piracy tactics to fight their enemies. No less famous were the Illyrian pirates, an Indo-European people who settled, above all, on the eastern coast of the Adriatic, whose economy was based largely on piratical activity. One of its most famous members was a woman, Queen Teuta, from the 3rd century BC, widow of King Agrón of the Ardiaei -Illyrian ethnicity-. Her kingdom stretched from present-day Split, on the Dalmatian coast, to Epirus, in the far north-west of Greece. Teuta excellently organized her privateering resources against other Illyrian pirates and against the Greek coasts – she conquered the island of Corfu – and Italy, until in 229 BC the Romans put an end to her adventures.
Alvilda
In the first century In the Baltic and the North Sea, the ancestors of the Vikings also practiced piracy on a large scale and in it, of course, there was no shortage of women. Like Alvilda, the beautiful Swedish warrior princess, of doubtful existence, and whose life is narrated by the Saxon monk Saxo Gramático, from the 12th and 13th centuries, in his History of the Danes. The friar places the pirate in the 1st century, and recounts that, in order not to marry a Danish prince, the girl fled from home and took command of a crew of women -later also of men- together with her sister , dedicating itself to the boarding of ships and coastal populations of Denmark. Finally, she was captured dressed as a man by the scorned suitor and there are those who claim that she married him.
In the Middle Ages, from the 6th century and after the Slavic invasions, there were women among the Croatian, Dalmatian and Venetian pirates of the Adriatic. And in the Viking world too: the Swedish Sigrid from the 10th century, the Norwegian Rusla and Aasa, from the 9th century, and the Icelandic Freydis, daughter of the Viking Erik the Red, in the 11th century. Some Frisians, Danish and Germans are also known, such as Foelke, who lived in the 14th century, and some French, halfway between the militia and the privateering, including Jeanne de Montfort, daughter of a French count, and Jeanne Clisson.
Female piracy in the Mediterranean
In the Modern Age, the Mediterranean was a sea of pirates. A Berber woman, Sidá al-Hurra, is known to have been a sultana during the 16th century. Even literature echoes them. Thus, Cervantes tells stories, perhaps fictitious or based on diffuse realities, of Spanish, Moorish, and Italian pirates -or similar-, some of them ex-captives, in North Africa.
Further north, between the 16th and 17th centuries, a peculiar Cornish pirate family was the Killigrew family, in which there are several women -see box-. English was Joan the Black and Irish Grace O’Malley. The latter, whose real name in Gaelic was Grainne Ni Mhaille, belonged to a line of gentry dating back to the twelfth century and was anti-English, her family having not paid allegiance to Henry VIII of England. She was born around 1530, she habitually spoke Gaelic and very bad English. Officially Christian, she kept the druidic religion, by whose rites she was married the second time. She participated in Irish clan and family feuds and was an expert seaman. Between 1550 and 1600 she was a truly brutal and unscrupulous pirate, even with her own children. She owned a large fleet with which she attacked English and Irish coastal towns and raided ships, even Turkish and Spanish.
Elizabeth I of England offered 500 pounds for her head, she was twice captured and twice released. In recent years she asked for and obtained the grace of the Queen, with whom she reached an agreement, in 1593, whereby she accepted her land claims and granted her pardon, making her her ally. . Her castle can still be seen on Clare Island. She died, it is said, a repeat offender, in the assault on a ship.
Bonny and Read
Between the 16th and 18th centuries, American waters were a paradise for marine banditry. And also a nest of Euro-American pirates: mostly European women, deported or emigrated to America. Some had been captured alongside pirate crews or in pirate ports. Judith-Armande Préjoly, born in the 17th century, would be one of them. Of doubtful existence, it is said that she was a goddaughter of Richelieu and a heretic, the same as Marie-Anne Dieu-le-Veut. We will also mention the Anglo-French renegade Charlotte de Berry and the Marquise de Fresne, both from the 17th century. Two other famous women pirates were the Irish Anne Bonny and the Anglo-Irish Mary Read. These have been the most celebrated in narratives and films. Defoe invented some tasteful biographies of the seventeenth century, in which the truth came out badly. Anne Bonny was the natural daughter of an Irish lawyer, who took her to South Carolina, USA. The girl, strong and brutal, killed a servant with a knife. She is associated with some men, but especially with the pirate Rackham, nicknamed Calico Jack.
For her part, Mary Read, who was perhaps the daughter of a prostitute, always manifested as a man and since she was little she liked to dress as such. She enlisted in the English army and then in a Dutch unit, without revealing her gender. At some point he joined the crew of Rackham’s ship, where he met Anne and they became friends and lovers. On the ship they wore men’s clothes, they swore and blasphemed, and in combat they behaved more bravely than many of them.
Captured along with Rackham, they were tried in British Jamaica and sentenced, in 1720, for “taking part in pirate bands and fighting”. Curiously, women who practiced piracy were not usually hanged, except if they had participated in combat, and even then, they were usually saved if they claimed to be pregnant. This is what happened with Anne and Mary, who, thanks to their pregnancy, were only imprisoned. Also famous in the 18th century were Mary Lindsey, for some whore and criminal, Mary Harvey, Rachel Wall, who was more of a racketeer, and the Irish Margaret Jordan, both sentenced to death in 1789 and 1809, respectively.
filibusters
In the 19th century, piracy died out in Europe, but a form of filibustering continued in Latin America. Men and women mixed in this trade, simple bandits, slave traders, mercenaries, immigrants and exiles, many at the service of landowners, local potentates and even newly minted republics. Some authors put Anita in this bag, the wife of the Italian Giuseppe Garibaldi, a patriotic mercenary and it seems that he was also a pirate for a time, that she lived…