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Women That Left Their Mark Throughout History

Khalid Elhassan August 4, 2020 34 min

5. Challenging Gender Roles and Superstition

Anne Dieu-le-Veut accompanied her new hubby on his buccaneering. Badass through and through, she fought by his side, and shared his work and the command of his ship. Anne differed from other female pirates of the era, in that she made no attempt to conceal her sex. Instead, she went about openly as a woman, notwithstanding the superstition that women aboard ship were bad luck. Instead, her ship’s crew saw her as a kind of mascot and lucky charm.

In 1693, Anne and her husband attacked the English in Jamaica. In retaliation, in 1695, the English attacked Port-de-Paix in Haiti, where Anne dwelt when ashore. The English captured and sacked the town, and took Anne and her children prisoner. They were kept hostage for three years, before they were finally released in 1698. Following her release from captivity, Anne Dieu-le-Veut disappears from the historic record. Unconfirmed stories have her and Laurens de Graaf settling in Mississippi or Alabama, but the last reliable mention of her is her death in 1710.

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.