#GuestPost - Anna Holmes
Wayward Voyage – a tale of wayward women in the Golden Age of
Piracy.
Who can resist
stories of real women pirates? Would you turn down the chance to sail on a
tall ship?
Dear reader, I
could resist neither.
The Golden
age of Piracy is a period when frontiers were being explored and boundaries
pushed. My historical novel, Wayward Voyage, follows Anne Bonny from
wild child to sea rover in
The West Indies.
In
the early 1700’s when women’s lives were so prescribed it is astonishing that
two women, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, ended up in Jack Rackham’s pirate gang.
Their resolve, cross-dressing, and fearlessness have fascinated me for a long
time and will resonate with readers today.
I love world-building and populating my imagined world
with believable characters. Some of my research for Wayward Voyage was
home based (books aplenty, internet). Visits to the National Archives in London
allowed me to read government documents and the record of the pirates’ trial (much
available online).
But nothing compares with experiential research.
I volunteered as voyage crew on a tall ship, the Lord
Nelson, operated by the Jubilee Sailing Trust. That week, sailing between
the Canary Islands, learning to handle ropes and sails, and get over my fear of
going aloft was awesome. I didn’t want
to go home to husband and kids. For all the hardship that would have been part
and parcel of being at sea in the eighteenth century, I can easily imagine the
attraction of setting your own rules far away from authorities. Especially for
women.
Women did go to sea – many in disguise. Susanne Stark
has written an excellent book about this, Female Tars: Women Aboard Ship in
the Age of Sail. Mary Read went to sea at a young age as she needed to earn
her living, first in the navy then in the army before taking to piracy. But why
did Anne run off to sea? In my story, she is a young woman who wants more and
does not want to be confined to a predictable life as a farmer’s wife in
Carolina with a brood of kids. There must be something more and she wants to
find it.
The vivid world I
create reflects the gritty and harsh life of colonial Americas and at sea.
The recent Covid pandemic we experienced gives us a
taste of how people lived daily with unexpected death: childbirth, malaria,
dysentery. My maternal grandmother died in the 1919 flu pandemic with her ninth
baby in her womb. My mother was aged four at that time. A sister, aged eight,
also died in that pandemic and two infants had earlier died in infancy. Her
brother grew to manhood only to be killed in the Second World War.
I invite you to read Wayward Voyage as an
unsentimental traveller but at the same time allow yourselves to become sucked
into Anne’s search for ‘something bigger, something more’ and enjoy the
adventure.
Bio
Stories with
big themes written as page-turners are Anna M Holmes’s speciality. She loves
research, exploring and building worlds and complex characters. Wayward
Voyage – inspired by pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read – is her debut novel
followed by eco-thriller, Blind
Eye, and
contemporary fiction, The Find. Initially she
worked as a radio journalist before a career in arts management working with UK
Arts Councils and as a creative producer. Writing, reading, dance, and yoga
shape her life. Originally
from New Zealand Anna lives in South-West London. To find out more about Anna
and Wayward Voyage visit web: https://www.annamholmes.com
FB: @AnnaMHolmesWriter
T @AnnaMHolmes_
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@annamholmeswriter
