This month marks the twentieth anniversary of the primary Pirates Of The Caribbean movie, The Curse Of The Black Pearl, which launched the world to Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Swann, the glamorous society lady turned pirate.

It had every thing a correct swashbuckling journey film wanted – fabulous settings, humour and a brave, intelligent feminine protagonist battling to outlive in a person’s world.

Since then, it’s grow to be an enormous world franchise and kick-started a brand new era’s love for wild tales of the ocean.

The movies took me again to my childhood bed room and a shelf full of Ladybird books that includes Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry, Richard the Lionheart and Marie Curie amongst many others.

Looking again, I can see this was the start of my love affair with historical past.

But my favorite, by far, was the Ladybird Book about Pirates. Its pages have been full of the romance and the swagger of the ocean; buccaneers, buried treasure and brutish villains: the Scottish privateer, Captain Kidd; Henry Morgan, the Welshman who turned the notoriously-brutal governor of Jamaica.

Then there was Captain Teach – higher often known as Blackbeard – who plaited his lengthy beard with ribbons earlier than battle and marooned his personal crew on a desert island.

But my coronary heart belonged to Mary Read and Anne Bonny, the legendary 18th-century feminine pirates on whom I later learnt Knightley’s character had been primarily based.

It’s straightforward to romanticise the pirate life and modern-day piracy is something however romantic.

But for these of us who grew up watching The Onedin Line on tv and studying Enid Blyton’s Devon coast-set Famous Five, journey tales concerning the sea have been in our blood.

Added to that, I lived near the ocean and was an everyday customer to the Historic Dockyard at Portsmouth to see Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory, and, later, the recovered wreck of The Mary Rose.

Nineteenth-century literature was awash with pirate tales: R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, Walter Scott’s The Pirate and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson got here out in 1883.

But all of those pirate tales have been offered as boys’ studying, as if women weren’t keen on journey.

Others, like Rafael Sabatini’s 1922 novel Captain Blood, (and who can overlook Errol Flynn because the eponymous captain within the 1935 movie model) claimed to have been impressed by actual buccaneers and pirates. But the place have been the ladies?

Not solely Bonny and Read, however some other girls who, out of necessity or a want for journey or revenge, additionally took to the seas and have become “she-captains” or pirate commanders?

I began to do some analysis and found Bonny and Read have been removed from the one girls to show pirate.

In the 14th century, a French noblewoman, Jeanne de Clisson, was often known as the “Lioness of Brittany”.

Vowing to avenge her husband’s execution for treason in 1343, she acquired three warships, painted them black and fitted them out with crimson sails, then launched a marketing campaign of terror towards the French crown and ships within the English Channel.

Her flagship was known as My Revenge and, for 13 years, de Clisson dominated the Channel, working down ships and slaughtering their crew – bar a single survivor. She all the time left one man alive to hold her message of defiance again to the French king.

Despite her piratical escapades – and giving beginning to seven youngsters while preventing the French – Jeanne survived to settle in Brittany along with her fourth husband and died in her personal mattress, in 1359, on the respectable age of 59.

A century later, Sayyida al Hurra was the queen of Tétouan in northern Morocco.

She managed the western facet of the Mediterranean Sea in an alliance with the Turkish corsair Barbarossa of Algiers, who held the jap waters.

A key pirate commander within the Sixteenth-century struggles between Ottoman and the Christian empires in Spain and Portugal, the identify “al Hurra” means the “Free One”, indicating she was a ruler in her personal proper.

And, in fact, there’s Gráinne Ní Mháille – also called Grace O’Malley.

A towering determine in Sixteenth-century Irish historical past, Gráinne was head of the O’Malley clan who, for greater than 300 years, dominated the southern shore of Clew Bay.

One of her many legends has it that when she requested to accompany her father on a buying and selling journey to Spain, and was refused on the grounds that her lengthy hair would catch within the ship’s ropes, she chopped it off somewhat than settle for her father’s resolution – this earned her the primary of her nicknames, Gráinne “Mhaol”, maol that means bald or cropped hair.

At her father’s dying, Gráinne took the helm as captain.

In 1593, after her sons and half-brother have been taken captive, O’Malley sailed to England to petition Elizabeth I for his or her launch.

She died in 1603, the identical yr as Queen Elizabeth, and is believed to have been buried on Clare Island.

By far essentially the most profitable feminine pirate was Zheng Yi Sao – often known as Ching Shih.

The pirate queen of the South China Seas, she took management of her husband’s pirate confederation after his dying in 1807 – with the help of his adopted son, whom she later married.

She commanded a fleet of as many as 60,000 pirates. She fought towards the East India Company, the Portuguese Empire and the Qing Dynasty.

When pressured to give up in 1810, she was in private command of 24 ships and greater than 1,000 pirates and, regardless of being defeated, managed to one way or the other negotiate retaining a few of her fleet and her personal freedom.

But regardless of Zheng Yi Sao’s extraordinary achievements, my coronary heart stays with Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

Their lives learn like a nautical sensation novel – embracing notoriety, braveness, disguise, romance, unattainable adventures, hazard and glory.

Read, who was born within the slums of London in 1685, started dressing as a boy when she was a toddler, first as a solution to safe an inheritance, then as a solution to enlist within the Royal Navy, preventing with British and Dutch forces towards the French.

Once peace was declared, with no hope of development, Mary joined a ship certain for the West Indies.

She was kidnapped by pirates, and aligned herself with their pursuits, later becoming a member of forces with Anne Bonny and her accomplice, “Calico” Jack Rackham. Bonny was born in Ireland in 1697 into extra affluent circumstances.

The household moved to Carolina in North America when she was ten and to keep away from an organized marriage, she eloped and married a sailor known as James Bonny. Arriving within the Bahamas, she fell in love with Calico Jack and ran away to sea with him disguised as a person, the place she met Mary Read.

Bonny and Read might, or might not, have fallen in love with each other however the three of them – Jack, Bonny and Read, spent years as pirates within the Caribbean, with a value on their heads till lastly, in October 1720, their ship was seized.

Jack was executed, however each girls have been granted a keep of execution by “pleading the belly” – that’s to say they claimed they have been pregnant.

And that is the place the official file ends. Read died in jail in April 1721, most likely from postpartum fever.

But Bonny? There is not any file both of her launch, or of her execution. A ledger in a church in Jamaica lists an Anne Bonny as dying in December 1733.

Other tales have her escaping to America and settling there. Who’s to say?

There’s part of me that hopes she may nonetheless be on the market, crusing the Caribbean… or maybe casting a gimlet eye over Keira Knightley as she, practically 300 years after Bonny’s disappearance, impressed women (and boys) everywhere in the world to show pirate.

Discovering that there have been many ladies who went to sea, who handed as males to reside extra fulfilled lives, was an eye-opener.

Finally, greater than 50 years after first coming throughout Bonny and Read in my Ladybird e book, I’ve written my very own pirate novel.

A narrative of revenge and rise up on the excessive seas, The Ghost Ship options homicide, secrets and techniques and a household feud, set in Sixteenth-century Amsterdam, La Rochelle and the waters across the Canary Islands.

My protagonists, Louise Joubert and Gilles Barenton, are imagined however are impressed by a few of these fearless, wonderful, swashbuckling pirate commanders from historical past.

And I can consider no higher solution to have a good time the twentieth anniversary of The Pirates Of The Caribbean, and people early Ladybird books I doted on, than by creating a brand new era of feminine pirates to thrill and entertain.

• The Ghost Ship by Kate Mosse (Mantle, £22) is out now. Visit expressbookshop.com or name 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25