← Back to the front page

The Real Pirates of the Caribbean

Khalid Elhassan January 7, 2020 32 min

13. “If You Had Fought Like a Man, You Would Not Hang Now Like a Dog!”

Bronze statue in the Bahamas of Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Pintrest

In October of 1720, Calico Jack and most of his crew were at anchor and drunk out of their gourds, when a pirate hunter chanced upon their ship. The men were too inebriated to defend themselves, so the only fight was put up by the crew’s two women, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who offered fierce resistance before they were finally subdued. Captured, Calico Jack was tried and convicted of piracy, and sentenced to death by hanging.

His lover, spared the noose after “pleading her belly” – she was pregnant, and the law did not permit hanging pregnant women – had little sympathy for him. When he grew maudlin while bidding her goodbye before his execution, Anne Bonny reportedly sneered: “if you had fought like a man, you would not hang now like a dog!” John Rackham, AKA Calico Jack, was hanged on November 18^th, 1720, and his corpse was displayed from a gibbet at the entrance to Port Royal, Jamaica, in an inlet known thereafter as Rackham’s Cay.

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.