Charlotte de Berry facts for kids

Charlotte de Berry (born 1636, England) was a female pirate captain.

Authenticity

Portrait of Edward Lloyd

The tall ship Irving Johnson, a replica of the 17th-century ships, lies near the entrance to Channel Islands Harbor, Oxnard, California, March 2005.

The earliest known reference to Charlotte de Berry comes from publisher Edward Lloyd's 1836 “penny dreadful” called History of the Pirates. Lloyd was known for producing other similar compilations of shocking and gory tales, often plagiarized. There is no evidence for de Berry's existence in 17th-century sources, though many elements of her story have parallels in other literature popular in Lloyd's day by authors such as Frank Marryat, Voltaire, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Retellings of de Berry's tale after 1836 have almost always mirrored Lloyd's original, sometimes with slight variations.

History

In her mid-to-late teens, she fell in love with a sailor and, against her parents' will, married him. Disguised as a man, she followed him on board his ship and fought alongside him. Her true identity was discovered by an officer who kept this knowledge to himself. The officer planned to get rid of de Berry's husband and marry her. He assigned her husband to the most dangerous jobs, which he survived thanks to his wife's help. Finally, Charlotte's husband was wrongly accused and found guilty of mutiny. He was punished and killed by flogging. The next time the ship was in port, Charlotte snuck away, dressing again as a woman working on the docks.

While de Berry worked on the docks, a captain of a merchant ship saw her and kidnapped her. He forced de Berry to marry him and took her away on his trip to Africa. To escape her new husband who was a tyrant, de Berry gained the respect of the crew and persuaded them to mutiny. She then became captain of the ship. After years of pirating, she fell in love with a planter's son from Grenada (some versions instead claim he was a Spaniard, Armelio or José Gonzalez) and married him.

However, they were soon ship-wrecked but by divine providence were rescued by a Dutch ship, and when that ship was ironically attacked by pirates, they bravely defended their rescuers. De Berry was wounded during the fight and fell overboard, after which her defeated crew blew up their own ship rather than be captured.

See also

• Jacquotte Delahaye – Another female 17th-century pirate whose story only appeared in the 1800s.