Besides rum there was one other thing that lured the pirate on a spree: the female sex. In Port Royal, for the most part, that meant whores. And there was no more famous whore, and none more representative of the type of grandiose scoundrel that called the city home, than Mary Carleton. To understand the kind of person that ended up in Port Royal and made it such a stink of vice in the eyes of the world, one must know Mary.
She’d been born the daughter of a fiddler and raised in the rural English district of Canterbury, and she arrived in London in 1663 on a river barge. She’d no intention of remaining a lowborn nobody, however.
[…]
Her route was impersonation: As she entered the first drinking house that would admit her, the Exchange Tavern, Mary suddenly became Maria von Wolway, a German princess down on her luck. The story she made up seemingly moment to moment was a heartbreaking one: With “teares standing in her eyes,” Mary revealed that she was a noble orphan who had been forced into an engagement with an old count against her will. She’d come to London, in disguise as an ordinary woman, leaving estates and mounds of jewels behind in Germany. She quickly married a local who thought he was getting a catch. When her scam was uncovered, her husband called her an “Out-landish Canterbury Monster,” and she was prosecuted for bigamy (it turned out she’d married before). Her trial at the Old Bailey became a Restoration drama of the first order. Spectators fought to get seats; reporters hung on her every word; the gentry argued pro or con at dinner parties. Samuel Pepys was decidedly pro-Mary; he even visited her in prison.
[…]
Moralists were outraged that she’d pretended to be royalty, but Mary shot back that if she was not noble by birthright, she was a fast learner. During the trial she detailed her “intent care and elegancy of learning, to which I have by great labour and industry attained.”
Mary was acquitted of her crimes and became a public personality, in the style of the times. She published her own pamphlets, in which she struck to her story. She went onstage, of course, in a play written for her called The German Princess (Pepys panned it).
But when she was caught in yet another marriage, Mary was shipped off to Port Royal, which was the last stop for many English criminals sentenced to exile. There she dropped the act and went into prostitution. Mary would not arrive until 1671, in the wake of Morgan’s greatest triumph, but she embodied the wide-open days of the pirates there. She joined other professionals whose names basically gave their stories: Buttock-de-Clink Jenny, Salt-Beef Peg, and No-Conscience Nan.
Source:
Talty, Stephan. “Rich and Wicked.” Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan’s Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws’ Bloody Reign. New York: Crown Publishing Group (NY), 2007. 132-33. Print.
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