Her flagship was called My Revenge and, for 13 years, de Clisson ruled the Channel, running down ships and slaughtering their crew – bar a single survivor. Vowing to avenge her husband’s execution for treason in 1343, she acquired three warships, painted them black and fitted them out with red sails, then launched a campaign of terror against the French crown and ships in the English Channel. In the 14th century, a French noblewoman, Jeanne de Clisson, was known as the “Lioness of Brittany”.

I started to do a little research and discovered Bonny and Read were far from the only women to turn pirate. Not only Bonny and Read, but any other women who, out of necessity or a desire for adventure or revenge, also took to the seas and became “she-captains” or pirate commanders? Others, like Rafael Sabatini’s 1922 novel Captain Blood, (and who can forget Errol Flynn as the eponymous captain in the 1935 film version) claimed to have been inspired by real buccaneers and pirates. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, Walter Scott’s The Pirate and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson came out in 1883.īut all of these pirate stories were sold as boys’ reading, as if girls weren’t interested in adventure.

Nineteenth-century literature was awash with pirate stories: R. It’s easy to romanticise the pirate life and modern-day piracy is anything but romantic.īut for those of us who grew up watching The Onedin Line on television and reading Enid Blyton’s Devon coast-set Famous Five, adventure stories about the sea were in our blood.Īdded to that, I lived close to the sea and was a regular visitor to the Historic Dockyard at Portsmouth to see Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory, and, later, the recovered wreck of The Mary Rose. Then there was Captain Teach – better known as Blackbeard – who plaited his long beard with ribbons before battle and marooned his own crew on a desert island.īut my heart belonged to Mary Read and Anne Bonny, the legendary 18th-century female pirates on whom I later learnt Knightley’s character had been based. Its pages were filled with the romance and the swagger of the sea buccaneers, buried treasure and brutish villains: the Scottish privateer, Captain Kidd Henry Morgan, the Welshman who became the notoriously-brutal governor of Jamaica. But my favourite, by far, was the Ladybird Book about Pirates.

World of warships legends selling ships