She even went so far as to fight a duel in his place, one of the crew
having insulted him, probably thinking him a milksop who would not
resent an affront. But the latent courage of Mary's husband instantly
blazed up, and he challenged the insulter to a duel. Although Mary
thought her husband was brave enough to fight anybody, she thought that
perhaps, in some ways, he was a milksop and did not understand the use
of arms nearly as well as she did. Therefore, she made him stay on board
the ship while she went to a little island near where they were anchored
and fought the duel with sword and pistol. The man pirate and the woman
pirate now went savagely to work, and it was not long before the man
pirate lay dead upon the sand, while Mary returned to an admiring crew
and a grateful husband.
During her piratical career Mary fell in with another woman pirate, Anne
Bonny, by name, and these women, being perhaps the only two of their
kind, became close friends. Anne came of a good family. She was the
daughter of an Irish lawyer, who went to Carolina and became a planter,
and there the little girl grew up. When her mother died she kept the
house, but her disposition was very much more masculine than feminine.
She was very quick-tempered and easily enraged, and it is told of her
that when an Englishwoman, who was working as a servant in her father's
house, had irritated Anne by some carelessness or impertinence, that
hot-tempered young woman sprang upon her and stabbed her with a
carving-knife.
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