Two women pirates escaped the gallows because they were pregnant.
Anne Bonny and Mary Read of Calico Jack's crew were sentenced to death in 1720 but reprieved; Read died in prison, Bonny's fate is unknown.
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More amazing facts
- 1718 Blackbeard held the people of a whole city hostage — and asked for a chest of medicine.
- 1718 · 1727 Blackbeard and Isaac Newton were contemporaries.
- 1720 Pirates had their own injury insurance.
- 1720 Isaac Newton lost a fortune in a stock bubble.
- 1721 Boston learned smallpox inoculation from an enslaved African man. Onesimus told his owner, the minister Cotton Mather, that this was how people at home protected themselves, and in the 1721 epidemic the inoculated died far less often.
- 1722 · 1795 The Chinese emperor Qianlong abdicated so as not to reign longer than his grandfather.