Short Biography: Anne Mccormac

Anne Bonny

Anne McCormac was born in 1697 in Kinsale, County Cork, Ireland. Her father, William McCormac, was an attorney and her mother was his servant who was called Mary Brennan. His reputation, business and personal, was destroyed by his infidelity in marriage. William’s wife and her family, carried a great deal of influence within the social circles of Kinsale. To remain a practicing attorney and to avoid discovery, William took his illegitimate daughter and her mother to London. While there, William would dress Anne as a boy and call her Andy, “pretending that she was the child of a relative entrusted to his care” (Rediker, 102). His ruse failed and the three were discovered. They were forced to move again, this time to Charlestown, South Carolina.

At first, things didn’t go very well in the Carolinas either. The Irish weren’t held in very high regard in America at the time so, William decided to drop the ‘Mc’ from their last name in order to blend in more effectively. William’s ability in business and his familiarity with the law allowed the small family to obtain a townhouse, then a plantation, and after a while a decent amount of wealth. At the age of 16, Anne fell in love with a sailor named James Bonny, “who just wanted her estate. Her

Perhaps because his style was to attack shipping vessels in shallow waters. He was, however, an effective and notorious romantic. Calico Jack managed to attract the affections of Anne, and the two of them slipped away from Nassau in secret aboard a stolen sloop. While onboard Rackham’s ship, ‘The Revenge’, it was known to the shipmates that Anne was a woman, (in fact ‘the Captain’s woman’.) In times of combat or going ashore, she would normally disguise her gender by dressing in men’s clothing. This was due to both the era’s ideas of what a ‘woman’s place’ should be, and the nautical superstition that having a woman onboard would bring bad