Maybe it's just me, but I don't think any single group of people or episode in history fascinates me right now so much as the crew of the sloop William in the summer/fall of 1720.
You have not one but two women actively sailing as pirates. The ONLY women, so far as we know, doing so at that time in the entire world. On one little sloop with a crew of 8-11 people depending on when during those couple of months it is.
Pirates at that time were overwhelmingly male, blatantly misogynist and prone to sexual violence in many cases. Women on pirate crews was basically unheard of. Captives, yes. But crew? Never. Yet witnesses testified that Bonny and Read appeared to be pirates willingly. Bore arms. Actively participated in piracy.
And of course, there's the whole queer angle, with the fact that both women alternated between male and female clothing, and the later rumours of their being lovers. Which is unconfirmed, like so much about them, but I do find the fact that their trial record referred to both as "spinsters" (ie unmarried) to be intriguing. And, you have to believe that their relationship must have been something more than just colleagues. Imagine, living on a little boat, wanted and hunted by the whole world, with the only other person on the planet who could possibly share or understand your experiences.
And then they get out of being hanged by pleading that they're pregnant, in a twist that feels like it belongs in a work of fiction only its actually there in the trial record. The last and only survivors of their crew... only to suffer one more tragic parting as Mary dies in prison. Leaving Ann's fate as the last of the crew a tantalizing, unsolved mystery.
And yet we know almost nothing about who they were personally. We have these fascinating little tidbits, and then a whole bunch of ambiguity and built-up mythology. Its like trying to see someone moving through a dense fog at night, or to make out a beautiful or terrible painting when its faded to just a few faint hints of colour. Maybe that's part of what draws me to their story, the same way I am to fossils that show traces of a creature that's been dead for millions of years.
And then there's the rest of the crew, who are discussed far less besides Captain Rackham, but I find the male crew members almost as fascinating. Pirate crews in this era were usually democracies of sorts. Even if the women had lovers among the crew, that would not be enough to allow them on board. The majority of the crew would have to consent to it. That is just... staggeringly unusual, given the norms for pirate crews in that era.
It was just a handful of assholes, petty criminals fucking around on a little boat in the Caribbean for a couple of months over 300 years ago. But they cast such a long shadow in history. There is so much there, and yet at the same time so little.
Of course, that's true of most history. Every person who ever lived, every forgotten name in some centuries-old record, was a person with their own unique, complex life that we barely know existed. This is just one of the few that got noticed. But part of their significance to me is that it reminds me of all the other stories that simply disappeared (Ann and Mary, likely due to the sensationalism around their sex/gender/sexuality, are probably the only rank and file pirates, not captains or officers, who's names are common knowledge).
What the fuck was going on on that little boat for a couple of months in 1720?
