A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans Read Free

prison, and there remain till tomorrow at nine o’clock; then thence you must go to the gallows, and there be hanged till you are dead.”
    â€œThis is no more than what thou saidst before,” she rejoined.
    â€œBut now,” said the governor, “it is to be executed. Therefore prepare yourself tomorrow at nine o’clock.”
    â€œI came in obedience to the will of God the last General Court, desiring you to repeal your unrighteous laws of banishment on pain of death,” she declared. “And that same is my work now, and earnest request, although I told you that if you refused to repeal them, the Lord would send others of his servants to witness against them.”
    Endecott then sneeringly asked if she was a “prophetess,” to which she replied that she spoke the words the Lord spoke in her, and now the thing was come to pass. As she continued to speak of her calling, the exasperated governor abruptly interrupted. “Away with her!” he screeched. “Away with her!”
    The next day Mary Dyer once again stood at the base of the great elm tree on Boston Common. As she ascended the ladder, she rebuffed all pleas to repent and save herself. It was then that Captain John Webb, commander of the military guard, told her she was guilty of spilling her own blood. “Nay,” she answered. “I came to keep blood-guiltiness from you, desiring you to repeal the unrighteous and unjust law of banishment upon pain of death, made against the innocent servants of the Lord, therefore my blood will be required at your hands who willfully do it; but for those that do it in the simplicity of their hearts, I do desire the Lord to forgive them. I came to do the will of my Father, and in obedience to his will I stand even to the death.” And so she did.

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Anne Bonny: Pirate of the Caribbean
    Anne Bonny was all sympathy when she came to see her condemned lover, Caribbean pirate “Calico Jack” Rackham, on the day of his execution. “If you’d fought like a man,” she snarled, “you wouldn’t be hanged like a dog!” It was a touching farewell worthy of a fellow pirate, which is exactly what Anne was. Though women were typically strictly forbidden aboard pirate ships, Calico Jack recognized that certain savage something in his girlfriend and made an exception. Together, the swashbuckling couple and the rest of their cutthroat crew prowled the waters of the West Indies, plundering merchant ships and terrorizing innocents during that romanticized period of history known as the Golden Age of Piracy.
    As the privileged daughter of William Cormac, a wealthy plantation owner in what would become South Carolina, Anne might have made a respectable match and settled into genteel anonymity. But there was something feral about her, even at an early age. Some unsubstantiated accounts say that as a teenager she stabbed a servant girl to death with a carving knife, and later beat an unwelcome suitor bloody. Whatever the case, Anne Cormac was clearly not destined for proper Charleston society.
    In 1718, at age twenty, she eloped with a drifter named James Bonny and settled with him in the Bahamas. It was a fateful move, for there she met Calico Jack. Historian Clinton Black notes that Rackham took Anne like he did any ship he plundered: with “no time wasted, straight up alongside…every gun brought to play, and the prize boarded.” There is no evidence of any resistance on Anne’s part, and soon enough the adulterous couple was out to sea.
    Bonny quickly established herself as one of the most ferocious pirates in Rackham’s crew. Yet oddly enough, she wasn’t the only woman. Mary Read had spent most of her life at sea disguised as a man. And so she was when Rackham captured the Dutch merchant vessel she was working on and invited her to join his band of pirates. According to one story, Anne developed a crush on Mary, thinking she was a man. This