Anne Bonny and Mary Read

Two renowned female pirates as dangerous as, if not more so than, their male counterparts were Anne Bonny (or Bonney) and Mary Read. According to the Royal Museums Greenwich, Bonny, the daughter of a plantation owner, was born in Ireland in 1698 before relocating to South Carolina (opens in new tab). In the early 1700s, Anne abandoned her home and set out for the Caribbean. She began pirating while posing as a male on the ship of pardoned buccaneer Calico Jack Rackham. When the ship Read, a London native, was working on was taken over by Rackham, she joined the crew while still dressing as a man.

Read and Bonny grew close and enjoyed plundering the waters together. They fought with a machete in one hand and a pistol in the other while wearing coats and long pants. According to Smithsonian Magazine, a victim of their piracy claimed that they were quite active on the ship and "wiling to do anything" (opens in new tab). When Rackham's ship and crew were apprehended off the coast of Jamaica in 1720 and tried, Bonny and Read were spared the hangman's noose because they were both expecting children. Read passed away from a fever while incarcerated, but Bonny lived. She was escorted back to South Carolina by her father after being released from prison, where she remained until the age of 84.