Sea Queens

I’d barely heard of any ladies who swashed, let alone buckled, until Sarah J lent me this book, a 280 page lesson in “just because you ain’t heard of them, doesn’t mean they didn’t exist”. So, you may have heard of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, because they’re in the rather tabloidy A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, published in 1724 and written by probably-Daniel-Defoe-with-a-pseudonym. But it didn’t start and end with them!

LADIES ON BOATS: got up to more than this lass, it turns out.

Now, I’ll try not to glorify the murderating tendencies and obvious criminality of historical ladypirates just because they were ladies. But it did surprise me at Halloween to find a fair few fellow party-punters believing no women pirates existed at all. Isn’t Elizabeth Swann’s turn as the Pirate King, they asked, in That Obviously Very Historically Accurate Movie Franchise, a total wishful? A lady pirate king; that just takes the disbelief-suspension cake, right?

Wrong! Lady pirates, though rare in history, are one of the few things in those films whose historical accuracy should not be in dispute. (Jury’s out on Governor Swann’s periwig.)

Lives and Legends

It should be noted before we go any further that “lives” and “legends” are difficult to separate, and this is arguably even more the case for the women than for the dudes, simply because more has been written, in general, on the dudes, who were greater in number. That book, that started me on my research? You can’t easily get a new copy of that in England any more right now, unfortunately (keep watching Amazon though), and there aren’t all that many books in print that aren’t 50% retellings of the myths we have. So these posts will have to be as concerned with fun storytelling and legend-sharing as anything else.

I’m going to start with a woman who lived in a castle¹ during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, headed up a family of notorious pillagers, and was pushing 70 at her most notorious. Her name was Lady Killigrew.

Killiwho?

Um. Actually, there are at least two pirate Lady Killigrews in the Killigrew Family Tree. Based in Falmouth, Cornwall, the family were sufficiently piratical that more than one Lady Killigrew was active within the same fifty years – Mary first, then Elizabeth. Hearsay has tangled them together so that their deeds are difficult to separate without writing a book. I’ll treat the legend here as one woman.

It’s important to understand that being uproariously criminal at sea didn’t necessarily make the Killigrew family, who were aristocrats, wanted criminals all over England; quite the opposite. Many of them received Letters of Marque from Elizabeth I; licence to go ahead and pillage, as long as it’s the pesky Spanish, in short. (Francis Drake? Arguably a hero of this sort of patriotic piracy, commonly referred to as “privateering”). Lady Killigrew’s husband was a big shot in the Navy with precisely this sort of Season Pass for pirating on foreign ships himself.

Guys, Nobody Wore Thigh High Stilettos In 1582

So, historians aren’t certain on all the details of the lives of the Killigrew women. Nor is anyone on DeviantArt (WHO IS SURPRISED) which houses a few ‘artist’s impression’ jobs, a couple of which have blown through the internet on an ill wind, originating, I presume, from somewhere on the cutting room floor for Dead Or Alive: Buccaneer Babes Edition.

What we do know for definite is that Lady (probably E) Killigrew had a long career hoarding the profits of a full-on smuggling racket at the family home, until she ended up on trial for an Incident in her mid-sixties (setting an indefatigable example to all angry older women that makes me think Moira Stewart should sail up the Thames in a galleon, storm the BBC and steal her job back.)

The legend of the Incident, attributed to both Ladies E and M Killigrew in different accounts I’ve read (though records show Lady E definitely went on trial for something piratical), goes something like:

1. A horrendous storm rocked Falmouth to its very foundations. A Spanish trade ship struggled into dock. Bedraggled sailors made their way to the castle.
2. This was their first mistake, for old Lady K saw them coming. And stocked up on pastries.
3. The lure of a crackling fire, tankards of ale, and the friendly jurisdiction of a respectable old lady was strong. The sailors spilled the beans about what was on their 144-tonne ship (a lucrative lot of cloth cargo). Lady K advised them to stick around until the weather was fair, even going out of her way to set them up at a guesthouse in Penryn, further up the coast. The ship was left entirely under Lady Killigrew’s watch. The sailors left Castle Killigrew praising their good fortune – the Lady was married to the guy in charge of stamping out piracy, so leaving their ship under her watch was surely safe.
4. Except for the part where Lady Killigrew up and stole the boat.
   The whole boat.

   Had it towed clean out of the bay.

5. On the dark night of 6th January 1582, the stormclouds hadn’t cleared. The story goes that she actually had herself rowed out to where the ship was docked and personally presided over the seizure. Guards were jumped and done in, booty was loaded into rowboats, and the entire ship towed up the coast by her dedicated staff of heavies.
6. The sailors returned to Falmouth in the morning. “Ship?” said Lady K’s doormen. “What ship?” Bingo: GRAND THEFT BOATO.

… there are a number of versions of this story. In some, like I say, it’s Mary Killigrew in charge, rather than Elizabeth. In some, Lady K takes up arms and leads a gang of armed privateers onto the ship to ransack it while the majority of the sailors are in Penryn. In some, a small-scale battle takes place in the harbour. In others, she simply empties the ship of its cargo, leaving an empty boat for the sailors.

But I like the version where she steals the boat best. You can’t begrudge me that. (BOAT!, as Kate Beaton would say.)

“Who’s Queen?”

Elizabeth I is famed in TV-spot history shorthand for her knack for staking out and maintaining middle ground. Whatever the detailed truth of that, she managed the ecclesiastical schisms that plagued England at the time bloody well by the, er, bloody standards, and seems to have clocked with reliable diplomatic intuition just when, how, and how far to take out the trash.

Unfortunately, this Fun With Boats was a bridge too far, and Lizzie, under pressure from some irate Spanish ambassadors, duly stuck Lady Killigrew on trial for piracy. However, the Queen clearly wasn’t wildly bothered – or at least, privateering was probably still politically useful to her – so within weeks she’d issued a pardon, and Lady K headed home to live out her days merrily fencing stolen goods in that basement ’til she died. She has a snazzy tombstone, complete with brass etching, at… a place. The freewheeling anarchist press that published my book haven’t actually captioned the picture with a location. This is irksome for trivia-thirsty feminerds like me, and begs the question: when are we going to get a big-guns mainstream-academic book about these women? At this rate I’ll have to write it and pay the rest of Team BadRep in rum to edit out my overuse of the capslock key and the word “AWESOME”.

To balance out the boobtacular hi-jinks on DeviantArt, here’s an illustration with historically plausible costuming.

"Heh, park the boat round the back, boys! ... anyone for scones?"

Next time you hear a sexist joke at work about how women just aren’t dog-eat-dog enough to be the CEO, imagine Lady Killigrew, and do her proud. (But don’t shanghai your boss’s BMW out the car park. Age of CCTV, and all that.)

• Which lesser-known sea-queen shall I do next? Grace O’Malley, maybe. Never heard of her? STICK AROUND. HISTORY IS AWESOME.

1. EDIT: or at least, her family occupied one part-time as caretakers-to-the-crown, as one of  our commenters has helpfully pointed out below.