During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries women played a varied and vital role ashore in maintaining piracy, yet very few were directly involved in roving at sea. Indeed the idea of women pirates seems unsettling, if not outlandish, challenging male expectations and fears regarding gender stereotypes. At least one modern study emphatically declares that, with the possible exception of the Chinese, ‘no woman is known to have committed piracy at sea’. Captain Johnson, whose rogues' gallery of sea rovers included Anne Bonny and Mary Read, two of the most notorious female pirates, disarmingly admitted that their lives were like a novel or romance. But he insisted that the ‘odd Incidents of their rambling Lives … [were] supported by many thousand Witnesses … who were present at their Tryals, and heard the Story of their Lives, upon the first Discovery of their Sex’. While defending the veracity of his account, Johnson laboured to include Bonny and Read within the ranks of Anglo-American pirate communities of the early eighteenth century. The ‘Truth of it can be no more contested’, he proclaimed, ‘than that there were such Men in the World, as Roberts and Black-beard‘.