This time, the woman pirate was standing alone at the auction house. The week before she had towered over the Blues Brothers, replicas of the famous movie characters who had been immortalized in plaster.
Someone had apparently bought the brothers and left the woman pirate behind. I found it odd that no one wanted her. I thought she’d end up in a man cave as a show-off, with her exposed chest and curvy body, holding a bar tray in her hand.
When you think pirate, you don’t think female and you don’t think black. Seeing her, though, made me wonder about whether there were female and black pirates way back when. When piracy was at its height in the 18th century, I found out, black pirates were among those actively engaged in the plundering. Women (especially those dressed like the plaster figure at auction), though, were rare.
Most of the black pirates were slaves who had left the plantations or escaped from slave ships attacked by pirates (some of them, too, were slave traders). Others were said to be free men. They were accepted as members of the crew, and when captured, were most likely returned to slavery, according to several accounts.
On the seas, they found some freedom. The most famous was Black Caesar, whose story I found in two versions. He was either an African chief who escaped from a slave ship or a slave from Haiti who participated in Toussaint L’Ouverture’s 1791 rebellion that liberated that country.
The first tale: He was of African royalty and he and some of his warriors were tricked into boarding a slave ship. They tried to subdue the crew but were defeated. He eventually escaped with the help of a sailor on board and the two banded together as pirates along the Florida Keys. Caesar’s Rock, an island north of Key Largo, FL, was named for him. Later, he met up and joined the infamous pirate Blackbeard, and the two plied the waters of the mid-Atlantic.
The second tale: He was a Haitian slave named Henri Caesar who joined in the killing of slaveholders alongside L’Ouverture and his followers. Later, Caesar and his men took over a Spanish ship moored offshore, and thus became pirates in the Caribbean (much unlike Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise movies). When things got too dangerous in his native waters, he took off for the Florida Keys.
Now, he is said to haunt Key Largo and is apparently an honored guest at the Key Largo Piratesfest.
During his reign of terror, Black Caesar was said to have had a harem of women whom he took from the ships he had raided. That seemed to be about how women were utilized, although a few were actual pirates with their own ships.
Female pirates like Mary Read dressed as men – some as disguises and others as the clothing of choice. Read captained her own ship in the Caribbean before it was captured and she joined her captor’s crew. There, she met up with another woman-in-man’s clothing, a pirate named Anne Bonny.
I found differing accounts of whether Bonny was posing as a man or was outwardly seen as a woman (one noted that she was the captain’s lover). She and Read became friends and appeared to be fearless. Another was a Chinese woman named Ching Shih, a 19th-century pirate who with her husband amassed a huge fleet of ships and crew that the ran out of the South China Sea.
The only black female pirate I came across was Zoe Saldana’s character Anamaria in the 2003 “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.” But since women pirates paraded around as men, maybe a few black women did the same. Who knows.
