Pirate Women: The Princesses, Prostitutes And Privateers Who Ruled The Seven Seas

By Laura Sook Duncombe

Chicago Review Press, £20.32

Review by Sean Bell

ANY decent history of piracy is an education not just in infamous villains, but in the society that produces piracy, and drives some to live beyond its laws and confines. A similarly necessary education can be gained by examining the position of women within that society. Laura Sook Duncombe recognises this parallel, and not only details the overlooked exploits of antiquity’s pirate women in an unfailingly entertaining manner, but provides a thoughtful meditation on how female contributions to buccaneering and brigandry, along with so much else, have been written out of history.

Piracy has always attracted embellishment, romance and fictionalistion, from which more conventional histories of the subject often struggle to separate the truth. Though Pirate Women is heavily and meticulously researched, despite an admitted shortage of primary sources, this is less of a concern for Duncombe; she does not identify as a historian, and notes from the outset that her book recounts the myths as well as the facts, cheerfully acknowledging that it is not always possible to know where the two have blurred. As much as anyone who ever lost themselves in Treasure Island, Duncombe is in love with the legend of piracy, and seeks to affirm women’s rightful place within that legend. History matters, but so do stories, and Duncombe has an evident and contagious respect for both.

For a self-professed non-historian, Duncombe has produced an astonishingly wide-ranging and eclectic study, beginning with piracy’s earliest ancient practitioners, among them Queen Artemisia I, who sacked city-states in the 5th century BCE, and Queen Teuta of Illyria, who upon inheriting the throne from her dissolute husband converted her entire navy into pirates and became the Terror of the Adriatic.

From thereon, at a breathless pace, Pirate Women addresses a different historical era and environment in every chapter, discovering fascinating figures within each. In the Viking age, there is Ladgerda, who turned the tide of battle with her fleet of ships to save her ex-husband before promptly stabbing him and seizing the throne of Denmark. From the Barbary corsairs rose Sayyida al-Hurra, the indomitable Islamic pirate queen of the Mediterranean; later, Duncombe pointedly highlights another monarch, Elizabeth I, who not only enlisted privateering "sea dogs" against her enemies, but “ruled her country in a very piratical fashion”. Challenging analyses such as this are almost as abundant as the colourful and fantastical anecdotes, and the book is hugely elevated because of it.

Duncombe has much fun with the 18th century "golden age" of piracy. Yet despite her sympathy with its mytho-poetics, she cuts to the root of its much-loved clichés and explains, in simple (yet not simplistic) terms, how the geopolitics of the day inadvertently produced the ideal circumstances for a renaissance of buccaneers. While historical focus has typically rested on Spain and Britain, the Caribbean and the New World, however, the woman Duncombe calls “the most successful pirate of all time” operated elsewhere. Cheng I deservedly gets a chapter to herself, and the story of how a woman with no military training built a navy unrivalled in the history of piracy and terrified all of China provides Pirate Women with its most gripping passages.

As the modern age approaches, piracy does not die, though it does evolve. An aspect of that evolution is its absorption into popular culture. Here, to her justifiable irritation, Duncombe finds slim pickings – despite the abundant history Duncombe has spent her book so joyously illuminating, “of the hundreds of pirate movies made over the years, there have been a mere handful that profile female pirates”. The assessment is made even grimmer when one realises the most prominent of these is Cutthroat Island.

Duncombe doesn’t need to ask why Hollywood overlooks pirate women, because it is for much the same reason they have been edited or sidelined from the history of piracy itself. Their existence threatens too many carefully tended narratives concerning women’s character, temperament and abilities, and their role in society itself. It is for this reason, Duncombe argues, that remembering their history is so important. “The outlaw’s irresistible appeal is a testament to the hunger for freedom and the desire to get away with things that one ought not to get away with,” she writes. “Pirate women deserve a spot next to their more famous male counterparts because yearning to escape the confines of an ordinary life and to live on one’s own terms is not exclusively a male feeling. Indeed, women may have more reason to reach outside of their traditional roles than men do.”

As Duncombe demonstrates, women unrestrained and unconcerned by law, borders or social mores were feared. What might be learned from their legacy was apparently feared even more.