Black Velvet Trousers by JAM
The cool sea breeze caresses my skin.
Goosebumps and standing hairs.
A brief, unsettling calm amidst a circus.
Water repetitively lashing against
the ship as we move forwards,
cutting a rolling rhythm through the current.
Fidgety, I readjust the waist of my velvet trousers
and brush my fingers down
the soft, luxurious fabric.
As black and heavy as the night will soon be.
“Anne Bonny and Mary Read were women, were pirates, were lovers. Their story has been mistold and untold, alternating between super whore and oblivion, because men cannot bear to look at a strong woman and say 'she is.'"
“One of Anne’s new friends was Pierre who ran the coffee shop, hairdressing and dressmaking establishment. He has been called Pierre Bouspuet, Piere Delvin, Petar Basket, but mainly history has recorded him Pierre, the Pansy Pirate. His main passion was designing fine clothes of velvet and silk but such clothes were rare in New Providence.”
– Excerpts from “Anne Bonny and Mary Read: Lesbian Pirates,” by Susan Baker, The Body Politic July/August 1976.
My project is inspired by the article “Anne Bonny and Mary Read: Lesbian Pirates,” written by Susan Baker and published in the July/August 1976 edition of The Body Politic, which I found in The ArQuives’ collection (image 1). According to Baker, Anne Bonny and Mary Read were notorious “pirates and lovers” during the eighteenth century. The article features a copy of an engraving depicting Bonny shooting a gun while wearing a loose blouse with her breasts fully exposed. The engraving is from a version of the book A General History of the Pyrates, published by Daniel Defore and Charles Johnson. Several editions of this book were printed between 1724 and 1728; the first includes an engraving by Benjamin Cole that depicts a fully clothed Bonny and Read, standing together with their bloodied weapons in hand (image 2). A later edition of this book, which was reprinted and engraved in Amsterdam in 1725 (image 3), includes the version of the engraving we see in The Body Politic article, which has since been reprinted in colour for a number of publications (image 4).
The eighteenth-century textual and visual depictions of Bonny are some of the many ways she has been mythologized and sexualized by male-dominated perspectives throughout western history and visual culture. These constructions of Bonny are like a Fata Morgana – a mirage that distorts our view, making a ship sailing at sea seem like it is flying (image 5). Due to our class discussions and readings about critical fabulation, I decided to write an ekphrasis poem for my project to explore this historical narrative and imagry by drawing attention to Bonny's bodily autonomy. I concentrated on one moment, when Bonny reportedly wore black velvet pants while sailing – fine clothing allegedly made for her by her friend Pierre – in an attempt to breathe life into Bonny’s story, constrasting her agency and radical choices with an anxious will to survive.
Image credits:
1. "Anne Bonny and Mary Read: Lesbian Pirates," by Susan Baker. From The Body Politic, July/August 1976. Image courtesy of The ArQuives.
2. Benjamin Cole, “Ann Bonny and Mary Read,” hand-coloured engraving. From Daniel Defoe and Charles Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates, 1724-1728. Image courtesy of the New York Public Library Digital Collections.
3. "Anne Bonny," from A General History of the Pyrates, 1725. Image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
4. Colour version of "Anne Bonny," from A General History of the Pyrates, 1725. Image courtesy of https://www.rareirishstuff.com/blog/death-of-irish-pirate-anne-bonny-.5133.html
5. Fata Morgana. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons