‘She took control of the ship with a pistol’: the high seas heroine who inspired a savage pirate tale

Photograph: Fototeca Storica Nazionale./Getty Images

Katherine Howe isn’t just a prolific author and historian. She is also a passionate sailor, so the recent discovery of a great-aunt, who singlehandedly rescued a ship from mutiny in the 19th century, was serendipitous to say the least. The relative was Hannah Masury, wife of the ship’s captain, Edward Howe. Unusually for the time, Hannah joined Edward on his voyages, helping to transport locomotives and labourers to and from California. One day, while sailing around the Pacific coast, Edward died. Without a commander, the crew and passengers attempted a mutiny, but Hannah had other ideas.

“She took control of the ship with just a pistol and hung a flag up to signal their distress,” says Howe, speaking via Zoom from her home in Marblehead, Massachusetts. “They were then rescued.”

It’s nice being related to grumpy women who don’t like being told what to do

The story part-inspired Howe’s latest novel, A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates (Written by Herself), which takes place roughly 130 years before her relative took to the seas. There are, in fact, dual timelines: one tells the story of fictionalised Hannah, who disguises herself as a cabin boy during the golden age of piracy in the 18th century; the other follows a downtrodden academic called Marian, who is attempting to piece Hannah’s story together in the 1930s. This is not a tale of mythical sea creatures and lovable rogues, though. Howe’s bloody and brutal writing immerses readers in a uniquely violent but totally thrilling era.

Unsparing … Howe’s novel. Photograph: AP

“The character in A True Account,” says Howe, “is based partly on Anne Bonny and Mary Read – women who disguised themselves as men during this golden age. But I wanted to use Hannah’s name as homage to this distant great-aunt, who had an incredible experience and left basically no record of it.”

In the book, Hannah flees her Boston home and unintentionally joins a crew of notorious pirates. There are elements of truth here. Hannah’s captain is Ned Low, who was a real-life pirate famed for torturing his enemies (Howe spares no details). So too was Will Fly, whose body was strung up near Boston harbour as a warning. In the chapter about the hanging, plucked straight from an eyewitness account, Will re-ties his own noose, disdainfully asking the hangman: “Don’t you know your trade?”

The story, a rollicking roman-à-clef, is also a comment on gender. As a Bostonian barmaid, Hannah deploys her sexuality as a means of protection, fending off rowdy regulars with flirtation and jest. But later, as a cabin boy, she unlocks previously unobtainable levels of freedom and privilege, which she abuses on at least one occasion.

Howe has long been fascinated by the suffocating, sometimes perilous strictures placed on women throughout history. Three of her previous novels delve into the Salem witch trials of the 1690s. One, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, centres on a PhD student called Connie Goodwin, who uncovers harrowing details about the accusation of witchcraft levelled at the woman in the book’s title.

Remarkably, five years after its publication, Howe discovered that Deliverance was her eight-times great-grandmother. Howe is also a descendant of Elizabeth Howe and Elizabeth Proctor, both accused in the trails (the latter was a key character in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible). “How nice for me to be related to other argumentative, grumpy women who don’t like being told what to do,” laughs Howe.

By the gun … another illustration showing pirates Mary Read and Anne Bonny. Photograph: Science History Images/Alamy

Salem appealed to her because it is one of the rare instances of “regular people” taking centre stage. “Broadly speaking, the period in A True Account is the same as Salem: this moment of the early-modern passing into the modern. In both cases, it’s a moment of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances, who otherwise would not have left much record of themselves in the archives.”

When researching the new book, Howe relied on ships’ logs and first-hand accounts, many published in a compendium titled A General History of the Pyrates (some scholars suggest that its author, Captain Charles Johnson, was Daniel Defoe writing under a pen name). These helped to paint a picture of crews, which were far more diverse than many popular depictions would have you believe.

“The oceangoing world was its own nation,” says Howe, who has just edited the upcoming Penguin Book of Pirates. “There’s certainly an over-representation of English sailors in a lot of the stories of piracy that have come to us. Many of the people who were captured or tried as pirates were described as ‘late of somewhere’ – ‘late of Barbados’, ‘late of wherever’ – and they could have been from any number of places. I was struck by the fact that there was this universe of culture and habitation and practice and assumption that was independent, to some degree, of their point of origin. Often, pirate crews were multi-ethnic, multilingual and, in rare instances, multi-gendered.”

Upon returning to land, the real Hannah sued for Edward’s percentage of the ship’s proceeds, using the money to buy a house in Beverly, Massachusetts. Howe visits the town regularly – it’s the home of her favourite Mexican restaurant. During her research, it transpired that she had been parking outside that very house for years. “I’m not a terribly sentimental person,” she says. “But after that, I tracked down where Hannah was buried and paid a little call. I sat down and said, ‘I know what happened. I know what you did. I see you.’”

A True Account by Katherine Howe is published by Magpie (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.