Captain William Kidd and Others of the Buccaneers

by John S. C. Abbott

The privateersman had been out but a few days when Rackam, who had many of his old confederates on board, formed a conspiracy, rose upon the officers, set them adrift, seized the ship, and turned to his old trade. Mary Read, in the character of Frank, was, as we have mentioned, a very handsome young fellow. The captain’s cabin-boy, Anne Bonney, fell desperately in love with Frank, and revealed to him, as she supposed, her sex. She approached Frank with all the seductions and allurements with which Potiphar’s wife solicited Joseph. Thus importuned, Frank confided to her that she was also a woman in disguise. This led to increased intimacy between the two young sailor women.

Captain Rackam became intensely jealous of his wife, in consequence of her familiarity with Frank. He threatened Anne that he would certainly cut Frank’s throat. Anne, well aware of the desperate character of the pirate, felt constrained, that she might save Mary’s life, to let the captain into the secret also. He did not divulge it, knowing that she might be exposed to very cruel treatment from the unprincipled wretches who thronged his decks.

But again the all-devouring passion took possession of the bosom of Frank. Many vessels were captured. After being plundered they were generally turned adrift again, with their crews. If the pirates, however, found on board these ships any one who could be of use to them, he was detained on board their ship. It so chanced that one day they took a ship where there was a young English artist. Rackam, thinking that the artist might be of service to him, in sketching scenes and drawing charts, detained him as a captive. He was a genteel young fellow, handsome, of fascinating manners, very skilful with his pencil, and possessed of very attractive conversational powers. Frank and the young artist were instinctively drawn toward each other.

And when Frank told her companion that she loathed the life of a pirate, that she was one of the crew by compulsion, and that she should embrace the first possible opportunity to escape, a new bond of union was formed between them. They became messmates, and were always together. He never had a doubt that the masculine pronoun, he, belonged to his bronzed but smooth-cheeked and soft-voiced companion.

Even on board a pirate ship there are many opportunities for seclusion. In the dark and tempestuous night, when the wine-heated officers were carousing in the cabin, and the crew were rioting in the forecastle, Frank and the artist, wrapped in those thick sailor-jackets which defy both wind and rain, would seek some retired position upon the deck, beneath the stormy sky, and beguile the weary hours in relating to each other the story of the past, and in planning measures for escape. Frank was the younger of the two, and in these hours of midnight communings, loved to recline with her head in the lap of her unsuspecting comrade.

The inevitable result ensued. The whole passionate nature of the woman, still almost in her girlhood, became aglow with love of the young artist. In one of these midnight communings she revealed to her astonished friend her sex. His friendship was speedily converted into impassioned love. He had ever, under her assumed character, had occasion to respect her. He could not recall a single action of immodesty or impropriety. Alone in the darkness of the night, upon the solitary deck with the stars alone looking down upon them, they went through the ceremony of what they both deemed a secret marriage.

Mary Read ever averred that she regarded those nuptials as sacred as if the rite had been performed in the church, by the robed priest, and in the presence of any number of witnesses. She was never accused of being unfaithful to her marriage vows, or of ever having been even indiscreet in her conduct.

Still the months passed away. The ship continued its piratic cruise. Frank, though secretly the wife of the artist, had excited no suspicion of her disguise. In her sailor’s garb she still performed every duty imposed upon others of the crew. There were several bloody actions fought. In these engagements both she and Anne Bonny were called upon, like the rest, to work at the guns.

It was one of the laws of the ship, that if any quarrel arose between any two of the crew, there should be no contention on board the ship, but that when they next approached an island, they should, with their friends, land in a boat, and settle the quarrel in a duel on the shore. The artist was so grossly incited by one of the pirates, that he either challenged him, or accepted a challenge from him to fight a duel. Frank would not have had her husband, on any account, refuse the hostile meeting. Public sentiment was such among the pirates, that had he done this, there would have been no end to the insults and abuse he would have received as a reward.

Frank was in a state of great agitation and anxiety for the fate of her lover. She was an admirable swordsman, and no one of the piratic crew was a truer shot with the pistol. Her love was so passionate that she felt that she could not live without that husband, whose union with her was so enhanced by the attractions which secrecy and romance give. She was far more ready to peril her own life than to have his endangered.