History’s Swashbuckling Sensualist?

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I ran across this fabulous, but unfortunately uncredited illustration on the Men’s Adventure Magazines & Books Facebook page. It comes from the March 1959 edition of a men’s periodical called Sir! (shown below), and purports to tell the true story of 18th-century marauder Mary Anne Blythe, “a 6-foot, full-bosomed Irish beauty who took many prizes from the shipping lanes around the Bahamas.”

According to Sir! contributor Ken Krippene, a Chicago lawyer turned journalist (who is also remembered for having married travel writer/pinup model Jane Dolinger), Blythe “was barely 15 [when] she left England on a British ship bound for New York, where she had relatives.” The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order (1999), edited by Bust magazine co-founders Marcelle Karp and Debbie Stoller, picks up the story from there, stating that as Blythe neared the Bahamas,

the terrible pirate Blackbeard boarded the ship she was traveling on. Wearing lit matches and red silk ribbons entwined in his long thick beard, he relieved her ship of all its treasure and killed most of the crew. When he returned to her and tried to rip off her dress, she laughed and slapped his face. Captivated by her courage, he was transformed into a perfect gentleman, and escorted her with a curtsy to his ship. There, dressing in men’s clothing, she became his protégée, learning all manner of things sexual or seafaring, and mastering the art of piracy. By the age of twenty she’d earned a ship and crew of her own.

While she could handle a cutlass and pistol with the best of the buccaneers, she had her own secret weapon: women. She knew the power of sexual desire, and used it to her benefit. Her girls would stand at the railing of her ship, sliding their loose tops from their shoulders and waving at the crews of passing merchant ships, while Mary Anne herself wore little more than a G-string and a pair of boots, her dark red hair catching in the wind. As the sea-weary crews of the merchant ships pulled beside them, ready to board and relieve themselves after months of only the ocean and the company of other men, her crew of bloodthirsty bandits would jump from their hiding places and capture the vessel.

Mary Anne did not only use her sexuality as a tool to manipulate men; she indulged her appetite for masculine booty as much as she did her desire for material booty. After taking over a ship, she would have her male captives line up on deck. From these, she would pick a young and handsome man as her lover, keeping him only until he bored her, which could last anywhere from a few hours to a few months (a woman used to so much adventure bored easily). When she was through with him, she would cut his throat and toss his lifeless body overboard.

Krippene adds embellishments to the tale, insisting that “this 18th-century strip teaser” strutted before her male captives “in her abbreviated costume of G-string and revealing bra, studying them like a Kentucky colonel buying a horse.” This led a commenter on the aforementioned Facebook page, one Matt Greenfield, to remark of Ms. Blythe: “Another one of those ‘really ahead of their time’ individuals, given that the bra was over a hundred years from being invented, while the term ‘geestring’ referred at the time to the string that held up the loincloths worn by male Native Americans and didn’t hop genders until the 1920s.”

How much veracity exists in the vivid saga of Mary Anne Blythe? It’s rather hard to tell 300 years later. The 18th century’s best-known pair of female freebooters were Mary Read and Anne Bonny; I don’t find Blythe so much as mentioned in any of the pirate histories on my shelves. Her name does, though, crop up in a 1965 collection of essays titled Bizarre Beauties; and in 2008’s The Legends of Brunswick County: Ghosts, Pirates, Indians, and Colonial North Carolina, author J.C. Judah says Blythe “supposedly buried her pirate treasure in the area of Fort Caswell, at the mouth of the Cape Fear River. It has yet to be discovered. Another cache is reportedly on Plum Point in Beaufort County, a chest full of jewels.”

Why were such valuables never retrieved? As The Bust Guide tells it, Blythe “wreaked havoc on the high seas for years, entertaining Blackbeard while her young lovers entertained her, until a young Spanish sailor captured her heart. She kept him for three years, but when Blackbeard’s jealousy threatened them both, the two lovers stole away on a ship bound for Peru, never to be heard from again.” It seems ardor trumps avarice, even for a G-string buccaneer.