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The Real Pirates of the Caribbean

Khalid Elhassan January 7, 2020 32 min

14. Becoming Calico Jack

Anne Bonny, Calico Jack, and Mary Read. Magnolia Box

John Rackham was nicknamed Calico Jack because of the colorful calico clothes he favored. In 1718, he was quartermaster aboard the pirate sloop Ranger, when she encountered a French warship twice her size. The pirate captain, choosing discretion over valor, fled. The pirate crew decried what they viewed as cowardice, voted the captain out of the command, and replaced him with Calico Jack.

As captain, Calico Jack specialized in plundering small vessels engaged in coastal trade, but fell upon larger ships when the opportunity presented itself. In 1719, he accepted a royal pardon, renounced piracy, and accepted a commission from the governor of the Bahamas to hunt pirates. However, a love triangle involving Anne Bonny, the future pirate, grew complicated, and ended with the lovers stealing a sloop to slip out of the Bahamas. That voided Calico Jack’s recent pardon.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.