Pirate Jane

By Terri Lord

Hen Frigates: Passion and Peril, Nineteenth-Century Women at Sea

by Joan Druett

Touchstone, 274 pp., $14 (paper)

She Captains: Heroines and Hellions of the Sea

by Joan Druett

Touchstone, 304 pp., $14 (paper)

The Sweet Trade

Forge, 400 pp., $24.95

Plundering pirate lore is a beloved pastime, a treasure trove of stories colorful, exciting, gory, intriguing, and real. The buccaneer, corsair, privateer, mutineer, freebooter, and pirate names snap like the Jolly Roger in a stiff Caribbean wind -- Blackbeard, Calico Jack Rackam, Captain Henry Morgan, Stede Bonnet, Bartholomew Roberts. Their infamous lives inspire endless fascination for kids and adults alike. Pirate legends, it seems, are the last bastion of childhood, the stuff of imagination for all ages.

The history of piracy is as old as the history of sea travel and knows fewer boundaries. Pirates came from every culture and corner of the world. Ancient Greek waterways could be as treacherous as the Spanish Main at its most lawless. The need for increased protection against marauders on the high seas (particularly during the golden age of sailing ships) was as much impetus for maritime growth and advances as military demands. And the faces behind the fierceness were not necessarily men.

The earliest recorded account of women raising hell on the water dates to 529 BC when Queen Tomyris lopped off the head of Cyrus the Great after a fierce sea battle on the Volga River. Forty years later, the widowed Queen Artemsia maneuvered her fleet of biremes and triremes in the Straits of Salamis and successfully routed King Xerxes' Greek navy. Quite a long historical gap occurs before Alfhilda the Danish Goth princess commandeered her ships into the North Sea in the 13th century and Grania ni Maille (Grace O'Malley) married two Irish chieftains and ruled the Irish Sea in the 1500s. By the time Cheng I Sao took up with her husband in China in the early 1800s, women on ships had a colorful and notorious history.

New Zealand writer Joan Druett must have saltwater running through her veins to tackle that history of ocean-bound women the way she has. Two years ago, she wrote the marvelous and under-read Hen Frigates: Passion and Peril, Nineteenth-Century Women at Sea detailing the lives of wives, girlfriends, and daughters who sailed with their sea captain husbands. (A "hen frigate" was any ship with the captain's wife aboard.) It's a lovingly researched book with dozens of hair-raising moments and citations of extreme bravery by those who undertook the perilous journeys: Witness 16-year-old "Miss Arnold" steering her father's ship to North Africa from England after he died and the crew mutinied.

She Captains: Heroines and Hellions of the Sea finds Druett wading back out into the ocean, netting another fascinating read. The author of nearly a dozen works of history and historical fiction, Druett is well aware of the tendency to over-romanticize piracy; her view of distaff life on the water is shrewd and unglamorous. She focuses less on the lurid notion of "women pirates" and more on those women as carrying on the tradition of warrior queens throughout history. She makes a good case that Cleopatra was one.

The gender gap gapes. There was no seaworthy Joan of Arc, no women who secretly led navies to victory, no renegade all-female ships. Between 1500s and 1800s, female convicts were regularly shipped out to the New Land in chains like their male counterparts. Women were not privateers, a fancy word for government-sanctioned pirates who were distinguished by letters of marque that meant that any plundering and conquest was done in the name of the king or queen. But they did occasionally take up arms, sometimes with their men, sometimes alone. As Druett notes, "Deception was not particularly difficult, especially in the lower ranks."

Not all the women in She Captains flaunt the skull and crossbones or crush advancing armies. Like Hen Frigates, there is tale after tale of strength and courage in all manner of extraordinary conditions for ordinary women of the times, from raging sea squalls to Arctic missions to whaling expeditions. Druett's painstaking research and deep love for her subject is evident in every page of She Captains.

Nothing fires the imagination like the names of these women; the most famous of them were Anne Bonny and Mary Read. They were as different as two women could be, and yet they were formidable allies who stood trial in the high courts in Port Royal, Jamaica, accused of piracy on the high seas. Neither were hanged, both having pleaded pregnancies. Not so for their cohort and Anne's lover Calico Jack Rackham, who did swing from the gallows. Mary died in prison before delivering her baby and recent evidence suggests Anne Bonny returned to the U.S., married well, and bore nine children besides the two she had at sea.

"Recent evidence" exists because the history of Bonny, Read, and company is largely unknown and unverified. That's good enough for Elizabeth Garrett, who found the pen is mighty when writing about the sword, skull, and crossbones. The Sweet Trade is her first novel, a stylish adventure of fact and fiction in the swashbuckling lives of Bonny, Read, and Rackham.

As Garrett's novel opens, the disowned Bonny shows up in the Caribbean with her husband and promptly embraces the island's outlaw pleasures, the most famous of which is Calico Jack Rackham. Bonny ditches her husband and sails off with Jack, happy until a new shipmate catches her eye. Anne's fancy turns out to be Mary Read and once their hackles are smoothed, the two women form a deep and abiding bond that Anne is more loyal to than Calico Jack. Unhappy Jack, carted off to the gallows, hears Anne's cold farewell: "If you had fought like a man you need not die like a dog."

The Sweet Trade owes its sparkle to Garrett's diamond prose and vivid descriptions. She doesn't flinch at the unpleasantness of shipboard life and she doesn't succumb to the temptation to portray Anne Bonny as Scarlett O'Hara with a parrot on her shoulder. Garrett lavishes plenty of detail on Anne, making her sensual and spirited if willful and shallow, but it is Mary Read who truly comes alive here. Not once does Garrett sacrifice Read's brave heart for her ability to think like a man and love like a woman. Mary Read in love, as she is twice in the novel, is much more wistful and memorable than Anne's brassy couplings.

Independent of Joan Druett's account of the two women, Garrett supports the theory of Mary Read as a female transvestite whereas Anne Bonny was your basic camp follower. If the Caribbean pirates were rock stars, Anne Bonny was their flashy, haughty groupie while Mary Read played in the band. Anne's transformation from pirate's lover to pirate was scarcely discreet and she flaunted her femininity behind a brace of pistols and a dagger. Both women were dressed and raised as boys, but it was a way of life for Mary Read and folly for Anne Bonny.

And what really did happen to Anne Bonny? Garrett brings her father to Jamaica to rescue her, and though that probably did not occur, he did have enough clout as a stateside attorney to finagle his daughter back to America. The information about Anne Bonny's subsequent marriage and family is sketchy, but one thing is for sure: Sometime in the 1700s lived a Carolina matriarch who was once a brash pirate queen plundering the old Spanish Main.

The only thing wrong with The Sweet Trade is that it came out in hardcover. It should have been released in paperback, since it's perfect summer reading for lazing by the pool and imagining the splash of the water as the spray of the ocean and a plastic float as a marauding galleon.