Over the next few months, Read and Bonny began to grow closer. Though neither knew that the other was also a woman, they found that they had much more in common with each other than with the men on the ship. Finally, Bonny decided to tell Mark Read that she had feelings for him. Obviously, this wasn’t an easy decision to make. If Mark didn’t keep her secret, then everyone on the crew would find out Bonny was a woman. And being the only woman on a ship full of pirates isn’t a position anyone wants to be in.
You can imagine the strange mixture of relief, confusion, and maybe just a bit of disappointment that Bonny must have felt when she confessed her gender and her feelings to Read, only to find out that Mark was actually Mary. But with this new connection between them, Read and Bonny grew even closer. The pair began spending much of their time together, even fighting side by side in battle. But the obvious relationship developing between the two pirates began to attract Captain Rackham’s attention. After all, Rackham still had no idea that Read was a woman.
As Rackham watched the person he thought was Mark Read spending time with his lover, his suspicion grew. Eventually, he decided to confront Bonny about her new friend in a fit of jealousy and threatened to cut Read’s throat. To avoid Rackham’s anger, Bonny was forced to admit that Read was actually a woman. And it’s here that the story gets a little hazy. Most modern tellings of the relationship between Rackham, Read, and Bonny imagine that, at this point, the three began engaging in a three-sided sexual relationship.
And there are many historians who suggest that Bonny and Read were at least having a romantic affair with each other. But we don’t know for certain that this was going on. Of course, both Bonny and Read were married, which suggests that they were probably attracted to men. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t attracted to each other. And given that Bonny seems to have fallen for Read when she thought Read was a man, there may have been some sexual attraction that survived the reveal of her true gender. So, it’s certainly possible that the three were engaged in a relationship.
Most of the information we have about Read and Bonny comes from the work of Charles Johnson, who wrote a popular account of the history of piracy in the Caribbean. Johnson’s account covers the careers of the two pirates, but it doesn’t go into much detail about their sexual relationship. That’s assuming of course, that there was one. But it certainly appears that both Read and Bonny were having sex with someone. The two claimed to be pregnant within a few months. And that fact would prove to be very important by the end of 1720. As it turns out, their pregnancies were what saved them from being executed.