'The sea has always felt like my true birthplace. It is where I found myself. It is where I found Mary.'
New Providence, 1719. A fierce and fearless Anne Bonny joins Jack Rackham and the crew of pirate ship William, embarking on the adventure of a lifetime.
Born of the Sea follows Anne as she cross-dresses, drinks and fights her way through the Caribbean during the Golden Age of Piracy. But Anne's life is changed forever when she meets Mary Read, plotting a new course on a voyage of self-discovery.
Genre: FICTION / Romance / LGBT / LesbianNew release. Currently ranking in the top 5 of several categories on pre-order.
My name, in those days, was Anne Bonny.
I’m told I was born in Cork, Ireland, sometime before 1700, but my father never told me the year, nor the day nor month of my birth. I should think he never really cared enough to know. Later, I would imagine I was born at sea in a night tempest; mountainous waves throwing the ship around like a twig in a rolling barrel of grog, my mother spread-eagled on the deck, her hair splayed out, screaming like a wild banshee. The sea has always felt like my true birthplace. It is where I found myself. It is where I found Mary.
I regret that neither my birth nor my early life was quite that romantic, however. I was an illegitimate child of my father – a lawyer – and his housemaid. To escape the scandal, and his wife’s wrath, my father dressed me as a boy and passed me off as a young clerk, opening legal letters and such. That was until my chest started to grow in, and my rosy cheeks and lips likened to those of a lady. Gentlemen and not-so-gentle-men began to pay me attention. Whether or not they knew I was a lass I do not know, but they nevertheless took a liking to me, be it a boy or girl they were after. More than once, I had to fight a fellow off, which was not a problem for me. My father used to tell me I inherited my rage from my mother – we both were crowned with the virago’s tell-tale tangle of fire-red hair – but I reckon he had more than a little to do with it. Eventually, when one particularly over-amorous lawyer made his advances, I stabbed him in the neck with a paperknife. He spent some time in the infirmary and it kicked up a fair old stink with my father. Before long, the truth of both my sex and my parentage was uncovered and my father left Ireland a disgraced man – with my birth mother and me in tow – to start a new life in Charles Town, Carolina.
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Italian
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Translation in progress.
Translated by Carmelo Massimo Tidona
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