S2E04 Transcript: Women Pirates

Ellie Brigida: Welcome to Sweetbitter, where we explore the untold history of women and queer pirates. We’re your hosts, Ellie Brigida…

Leesa Charlotte: …and Leesa Charlotte.

EB: This episode, we’re moving on to women pirates.

LC: And be sure to stay tuned until the end of the episode for our shanty for this one. It should be good.

EB: I’m so excited and very, very excited to welcome Alyse to play Fact or Fiction with us today. Hi, Alyse.

Alyse Knorr: Hi, y’all. How’s it going?

EB: Good. I’m so excited to hear what you have ready for us. And for me to maybe get it right or wrong. We’ll see, we’ll see.

AK: Fingers crossed.

EB: So what do we got? What do we got?

AK: Okay, fact or fiction: did pirates actually make people walk the plank?

EB: Ooh, okay. That is a tricky one. I feel like I’m gonna say no. They did have some cruel punishments, but I don’t think it would be very, like, aerodynamic. Maybe it’s the wrong word, but I don’t think they built planks on their ships. I don’t think they actually had planks. Like I don’t think they built a plank for people to get off of.

LC: It was a plank of wood on–

EB: Yeah, I don’t know if they, like, really wanted to do the carpentry for that. I feel like if they were gonna put someone into the sea, they’d just say, “Just jump off. We don’t need a plank for you.”

LC: I really hear your point. That’s hilarious. It’s a very technical answer. It’s not–

EB: Yeah.

LC: Now I’m thinking about the carpentry of a ship.

EB: Yeah, like, I don’t know, it just seems a little excessive. Like, why do you need to build more stuff on your ship? They could just jump or you could push them. That’s my answer. What about you, Leesa?

LC: Okay, so your answer is no. So you think that they made them jump off the ship, not walking the plank?

EB: Yeah, that’s my answer.

LC: Okay, okay. I think it’s fiction, too. Not for any carpentry reasons. I just don’t think it’s true. It just seems like a really, like–I mean, I know pirates are flamboyant, but it seems like a lot.

EB: Anyway, Alyse, are we both wrong?

AK: You know, you’re both right.

LC: Yes, what do we win!

AK: My love.

LC: I feel like that’s always a prize.

EB: It’s a great prize, though.

LC: Yeah.

AK: My dad used to say that to us when we were kids. We’d be like, “What’s the prize?” And he’d be like, “A kiss!”

EB: You’re like, “That’s it?”

AK: Have you never played a game or something? Yeah. So there’s like a few, like, one-off instances of people talking about walking the plank, but not enough to make it, you know, seemed like it was really real. It could have been like embellished history. And so it more comes from pop culture like Robert Louis Stevenson. And Daniel Defoe, in his General History of the Pyrates, did tell that story about the Mediterranean pirates, like, putting a ladder down into the waters and letting the Roman walk, saying he was free to go.

LC: I remember this story.

AK: So that’s the thought, that evolved into this thought about walking the plank, but it really wasn’t a common practice because they wouldn’t have bothered with the plank. I mean, some of them who were like super sadistic might have, but mostly they were just, like, toss you overboard. And then they had some, like, really creative and awful other means of torturing people.

EB: Like what?

AK: Right. Yeah. As late as 2019, the US Navy was allowing officers to punish their sailors by limiting their meals to bread and water. And that goes all the way back to the 1800s, 1700s. And so the people at sea, like navies and pirates, have always just really been into torture. And that means, like, starving people, selling them into slavery, beating them with all kinds of different, you know, canes and cat o’ nine tails, making them go sit in the cold wind at the top of the mast. And one of the worst ones is called keelhauling, and this was really common for sailors to get, between the mid-1600s and the mid-1800s. What they would do is tie someone to a rope and throw them over the side of the ship and then drag them down along the length of the ship or from one side of the ship to the other. And all this stuff that’s, like, growing on the ship, like the barnacles, would just scratch you up. Maybe a shark would come eat you, maybe you would drown. So it was a form of torture and execution. I’ve also seen some pretty gnarly pictures of people tied between two ships. So like, their hands are tied to one ship, their feet are tied to the other ship and then the ships go in two different directions. And that’s how they’re executed. Yeah.

LC: That is really rough.

AK: Rough.

EB: That is painful. I feel that.

LC: See, that doesn’t feel like it’s very logistically easy, Ellie.

EB: You’re right. That’s why I said, like, I do think they’re torturing people, but I just don’t think it was with the plank. Yeah, they did even more extensive things.

LC: Very creative.

AK: Yeah. So I don’t know, there’s some things about walking the plank where you can read about some of the historical instances, but it really became much more of a pop culture thing with, you know, people drawing pictures of this or writing about it in Treasure Island, or Peter Pan, especially, has all kinds of stuff about walking the plank.

LC: That’s how you knew you’d be able to fly.

AK: Yes, exactly. Because it becomes like a diving board that launches you into the sky, which is really cool, if you can fly.

EB: Thank you. We love you, Alyse. We will be back after a quick break.

AK: Bye.

LC: We’re back. So as we said at the top of the episode, this week we’re going to be giving a general overview of women pirates. How common were they? We don’t see them much in the movies.

EB: And yet, here’s historian and pirate expert Rebecca Simon to tell us more. 

Rebecca Simon: It was common for pirates to ban women. Actually, this was a common practice in the maritime world. Does this mean there were no female sailors or female pirates? No. Two of the most famous pirates to sail were the female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read. You have a woman named Hannah Snell, who was in the Navy, you know, a few decades after the 1750s. You have Grace O’Malley, the Irish pirate queen. You know, there were other female pirates, Sayyida al Hurra from Morocco. So they did exist. But Ed Low had a document of what’s called The Pirate Articles, which were rules on the pirate ship, we might know them as, like, the pirate codes. And one of them is you can’t bring someone of the opposite sex on board, or you can’t bring young people on board. And there are a few reasons for this. There is kind of the superstition that women were bad luck on ships. I don’t think this was actually a major thing. I think we build it up a little bit. But, in maritime lore, female figures such as mermaids and sirens, were these mythological creatures that would lure pirates into the sea by bewitching them, and then would drown them. So at the same time, it’s quite interesting because the ships are always given female pronouns. I’m not quite sure why. But–so there is kind of this. But the reality is, I think the reason why a lot of women would have been barred from sailing would be because of probable sexual complications. There could be the possibility of sexual violence happening. It could be that women were taken against their will. It could be that, you know, you could get an unplanned pregnancy, perhaps. And then the fact that a lot of women might not have physically been able to handle the labor, the physical labor, that might be required. Is that true for all? Absolutely not. Were there women on ships? Yes, there were. There were captains who’d bring their wives, there would be people who might bring on women to act as kind of nurses to maybe help do repairs or healing, that sort of thing. So there were women on ships, but they just weren’t recorded much, probably because they just didn’t think to record the role women would have. There’s very likely that women would disguise themselves. It is documented and known that there were women who disguised themselves to fight in the armies, and the same on ships. And so, you know, they’d dress as men, they would act as men, do the physical labor. It wasn’t too difficult for women to disguise themselves as younger sailors, like maybe as cabin boys, would be shorter and smaller in stature than men, you know, clean shaven shows they haven’t fully gone through puberty yet. Baggy clothes, binding your breasts, if you’re doing really heavy labor, a lot of times you might stop getting your periods, or if you do, there’s ways to kind of disguise that or excuse that, you know. You get lots of injuries on ships, like you can explain that away. So yeah, there have been studies about transvestism on ships and in the army and what it was like during that time period, you know. The idea of a woman kind of dressing as a man kind of, you know, it freaked men out. It’s kind of funny. It freaked them out, because they were like, “Who are these women trying to steal our masculinity?” But at the same time, they just weren’t taken seriously. It was like, “Oh, well, they’re women. So it doesn’t matter.” You know, “What they do doesn’t matter. Let them do what they want.” And if they–if men perhaps caught their wives in some sort of, you know, romantic relationship with another woman, they would let it go because, you know, she wasn’t cuckolding him with another man.

LC: Gay panic. Yay!

EB: Such a new thing, right?

LC: So new.

EB: So new, so new. I love this one. I’m so excited to hear more about all of these famous women pirates. Okay, so we know from season one, there’s a lot of erasure when we’re talking about HIStory, get it, his story. How has this skewed our understanding of pirates?

LC: We spoke about this with Laura Duncombe, who is a lawyer and an expert in women pirates, and she will be our source for the rest of the episode.

Laura Duncombe: I always tell people that the number one myth about pirates, I think, is that pirates buried their treasure. You know, pirates didn’t bury their treasure. They spent it, sometimes before they had it. So they didn’t have time to sort of think of a retirement plan. So I always say that the real treasure hunt, the real buried treasure, is tracking down the stories of these pirates, and particularly of women pirates, because they have been sort of, you know, unconsciously and also systematically excluded from the limelight. So we get their information from a lot of different ways. Some of them, like the medieval ones, because they were less of an exclusive outlaw. They had noble families, they had money at some point, so that we have them in records, in royal records, for a period of time until things, you know, go sideways. But yeah, a lot of it’s oral tradition. A lot of it is ballads and legends. A lot of the things we knew about Grace O’Malley before Anne Chambers’s sort of seminal biography was passed down in song. So these stories are not written down in the hallowed halls of history books, because women have been kept out of history books for so long, because history books weren’t written by women, you know. They’re not written by people of color, they’re not written by any sort of marginalized identity for the most part. For a very, very long time they were written by, you know, white cis men. So we don’t have–no sort of lie detector, Maury Povich Fact or Fiction, like, “Is this story 100% true about the rope hook?” A lot of these things we don’t know. We have a little more confidence in some of the Golden Age pirates, because we have trial transcripts from their trials. So we have, like, slightly more, you know, verifiable sources. But I think that what we say when we talk about pirates is almost as important as, you know, what is actually said, but just the why. Why these stories persist, and what themes keep cropping up over and over, and like what that says about our sort of eternal love affair with the pirates and why their stories are just so popular and keep coming up over and over again. I think that because pirate records are so limited that we can project onto them anything we want them to be, you know. I mean, you have to look no further than the shelves of romance novels to see that, you know, we can make pirates into these romantic, swoonworthy lovers, when the reality was, you know, when you look at Blackbeard, pirates on the whole were generally not particularly courteous to women. So and–no knocking pirate romance novels. I want to be completely clear about that. Whatever floats your romance boat is a-okay in my book. But I think that we like to ignore the bad and sort of emphasize the good, and so there is sort of this idea of, like, “Oh yeah, pirates, like Robin Hood. They’re the good guys!” And whoever you think the good guys are, you can sort of tie the pirates to that. But I think, really, their ideals were just, for the most part, I think something that unites all pirates is a desire for survival, just the desire to keep living and have enough money to support yourself and live your life, that they were not often afforded the luxury of political ideals. You know, there was some movement of the pirates of the Brethren Coast, and the Pirate Round area down in the Caribbean in the late 1600s, early 1700s, were like, “Let’s make a government! Let’s make a thing!” You know, but for the most part they were just trying to make a living, you know, so I mean, they’re working class heroes, but I don’t know that they would have espoused, you know, any of those ideals to themselves if you ask them. I think they would say, “I’m just trying to, you know, live my life.” It’s almost like they’re human beings that contain multitudes and were good and bad and, you know, heroes and villains and all of those things that we are today.

EB: I’ve said this many times this season, but I am so here for this like, nothing is black and white. There’s all kinds of gray areas. I also talked to Laura, and I’m so excited for all of you to hear all the things she had to say, because she is an encyclopedia of women pirates.

LC: So excited.

EB: It is wild.

LC: I am jealous that I missed that interview, and I’m so excited to listen to it this episode.

EB: Yes. And she talked to me about Alfhild, who’s a Viking pirate from the fifth century. She’s going to tell you all more about her as well.

LD: So Alfhild was a Viking and, you know, there’s a big question: are Vikings pirates? Do we call Vikings pirates? But you know, using the definition of people who steal stuff on the water, then yes, she was absolutely a pirate. And I believe that the model of sailing that she lives definitely influences pirates further down the road. You know, when people think of pirates, they largely think of pirates from like 1650 to 1720. Like there’s this little tiny snapshot in the history of recording time that when we think “pirate” that’s what we think of. We think of Long John Silver and Treasure Island and Captain Hook. But really, you know, those pirates didn’t just spring out of nothing. They came from a long, long line of pirates, and I think Vikings are definitely at the beginning of that line, although after other Greek pirates. So Alfhild was a princess, so the story goes, and we have her story from Saxo Grammaticus, and she was a princess who was supposed to marry, and decided that instead she would escape and become a pirate. We don’t know exactly why. There’s a couple different versions of her story, and in one, like, her mother kind of yells at her and says, you know, “What are you doing throwing yourself at the first, you know, pair of pants that comes your way?” And she likes the guy, but then she’s embarrassed, and in other ones, she doesn’t like the guy and she just wants out. So she and some of her girlfriends sort of like slipped down, you know, a rope ladder made of bedsheets out of her castle, and become pirates. We don’t know how they learned to sail. Maybe she hired someone, you know, we just don’t know. There’s a lot of questions here, more questions than answers, of course, particularly when you’re going back that far in time. But she and her crew of ladies sailed on and were successful for some time, until her wayward bridegroom finds her. And he’s battling with these fierce pirates. And then, you know, her helmet gets knocked off, and, “Oh, my goodness, it’s Alfhild, my love, the one who I’ve been looking for.” And he tells her like, “Go put on your girl clothes, and let’s go home and get married.” And that is what happens. And so I find the stories sort of unbearably sad. This, you know, woman who had the dream to just live her own life and then, you know, we think of like, “Oh, it’s happily ever after, she gets married.” But you know, that’s not what she wanted at all. They’re sort of imagining her, you know, looking out the window to the sea as they get closer and closer to shore, and just thinking of everything that she’s giving up. And, you know, most pirate stories don’t have happy endings. But Alfhild, even though she lives, I think is less happy than many of the others who I discuss in my books. Some of the interesting things that I learned about Vikings were that Viking women recorded their history in tapestries. And so we have many of these tapestries from the time period that these Viking sagas were being recorded–of course, being told by the men–and you can tell what stories they are, but they emphasize different points in the story. So it’s like the, you know, he said, she said, when you hear the story versus look at the tapestry. And for a long, long, long time, those tapestries were regarded as art and pretty things and not historical documents. And it just makes me think of, like, all the other ways in which women have been telling their stories through the millennia and we have sort of ignored it or pushed it to the side or not valued it the same way as we do a written account by a man, and what other wonderful things we could discover if we just opened our eyes and sort of expanded our idea of what is history.

LC: What a wild ride! At the beginning of that I was like, “Yes, queen, yes,” like go off and live your best gay life. And then, what a sad ending.

EB: I know it’s so sad. I’ve really want them to make Alfhild into, like, the first queer Disney princess besides, you know, Elsa’s queer. But I feel like Alfhild would be a great Disney princess movie.

LC: I’m just like, where is this movie? Why has nobody made this movie? What an amazing story. I’m devastated.

EB: I mean, we should make it.

LC: It’s time, let’s go!

EB: Exactly. It’s such a great story–depressing, but I would, like, wish fulfill the ending.

LC: Oh, yes. You don’t need more sad, gay stories, for sure.

EB: We would just, like, take some liberties. But Alfhild is not the only queer woman pirate, we have so many to talk about. So the next pirate that Laura is going to tell us about is Jeanne de Clisson, an amazing medieval revenge pirate from the 14th century.

LD: Jeanne de Clisson was sort of a sideways entry into piracy, but a mighty pirate all the same. Her husband was involved in the War of Breton Succession, trying to figure out who belonged on the ducal throne of Brittany. And he was implicated in a treasonous plot, falsely accused by all accounts, and murdered by Charles de Blois. So Jeanne decided that she was going to avenge her husband, avenge her family’s honor, and just kind of go on a killing spree to let people know that the Clisson name was not to be dragged through the mud. So her husband’s head was put on a spike outside of the palace, which is usually reserved for common criminals. So it was a very shocking thing. So the first thing Jeanne does when she hears that her husband is dead is she takes her children to go see their father’s head on a spike. And then she sells her jewelry, everything she has–all of their money and assets have been frozen by the government, because they’re on, you know, the alleged wrong side of the government. So she sells her jewelry, her linens, her drapes, you know, some accounts say her body–everything she’s got to sell, she sells, to gather, to scrape together as much money as she can to buy a ship. She gets this ship, she paints it black, the sails are black, and she sails up and down the coast of France and the channel, and she is just slaughtering everyone who opposes her, except for one person. She leaves one person alive to tell the story that, you know, Jeanne de Clisson was coming for you. And she is just a tremendous sailor and pirate. I don’t know how she learned how to sail, maybe she hired some folks to teach her, maybe she had a crew, but she was undoubtedly in command and she was just kicking butt and taking names, and everyone was terrified of her. There’s a little disagreement on that. Some say that her children were left, some courtiers sympathetic to her father’s–or, to her husband’s, her late husband’s, campaign and cause. But there’s a story about–she had them in a rowboat, and she was sailing. She was trying to escape a naval battle where her ship had been taken down and she sailed directly to England in a rowboat with her children to keep them alive after the storm so, you know, just see her going. I can imagine, you know, I go on car trips with my kids and you know, “Are we there yet? Is there any snacks?” And you know, they didn’t even have iPads. So she at least was incredibly strong in more than one respect, because she took her young children in a rowboat to England to appeal directly to the English king for money and ships and means to destroy.

LC: Is it terrible if I’m just like having life envy right now? I mean, I know it probably wasn’t all glamorous and maybe I shouldn’t commit my life to revenge on the high seas, but it seems pretty cool.

EB: It does, it does. And I mean, it is just very cool to hear about, like, this is a pirate queen.

LC: Yeah!

EB: Like the second mate pirate, right? Like, Sayyida was running things.

LC: Yes. So good. Okay, so speaking of Australia’s pirates, as I am now related.

EB: Because you could be.

LC: I believe that Laura also has an Australian pirate to tell us about, who shares one name with me: Charlotte Badger.

LD: So Charlotte Badger was a young woman who was a convict who was transported from England to Australia. Many prisoners were sent from England to Australia, which is a fascinating story all involving you know, Charles Dickens, prison conditions, and people thinking, “Well, we have all these criminals, but we don’t really want to think about them or look at them or rehabilitate them. So let’s just send them out of sight, out of mind, all the way to Australia.” Her offense was pretty petty. It seems like it was a theft of not that much. But she, along with Catherine Hagerty, were transported to Australia from England. So this was a gruesome trip. Many people did not survive it. And, you know, a bunch of female prisoners on a ship were not treated super well by their male sailor captors. Once they got there, they were at the Parramatta Female Factory, which was a  workhouse slash, like, matchmaking service? They estimate that it’s a significant portion–it was either, like, one in 10 or one in 20–people living in Australia are descended from women who lived at the Parramatta Female Factory, because you could go and pick up a bride if you were a man in Australia and you needed someone, and the warden sort of was like, “Any of these ladies work for you?” And they did this, so you could leave the Parramatta Female Factory if you died, or if you got married, or if you got a job somewhere else. And so that’s what happened to Charlotte and Catherine, and they got a job in Tasmania, and so they were going to go back on a ship called the Venus and set off to a new job where they had been sort of, like, bought and paid for. So there’s not a ton of people on the ship. There’s a captain, there’s a first mate, there’s a couple crew, and then there’s Charlotte and Catherine, and Charlotte’s daughter. She’s given birth to a daughter during the time in the female factory, father unknown. We think it’s possible that it was one of her employers, because to get a job–this is a cushy job that they’re being sent off to, so that maybe she got some preferential treatment due to bearing a child to one of her employers. So they’re on the Venus and accounts of exactly what went on are very divergent. We have, you know, some say that they fell in love with the men on the Venus and convinced them to, you know, make a break for it, and some say that they had a mutiny. But whatever happened, the captain was left, or docked at shore. And the captain went off the ship to go do some business, and Catherine and Charlotte and the baby were, like, on the boat, and whatever ended up happening. The end of the day, the captain comes back to the boat, it’s not there. Boat is gone. So they have taken control of the ship and sailed off into the sunset. And they end up in New Zealand, and Charlotte Badger is often touted as the first female white settler of New Zealand. And the men bug out and leave them there, and we just don’t know what happens after that exactly. There are some stories that they were killed by Maoris. There are some stories that they were sort of adopted into the Maori tribe and, you know, we have one sailing ship is like sort of a bizarre postscript later, like an English ship who tells of–they met this big, fat English woman who spoke English and the native language, and she had a little girl with her and, you know, she was a part of the natives, but she was also clearly English. And when you sort of connect all the dots and reverse engineer it, like it very well could have been Charlotte Badger. So–but wherever she died, and whatever ended up happening to her, she died a free woman. And as far as I know, she’s the only pirate who, the treasure that she stole was actually herself. So it’s a neat story. And it’s just really–it’s an amazing sort of part of history. You know, I think every part of history is an amazing part of history. I’m just always fascinated by the stories of the normal, you know, people who lived and died and worked and, you know, sweated and loved and feared as, you know, not just the big, broad brushes of this battle, and this person was ruling, but just like, you know, what was going on? What was it like for people? And I think they have remarkable stories.

LC: That is really interesting. And also, like, historically, Australia was sorry, predominantly male for like so much of its colonial history. Like, I think we only got to a kind of even point pretty recently. Like, for a long time, Australia was like 90% men. So I love this, I mean, obviously, colonialism is bad, but it does make sense that she might be, like, the first white female settler in New Zealand. They just sent them over.

EB: I know. I also love, like, the agency that Charlotte has here. Like, there’s a thread between a lot of the pirates that Laura was talking about of, like, they stand out to us because they were women with agency, which we do not see very often in history, or we don’t see them written about.

LC: No, and this is what CJ, I think, touched on in episode two when he was talking about queer people and black people and women, he was talking about the fact that, oftentimes, a life of crime was the best life they could live, that was more true to themselves and that was more free from the shackles of what society was doing at the time. Which is, like, a wild thought, to be like–actually he made the argument in episode two, which I think is super interesting, that it’s still kind of like the way to go to live a more true life is to, like, be a criminal, which I thought was like a really interesting throughline.

EB: Be gay, do crimes.

LC: Yes, exactly. You summed that up way better than my brain did, Ellie.

EB: But it is true. I am so fascinated by Charlotte and Catherine, though, stealing the ship. So I asked Laura: what was Charlotte and Catherine’s relationship? And what happened to them after they sort of just disappeared?

LC: They were just friends, as far as I know. No one describes them as lovers, like they do with Anne and Mary, which I don’t even think is true, but, nothing against it anyway, just I just think people are like, “Oh, it’s two women. I bet they were lesbians!” It’s like, that’s the only thing we can think of? But yeah, they just became friends. They didn’t know each other when they were in England as far as I know. They became friends on the journey and then they kind of stuck together. You find out Catherine dies like fairly early on after arriving. We know that she died, like, pretty quickly and that Charlotte was like left on her own with her young daughter. All sources seem to agree that in about a year Charlotte and her daughter were alone on the island, and Catherine died in early 1807, by which time the men seem to have either left the island or been arrested for their mutiny.

EB: This is a very different life than we expect for pirates, because most pirates don’t get to retire. They don’t get to, like, live a life on an island with their daughter. It’s unfortunate that Catherine died early. And also the men left the island as well, right? So there were men on the boat. They were, like, transporting them. And they took them with them to the islands.

LC: Yeah.

EB: And then they were like, “Eh, we don’t want to be here. Bye.” Or–

LC: –or they were like, so if I’m recording this, I’d say that Charlotte and her daughter were just like, “Can you leave? I want to live free from patriarchy, just go.”

EB: Yeah, at some point they left the island. We don’t know how that happened. It could have been they were asked to leave, we don’t really know. But I’ve just–like I said before, there’s so many fascinating women pirates that we don’t get to hear about. Laura had so much incredible information to give us about these women pirates. And she also has two books that talk way more about women pirates if you want to read those. They are Pirate Women: The Princesses, Prostitutes, and Privateers Who Ruled the Seven Seas and A Pirate’s Life for She: Swashbuckling Women Through the Ages by Laura Duncombe. So check those out, because they are incredible reads and there’s so many more women pirates, we can’t talk about them all here. But those books are worth just knowing about all these pirates.

LC: Love a good alliteration, too. Gotta respect.

EB: I know, I also love the alliteration.

LC: Princesses, prostitutes, and privateers.

EB: Pirates, princesses, prostitutes, privateers–love it. So these are her books, and also all the contents that are in them. If you want to keep listening to our show and hear more about the untold history of these pirates, here’s a taste of what’s to come on Sweetbitter.

Brandon Jones: The classics and classical studies, that’s one of the challenges we’re up against, is that the stories are almost always told by the victors. And it’s the job of the social historian to try to dig through material culture, to dig through language, anthropology, to try to get something a little closer to the truth.

Laura Duncombe: So we have, you know, Teuta of Illyria, we have Queen Artemisia, and both of those women were, you know, high-ranking officials in their country who led ships and expeditions out to fight other navies. So they were very, very cool women and sort of set the bar for what female piracy looked like.

LC: Thanks for listening to Sweetbitter. Our fifth episode will be released on October 28th.

EB: If you enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review us. It really helps, especially written reviews on Apple podcasts. You can also support us on Patreon at patreon.com/sweetbitter.

LC: Thank you to our new Patreon supporter this week, Teresa. And thank you to our new subscriber on Apple podcasts. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t share your name with us, but we appreciate your support anyway, and if you want to reach out, tell us who you are, we would love to shout you out on the podcast.

EB: Sweetbitter is an independent production by me, Ellie Brigida, Alyse Knorr, and Leesa Charlotte, in partnership with Three Springs Media. Our audio engineering is by Jaren Jackson. Our production assistant is Thea Smith, and our artwork is by Istela Illustrated. Thank you to our guests this week, Rebecca Simon and Laura Duncombe. You can read more about our guests and where to find them on our website.

LC: You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at @sweetbitterpod, or contact us on our website, sweetbitterpodcast.com.

EB: Now without further ado, we have our sea shanty for this week, “We Are Women Pirates,” written by Alyse and mixed by Joshua. You’re gonna love it.