Jacquotte Delahaye
Jacquotte Delahaye (floruit 1656), was a supposed pirate, or buccaneer, active in the Caribbean sea. Alongside Anne Dieu-le-Veut, she was one of very few female buccaneers.
Biography
Delahaye reportedly came from Saint-Domingue in modern Haiti, and was the daughter of a French father and a Haitian mother. Her mother is said to have died while giving birth. Her brother suffered mild mental disability, and was left in her care after her father's death. According to legend and tradition, she became a pirate after the murder of her father.
Jacquotte Delahaye is the subject of many legendary stories. To escape her pursuers, she faked her own death and took on a male alias, living as a man for many years. Upon her return, she became known as "back from the dead red" because of her striking red hair.
She led a gang of hundreds of pirates, and with their help took over a small Caribbean island in the year of 1656, which was called a "freebooter republic".
[1] Several years later, she died in a shoot-out while defending it.[2]
Though no official documentation of any children exists, it was rumoured she had a daughter named Dinah Delahaye, who shared her mother's striking red hair, and who grew up to become a master swordswoman, and pirate commanding a small fleet of ships.
There is no evidence from period sources that Delahaye was a real person. Stories of her exploits are attributed to Leon Treich, a French fiction writer of the 1940s.[3]
References
- ^ Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, 1400–1800. Charles H. Parker
- ^ Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, 1400–1800. Charles H. Parker
- ^ Little, Benerson (2016). The Golden Age of Piracy: The Truth Behind Pirate Myths. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. ISBN 9781510713048. Retrieved 15 September 2017.
- Ulrike Klausmann, Marion Meinzerin, Gabriel Kuhn: Women pirates and the politics of the Jolly Roger Black Rose Books (1997)
- Charles H. Parker: Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, 1400–1800 (2010)