Mary Read: Two Lives. One Sword.

At her own murder trial, Mary Read was asked why pirates like her showed such contempt for the gallows. Her answer,  "Without the threat of hanging, she said, every coward would turn pirate and ruin it for everyone."

Mary Read came into the world in late seventeenth-century England as the illegitimate daughter of a widow who dressed her newborn girl as a boy to claim an inheritance from a suspicious grandmother. That first disguise wasn't Mary's choice. But every one that followed was.

She enlisted in the British military disguised as a man, fought in Flanders — not as a nurse, but as a soldier — and by all accounts, a good one. On the battlefield she fell in love with a fellow soldier, shed her disguise, and married him. They settled in the Netherlands and opened an inn. For the first time in her life, she was simply herself. Then he died, the inn failed, and the world offered her nothing. But there was always her old identity to fall back on.

She worked merchant vessels, crossed the Atlantic, and — according to some accounts — was captured by pirates before deciding she had no particular objection to joining them. On Calico Jack Rackham's sloop she met Anne Bonny, one of the only people aboard who knew her secret. The two women were not rivals. They were, in their own strange way, kin.

On the ship, Mary fell for one of the crew. When he was challenged to a duel by a more experienced fighter, Mary couldn't stand it. She picked a fight with the same man herself, arranged to meet him two hours earlier, and killed him — pistol in one hand, cutlass in the other — before her sailor ever had to show up.

When the British navy caught up with Rackham's crew in October 1720, most of the men were below deck, drunk. Mary and Anne stayed topside and fought. Mary screamed at the cowering men to come up and defend the ship. They didn't come. She and Anne faced the boarding party largely alone.

There are accounts of her firing into the hold at the men hiding below, basically saying:

“Get up here and fight, or I’ll kill you myself.” 

She was convicted of piracy and sentenced to hang. She was also pregnant, so the court granted a stay of execution. She never made it to the gallows. Mary Read died in prison in April 1721, likely of fever, and was buried in Jamaica — far from England, far from Flanders, far from the inn where she'd briefly gotten to be herself.