13. “If You Had Fought Like a Man, You Would Not Hang Now Like a Dog!”
In October of 1720, Calico Jack and most of his crew were at anchor and drunk out of their gourds, when a pirate hunter chanced upon their ship. The men were too inebriated to defend themselves, so the only fight was put up by the crew’s two women, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who offered fierce resistance before they were finally subdued. Captured, Calico Jack was tried and convicted of piracy, and sentenced to death by hanging.
His lover, spared the noose after “pleading her belly” – she was pregnant, and the law did not permit hanging pregnant women – had little sympathy for him. When he grew maudlin while bidding her goodbye before his execution, Anne Bonny reportedly sneered: “if you had fought like a man, you would not hang now like a dog!” John Rackham, AKA Calico Jack, was hanged on November 18th, 1720, and his corpse was displayed from a gibbet at the entrance to Port Royal, Jamaica, in an inlet known thereafter as Rackham’s Cay.