Her surname comes from a marriage to sailor James Bonny — a man of no fortune, which is the point. Her father disapproved and cut her off. The couple left Carolina for the Bahamas, landing on New Providence, at Nassau.

John Rackham — Calico Jack, named for the printed cotton he wore — was a real pirate, and by the standards of the trade a middling one. He'd been quartermaster to Charles Vane, took over the crew when Vane was deposed, accepted the pardon, and then went back to piracy in 1720 by stealing a sloop out of Nassau harbour.

Anne left with him. Johnson tells a story about Rackham attempting to buy a divorce from James Bonny by "purchase" — a rough-and-ready custom in which a husband sold his wife's freedom — and Governor Rogers threatening Anne with a flogging over the affair. Again: Johnson only.

What the record supports is that by August 1720, Anne Bonny was aboard Rackham's sloop William, and that she stayed there for the two months that made her famous. The crew took fishing boats, small trading sloops, and canoes around Jamaica. This was not treasure-fleet piracy. It was armed robbery in coastal water, and it was enough to hang for.

Anne Bonny and Mary Read

Mary Read was aboard too. Read's own history is, if anything, stranger than Anne's: raised as a boy by a mother concealing a dead child's identity to keep an inheritance, service as a soldier in Flanders, marriage to a fellow soldier, widowhood, a return to men's clothing, a berth on a ship taken by pirates. By 1720 she was one of Rackham's crew.

The two women are almost always described as inseparable. The story that Anne pursued Mary believing her to be a handsome young man is the popular version. Two centuries of readers have taken it as either proof of a romance or proof of a novelist at work, and there is no way to settle that from here. What can be said is that they fought together, were captured together, were tried together on the same day, and used the same defense.

The trial gives us something better than the gossip anyway: sworn testimony from the women they robbed.

Dorothy Thomas, taken in a canoe off Jamaica, testified that the two "wore Mens Jackets, and long Trouzers, and Handkerchiefs tied about their Heads," each with a machete and pistol, and that they cursed at the men of the crew to kill her so she could not testify against them. She said she knew they were women "by the largeness of their Breasts."

Two French witnesses testified that in ordinary work the two dressed as men, but when a chase or a boarding came, they put on women's clothing — and that in action they were "very active on Board, and willing to do any Thing," handing up powder, and that nobody aboard was more forward or more willing to board than these two.