20. Pirates in Love

“I like marriage!  It’s like a wager on who will fall out of love first.” ….Jack Sparrow, Pirates of the Caribbean, Dead Man’s Chest.

For every woman who feared pirates there were those who had the bravery to marry one. Some women were even involved in piracy themselves.

Blackbeard reputedly had 14 wives, the 14th being a 16-year-old girl in Bath, North Carolina. 

Stede Bonnet abandoned a wife and 3 children on the island of Barbados and reportedly turned to piracy because of “some discomforts he found in a married state.”  

William Kidd’s privateering and pirating aspirations were funded by his rich, New York wife, Sarah Oort.   

Anne Bonny had been unhappily married to sailor James Bonny before she ran off with Captain Calico Jack Rackham.  The two wed in New Providence, now Nassau, Bahamas in 1719.  They stole a British Sloop, and during their “honeymoon cruise” the couple engaged in pirating along the Southwest Florida coast. 

Following a sea battle in which their ships main mast was shattered, a hurricane blew the stricken ship to the Estero Island, near Fort Meyers, Florida. While the ship was being repaired Rackham and Bonny continued to honeymoon on a nearby deserted island, for whom Lovers’ Key, Florida, is named. There are rumors the couple buried treasure somewhere among Estero Bay’s mangrove islands. 

It would be remiss in discussions of pirate marriage to not reference Matelotage.  For 17th to 18th century Caribbean Pirates, whether this was for economic and contractual reasons or whether it was for love, the civil union between two men was a public, accepted practice.