A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans (2 page)

It was a cruel lesson in conformity—or a cruel joke, had the theocratic Puritans of Massachusetts been feeling the least bit frisky. Mary Dyer and two of her fellow Quakers were led to the elm tree on Boston Common, from which they had been condemned to hang. Each was fitted with a noose, and, as Mary watched, Marmaduke Stephenson and William Robinson were dropped to their deaths. Then it was her turn. She ascended the ladder, and the rope around her neck was looped over the tree branch. Just then, however, came word of a reprieve. The Puritans had planned it all along.

 

The Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, as they were commonly called, faced a hostile reception from their fellow Christians when they first came to Massachusetts in 1656. Whipping and mutilation; fines, prison, banishment, and even death by hanging were the instruments of persecution used against the pacifist sect that—along with so-called witches—the ruling Puritans found so threatening to their established order. Quakers were denounced as “open and capitall blasphemers, open seducers from the glorious Trinity,…and from the Holy Scriptures as the rule of life, open ennemyes of government itself as established in the hands of any but men of theire owne principles,…and malignant and assiduous promoters of doctrines directly tending to subvert both our churches and state.” All this because the Quakers dared to believe that it was the Holy Spirit who would lead them to righteousness, not the clerical authority that formed the basis of the Puritan power structure. Mary Dyer was determined to bear witness against this state of extreme intolerance, even if she had to lay down her life.

Though her impact was profound, only the barest sketch of her life survives. She was described by the Quaker chronicler George Bishop as “a Comely Grave Woman, and of Goodly Personage, and one of good Report, having a Husband of an Estate, fearing the Lord, and a Mother of Children.” Mary and her husband, William, had come to the Massachusetts Bay Colony from England in 1635 seeking religious tolerance. Little did they know that such freedom of belief was reserved only for the Puritans who ran the place.

Even before she joined the Society of Friends, Mary offended the Massachusetts authorities because of her close association with Anne Hutchinson—“the instrument of Satan,” as Governor John Winthrop called her—who was banished from Massachusetts for having dared challenge Puritan orthodoxy and who went on to cofound the colony of Rhode Island. Hutchinson stressed the individual's intuition as a means for reaching God rather than the observance of institutionalized beliefs and the precepts of ministers.
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Her approach appealed to Mary and closely resembled the Quaker tenets she would later adopt. As a result, the two women formed an enduring bond.

During the course of their friendship, Hutchinson, a midwife, helped deliver Mary's stillborn baby—a girl with severe defects—then secretly buried the child to avoid the superstition and controversy that would have been aroused at a time when even the slightest abnormality might be considered the mark of the devil. Mary, in turn, stood by Anne's side during her heresy trials, and eventually followed her to exile in Rhode Island.

The relationship between the two women prompted Governor Winthrop, once an admirer of Mary's, to condemn her as a woman “notoriously infected with Mrs. Hutchinson's errors, and very censorious and troublesome (she being of a very proud spirit, and much addicted to revelations).” That, he was convinced, was what caused Mary to deliver the “monster” he never actually saw but vividly described in his journal:

The Dyers were counted among Rhode Island's leading citizens after following Anne Hutchinson and her family into exile there in 1638. William held a number of high offices and was, in fact, one of the signers of the Portsmouth Compact that established the new colony. In 1652 Mary accompanied him on business to England, where she converted to the Quaker doctrines recently established by George Fox. Five years later, when she returned to Boston en route to her home in Rhode Island, she was promptly arrested. The first Quakers had arrived in Massachusetts the year before, and since that time the Puritans, under Governor John Endecott, had enacted harsh measures against them. Mary was only released from prison when her husband, who had not converted, promised on pain of great penalty to usher her out of the colony and not allow anyone to speak to her along the way.

She was not home for long before she ventured back to Massachusetts in 1659 to visit Marmaduke Stephenson and William Robinson, two fellow Rhode Island Quakers who had been imprisoned for having entered the colony to bear witness against the persecuting spirit that existed there. Mary was arrested as well. That September she and the others were brought before the Court of Assistants and banished from Massachusetts. Failure to leave carried an automatic death sentence. Mary did return to Rhode Island, briefly, but Stephenson and Robinson remained in Massachusetts “to try the bloody laws unto death.” Mary soon rejoined them, resulting in the farce that was played out on Boston Common. It was merely a dress rehearsal for what was to come.

If the Puritans believed they had frightened Mary Dyer into submission with the mock execution, they underestimated her religious zeal, which rivaled their own. She was every bit as willing to die for her faith as they were to kill for theirs. “My life is not accepted,” she wrote to the authorities after her reprieve, “neither availeth me, in comparison with the lives and liberty of the Truth and Servants of the living God, for which in the Bowels of Love and Meekness I sought you; yet nevertheless with wicked Hands have you put two of them to Death, which makes me to feel that the Mercies of the Wicked is cruelty; I rather chuse to Dye than to live, as from you, as Guilty of their Innocent Blood.”

The Massachusetts authorities sent her back to Rhode Island, making much of their mercy in the face of popular indignation over the executions of Stephenson and Robinson. But six months later Mary defiantly returned to Boston and was arrested yet again. She was brought before the magistrates on May 31, 1660.

“Are you the same Mary Dyer that was here before?” inquired Governor Endecott.

“I am the same Mary Dyer that was here the last General Court,” she replied.

“You will own yourself a Quaker, will you not?” the governor continued.

“I own myself to be reproachfully so called,” Mary answered.

“Sentence was passed upon you the last General Court; and now likewise,” Endecott pronounced. “You must return to the prison, and there remain till tomorrow at nine o'clock; then thence you must go to the gallows, and there be hanged till you are dead.”

“This is no more than what thou saidst before,” she rejoined.

“But now,” said the governor, “it is to be executed. Therefore prepare yourself tomorrow at nine o'clock.”

“I came in obedience to the will of God the last General Court, desiring you to repeal your unrighteous laws of banishment on pain of death,” she declared. “And that same is my work now, and earnest request, although I told you that if you refused to repeal them, the Lord would send others of his servants to witness against them.”

Endecott then sneeringly asked if she was a “prophetess,” to which she replied that she spoke the words the Lord spoke in her, and now the thing was come to pass. As she continued to speak of her calling, the exasperated governor abruptly interrupted. “Away with her!” he screeched. “Away with her!”

The next day Mary Dyer once again stood at the base of the great elm tree on Boston Common. As she ascended the ladder, she rebuffed all pleas to repent and save herself. It was then that Captain John Webb, commander of the military guard, told her she was guilty of spilling her own blood. “Nay,” she answered. “I came to keep blood-guiltiness from you, desiring you to repeal the unrighteous and unjust law of banishment upon pain of death, made against the innocent servants of the Lord, therefore my blood will be required at your hands who willfully do it; but for those that do it in the simplicity of their hearts, I do desire the Lord to forgive them. I came to do the will of my Father, and in obedience to his will I stand even to the death.” And so she did.

Anne Bonny was all sympathy when she came to see her condemned lover, Caribbean pirate “Calico Jack” Rackham, on the day of his execution. “If you'd fought like a man,” she snarled, “you wouldn't be hanged like a dog!” It was a touching farewell worthy of a fellow pirate, which is exactly what Anne was. Though women were typically strictly forbidden aboard pirate ships, Calico Jack recognized that certain savage something in his girlfriend and made an exception. Together, the swashbuckling couple and the rest of their cutthroat crew prowled the waters of the West Indies, plundering merchant ships and terrorizing innocents during that romanticized period of history known as the Golden Age of Piracy.

As the privileged daughter of William Cormac, a wealthy plantation owner in what would become South Carolina, Anne might have made a respectable match and settled into genteel anonymity. But there was something feral about her, even at an early age. Some unsubstantiated accounts say that as a teenager she stabbed a servant girl to death with a carving knife, and later beat an unwelcome suitor bloody. Whatever the case, Anne Cormac was clearly not destined for proper Charleston society.

In 1718, at age twenty, she eloped with a drifter named James Bonny and settled with him in the Bahamas. It was a fateful move, for there she met Calico Jack. Historian Clinton Black notes that Rackham took Anne like he did any ship he plundered: with “no time wasted, straight up alongside…every gun brought to play, and the prize boarded.” There is no evidence of any resistance on Anne's part, and soon enough the adulterous couple was out to sea.

Bonny quickly established herself as one of the most ferocious pirates in Rackham's crew. Yet oddly enough, she wasn't the only woman. Mary Read had spent most of her life at sea disguised as a man. And so she was when Rackham captured the Dutch merchant vessel she was working on and invited her to join his band of pirates. According to one story, Anne developed a crush on Mary, thinking she was a man. This apparently drove Calico Jack wild with jealousy, and he threatened to slit Read's throat. It was then that Mary opened her shirt to reveal her breasts and said, “As you can see, sir, I am no threat to you.” After that Anne Bonny and Mary Read became inseparable friends—and one terrifying team.

Victims of their raids reported the two women screaming like banshees as they boarded a captured ship, wielding their weapons as seasoned marauders. In one instance, a woman named Dorothy Thomas was attacked while alone in a canoe on the north side of Jamaica and forced aboard Rackham's sloop for an ordeal that can only be imagined. A report on the deposition she gave later stated that Bonny and Read “wore Mens Jackets, and long Trouzers, and Handkerchiefs tied about their Heads; and that each of them had a Machet and Pistol in their Hands, and cursed and swore at the Men, to murther the Deponent; and that they should kill her, to prevent her coming against them; and the Deponent further said, That the Reason of knowing and believing them to be Women then was, by the largeness of their Breasts.”

Throughout the summer and early fall of 1720, Rackham and his crew conducted raid after raid, with Bonny and Read often leading the charge. But on the night of October 22, their reign of terror on the seas came to an end. A British navy vessel captained by pirate hunter Jonathan Barnett overpowered their anchored sloop and disabled it. After firing only one shot, Rackham realized there was no hope and called for quarter, which Barnett granted. Bonny and Read wanted no part of it, however. They put up a fierce fight with their pistols and cutlasses while the rest of the crew cowered in the ship's hold. At one point Anne reportedly screamed down at them, “If there's a man among ye, ye'll come up and fight like the men ye are to be!” When that failed to motivate them, she fired into the hold and killed one of the crew. It was an act of defiant rage that would have done Blackbeard proud.

In spite of their frenzied resistance, Bonny and Read were overpowered and taken prisoner with the rest of the crew. Calico Jack and the other men were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death that November. After his kiss-off from Anne and subsequent execution, Rackham's corpse was subjected to a rather ghastly ordeal: It was placed upright in a metal cage known as a gibbet and left to rot on the Jamaica coast, as a warning to other pirates. A week later the women were tried. One witness who had been taken prisoner described them as “very profligate, cursing and swearing much, and very ready and willing to do most any Thing on Board.” Another testified that “when they saw any Vessel, gave chase, or Attacked, they wore Men's Cloathes; and at other Times, they wore Women's Cloaths; That they did not seem to be Kept, or detain'd by Force, but of their own Free-Will and Consent.”

Neither woman offered a defense, and each was duly condemned to hang. Right after the sentence was read, however, both informed the court that they were pregnant. An examination proved this to be true, and the sentences were suspended. Mary Read died in prison soon after, perhaps during childbirth, but Anne Bonny's fate remains a mystery. Some historians speculate that her wealthy father used his influence with the British authorities to get her released, but no direct evidence of this has ever been produced. Only one thing is certain: She fought like a man, and, unlike Calico Jack, she wasn't hanged like a dog.