Counting BAME women into piracy: 9 FAQs

Women’s History Month at the National Maritime Museum this month brings a focus on women’s piracy. https://tinyurl.com/RMG-Rebel-Women-Female-Pirates

Piracy has been told as a largely white and male story. 

But were there actually any brown or black female pirates, like Anamaria (Zoe Saldana)? (PIctured above, telling off Captain Jack Sparrow [Johnny Depp], in The Curse of the Black Pearl.)

Certainly women on land were (and are) involved in the wider piracy business. But few, if any, were at sea like Anamaria, whose celluloid character was based on white pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

Women's support is crucial to the infrastructure of these organised criminal activities. 

If they live on coasts where black and brown people predominate then yes, the women in supportive roles in ports will be black and brown. 

The actual seagoing perpetrators were almost entirely males, because piracy is violent crime involving hyper-masculine sea-rovers. 

By contrast women’s presence is hidden, which means solid proof is rare. But we can piece together BAME women’s probable roles using circumstantial evidence and lenses that see both gender and race.

 

VARYING PATTERNS

Piracy impacted on BAME women from Madagascar to the Spanish Main and Nassau to New England. The gendered patterns varied with period and location. 

For example, in 2000-2018 Somalia, women were affected by high levels of piracy. Women were not involved in heists at sea, not least because it is a Muslim culture and because so many pirates were ex-military, and therefore male. But they were aboard as carers for the captives awaiting ransom.   

Brittany Gilmer writes in ‘Invisible Pirates: Women and the Gendered Roles of Somali Piracy’, (Feminist Criminology, 14: 3, 2019) that they were were care workers, resource dealers, relationship facilitators and financial investors.

GOLDEN AGE. WEST INDIES

Proportionally the greatest number of BAME women were probably in piracy’s so-called Golden Age, 1650-1730. 

The Caribbean was one of the main areas. If you’d been a brown or black woman in Jamaica or Tortuga,  needing to earn a living, you’d have been mixed up in piracy, and certainly mixing with the visiting male seafarers.  Some men were BAME. 60 out of Captain Blackbeard's 100 crew were said to black and brown.

As a woman you might have gained your main earnings as a consequence of piracy, if you could supply what the needy incomers required. 

Gender, race and class: Racially mixed crews with white captains were reportedly the norm: Image courtesy of Disney Studio Motion Pictures.

9 FAQs.

1.What did women do in this Golden Age Caribbean world?

Their five main roles were surely these:

• As wives and girlfriends, and even mothers and daughters of pirates, giving domestic support including shelter and listening
• As paid providers of goods and visitor services, such as laundry, nursing care, lodgings 
• As partners in casual sex, including paid sex, not necessarily willingly  (see the picture of  Madagascan pirate's' 'native wife') 
• As captives and victims
• As fences distributing stolen goods, as well as suppliers of intelligence about ship movements and impending crackdowns 

And this pattern was similar with non-piratical seafarers too. For example, in Jamaica in 1780 a formerly enslaved black women, Cubah Cornwallis (c1750-1848), nursed Royal Navy hero Horatio Nelson.

2.How many? 

Surely tens of thousands. Estimates say that one-third of the 10,000 pirates of this period were former enslaved men (some escapees). 

If this statistic is correct then at least 33,000 BAME men were pirates. If you were the blood relative of a pirate you would be domestically implicated in piracy. These women were not inevitably brown or black but most would have been. 

Just before the start of the eighteenth century roughly 6,000 people were in Port Royal, the most infamous of all the West Indies pirate havens. If women were approximately half the population this suggests that at least 2,000 women may have been involved in profiting in some way from the 200-odd ships visiting the port in 1688. 

 
3.Were black and brown women in piracy beautiful ‘co-stars?

It’s unlikely that they were a sort of moll for a Johnny Depp figure. This is mythology. Women who counted as ‘beautiful’ could command the highest prices in the sex industry. This meant that the richest pirate men (captains, who were white) were in a position to attract or buy the trophy women, who were white. And you might not have wanted anything to do with these marauders of the high seas anyway.

Interestingly, Rachel Pringle Polgreen (1753–1791), who kept a Barbados brothel and is the best recorded Caribbean women in seafaring life, is not portrayed as attractive by today’s standards. But she was very popular.  

4. Did black and brown women get rich if they were connected to a pirate?

Possibly. Any newly-arrived ship was an island’s vital opportunity for dirt-poor people to earn in a range of ways. Gain could be substantial, especially from  men newly paid off after a successful venture.

For example when the 300 pirates who’d taken part in legendary Henry Morgan’s raid on Portobello in 1688 went back to their Port Royal base they each had prize money of over  £60. (This was £15,000 in today’s money) or roughly the price of an enslaved human being.) Such prize money was usually spent lavishly, so nearby women gained.

If your pirate was black or brown your situation would have partly been a consequence of the racial attitudes on his particular pirate ship. 

Some radical pirate captains were notably fair.But BAME men generally had lower status than white men. They typically worked as cooks. 

In these commune-like situations officers shared out the bounty according to status. For example. a captain might get five shares to the ship’s boy’s half-share.  

So BAME pirates’ lack of high-paying roles meant they gained less money than white people. But earnings were often better, if less regular,  than the low wages they could command in legit work on land. 

The legendary ‘Black Caesar’ was West African-born and operating around 1710 on Blackbeard’s Queen Anne's Revenge. He is the exception to this pattern. He gained wealth, temporarily.  See imagined version of him here). 

5. Was it better to have a black and brown pirate than a white pirate as your man?

In some ways. He was less likely to be hanged than a white man, if apprehended by the law.

Instead a black or brown pirate would be returned to his ‘owner’ or re-enslaved. This might mean he was forcibly located far away from you, in a situation you didn’t want if you had been a relatively high-earning woman in port.  

6. Why were BAME women less involved in actually sailing on pirate vessels?

In Golden Age piracy only captains – but not lower crew –sailed with their female partners. (and very few at that).

Captains were usually white, and chose white British women as partners.  For example in the 1710s Calico Jack Rackham on the Kingston sailed with Anne Bonny, a white Irish-American woman who was regarded as his wife. She is said to have had two children by him.  (See artist's idea of Anne, and Mary Read: the tw most famous women pirates.)

7. What about being captured by pirates?  

BAME women in the Golden Age were less likely to be travelling than white women. The few were mainly servants.  

Servants of any colour were seen as of less value, not least because they could not be ransomed for a high price. Black and brown women servants would probably have been at the bottom of the chain, and more likely to be raped and discarded. 

Black Caesar was rumoured to have had a harem of 100 women captives from ships c1710.Their ethnicity is not recorded.

8. Who were the black and brown women who best enjoyed pirate life?

They would be light-skinned, conventionally beautiful, freed women, who were based in ports and prepared to meet white men's needs. The most successful had enough capital and entrepreneurial ingenuity to profit from the more high status men (meaning whites) in visiting ships. Doctoresses and brothel operators were probably the highest earners; it could be a seller’s market. 

Women were best off mixing with pirates who were needy after a long voyages . It was most profitable to meet quite soon after the men  had landed, consequent to successfully plundering a vessel. If the women knew how to avoid pregnancy - and in Jamaica they did - so much the better.

9. Who were the worst-off  black and brown women in the pirate world?

Probably all of them. Pirates were only sometimes gents. They were, and are, men habituated to violence. That could spill over into domestic violence too. For a modern take on it see Shukria Dini’s article ‘Ten reasons why Somali pirates are bad for women’ (https://tinyurl.co/pirateBad).

But women needing the support of a male relative who would remain securely present as a steady earner were especially badly off.  A pirate is part of what is now called the precariat. So you would be in a relationship of feast and famine, and have to tolerating a lot being left behind.

 Being morally opposed to the business would bring loneliness and ostracism. BAME women might be the least economically able to survive such difficulties, depending on the sisterly support available and their own resilience.

 READING MORE

To my knowledge, there is no solid information on BAME women in Golden Age piracy. But we can deduce a lot from reading histories of piracy in conjunction with modern analyses of BAME and gender. 

In relation to what were called the West Indies these include:

• Hilary McD. Beckles, ‘Sex and Gender in the Historiography of Caribbean Slavery,’ in Engendering History, ed. Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton, and Barbara Bailey (London: James Currey Publishers, 1995) 

• 
  Lucille Mathurin Mair, A Historical Study of Women in Jamaica 1655-1844 (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2006)

•  Verene A.Shepherd, ed. Women in Caribbean History: The British-Colonised Territories (Kingston: I. Randle, 1999)

• Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838 (London: Heinemann Publishers, 1990). 

See also my article on Cuba Cornwallis:  

'Questing for Cuba Cornwallis',Trafalgar Chronicle, Autumn 2018 pp24-33. https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/The-Trafalgar-Chronicle-Paperback/p/15611.

10 FAQs. Black women in maritime history

1. Were there any BAME women seafarers in Britain's past? 

Yes, but not many and only post-1980s. A key example of success in that trend is Captain Belinda Bennett, (pictured above) from 2016 the world’s first black woman captain of a cruise ship. 

In countries where the majority of the population is black and brown then women had a more success e.g. in Ghana, Beatrice Vormawah, (pictured below) the world’s first black women captain in 1995. https://genderedseas.blogspot.com/2015/01/ghanas-pioneering-seawomen.html

2.  Did BAME women do particular jobs on British ships?  

Yes. The situation was and is culturally specific: women from the Philippines have predominated in domestic work; today women from India often work in finance departments on cruise ships. There’s no intrinsic reason for this. This is proven because o there have been BAME women engineers, and deck officers who have worked their way up to captain status.

3.  Why have so few BAME women worked on UK ships?  

It is odd. You might expect employers to take advantage of people who could be doubly low-paid because female and dark-skinned. This did not happen. 

Knowing the history of female maritime labour I deduce three explanations for this, apart from the fact that women were few anyway, and usually confined to domestic jobs mainly until the late 1970s.

# PROTECTIONISM. From at least 1900-1985 the National Union of Seamen argued that British people should be given jobs first, then white ‘foreigners’ second, then BAME people. 

When the UK’s BAME population was small, this made BAME women proportionately less likely to get into seafaring work as stewardesses (the main job open to women, which was highly sought after) than white women. 

# "CONSUMERS' XENOPHOBIA." It is likely that shipowners would justify preferring white women for this relatively intimate job by saying that passengers would not want BAME women as stewardesses.

 (This is not openly discussed in any documents I have seen; it’s something I gather from what I'm told off the record, and from detecting employment patterns from company records.)

# SEX FEARS. Relatedly, elite-ish white passengers on ships serving the Raj were used to having black servants. This is why companies such as P&O and British India could carry Asian male General Servants (as stewards were called) throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By contrast Indian women were not employed as such GSs or stewardesses. 

Reasons for this include shipping lines fears about social stability and intimate ’immoral’ racial mixing. There would be anxiety that the women might be used for sex – by passengers and other crew. The issue was not to protect such women but protect the shipping company from scandal and consequent reduced ticket sales.

4. What about BAME women passengers on UK ships? 

Yes, there have been some, including ayahs (see picture) and the multiple wives of some African leaders in the nineteenth century. Numbers have grown since cruising became more affordable from the late 1960s. 

Unequal pay practices mean single women and some BAME people tended to not have an income that allowed such travel earlier, especially as solo women. More BAME women came into the UK (e.g., Indian women for university education) than left its shores. 

This is because the biggest outbound traffic by women – as emigrants to the empire and US – was by white people, the majority of the population. I have not found any BAME women among the convicts or convicts' wives being forcibly transported e.g. to Van Diemen’s Land.

5.  Women are sexually abused on ships. Has this been worse for BAME women? 

Yes, the 2010 Akhona Geveza case is the key example of this.  https://genderedseas.blogspot.com/2010/07/cadet-gevezas-death-exposes-shipboard.html. 

See picture. The cultural idea that dark women are attractively exotic, and have animal instincts, has led to their being targeted. Most women do not report such crime, even in these #MeToo times.

6.  Have BAME women been stowaways on ships to the UK? 

Yes, a few. Especially from the Caribbean to the UK. The most famous is Evelyn Wauchope, followed by Hazel Brown. Both left Jamaica in this way in 1948, but Hazel was deported home. Stowaways’ motives include accessing a free passage. That means that women, who have usually been paid much less than men, would have particular need to stow away. If sage, women knew that ships’ officials and port magistrates would receive BAME women even less leniently than white women – but probably still give women better treatment than black men.

7. Did BAME women disguise themselves as men to sail on British ships? 

Possibly. About 44 such women are recorded. But the only known black one was ‘William Brown’. From Grenada, she sailed on the Queen Charlotte in 1815. https://genderedseas.blogspot.com/2017/04/black-woman-cross-dressed-seafarer.html. 

There is no reason to think that she was discovered more readily or ejected more quickly than white women. However this may have been so. Officers simply feared that the presence of any women not married to men aboard would lead to promiscuous sexual activity and men’s rivalry for access to the women.

8.   Were BAME women involved in maritime business ashore in the UK? 

Yes, but we don’t know the extent of this. One example is Mrs. Penelope Steel, from Jamaica. She part-funded the publication Steel’s Navy List, which was equivalent of a search engine like google, specific to the biggest employer in Britain.  https://www.rmg.co.uk/discover/behind-the-scenes/blog/three-women-london-chart-trade-c1800-1860. 

A surprising number of well-off white wives funded husband’s careers as naval officers. BAME women overseas certainly provided sexual, and laundry services for visiting sailors. It is likely that they would have also have done so in the UK. Such grey economy low-waged work is seldom recorded, whatever the worker’s ethnicity.

9. Have BAME women been in the Royal Navy for long? 

No. In both world wars there is evidence that women thought to have ‘a touch of the tar brush’ were rejected, or selectively processed, in the WRNS. This was partly out of fear that ‘foreign birth’ would compromise national security. 

From the 1970s personnel shortages meant recruits were actively sought in the Caribbean, women included. 

A small number of BAME women were in the WRNS (which was about 3,000-strong in the late 20C).  This pattern continued and increased when the WRNS was subsumed into the Navy in 1993. But there were no BAME Wrens among the first 20 allowed to go to sea in 1991.

Today BAME people are 3.8 of the Royal Navy/Royal Marines, which is strong on equal opportunities. As about 600 women are at sea at any one time currently, logically nineteen may be from a BAME background. https://tinyurl.com/2018-gov-stats, (see page 7).

10.   Did UK girls’ sea training organisations include BAME girls? 

Yes, in small numbers and lately. The Sea Rangers began in 1920 and the Girls Nautical Training Corps in 1942.  From the 1960s both organisations had small numbers of BAME girls, and later a few officers. 

Numbers increased as the UK’s BAME population increased. The Sea Rangers website features BAME girls.