Anne Bonny was captured with Calico Jack Rackham's crew by pirate hunter Jonathan Barnet's squadron near Negril Point, Jamaica.
On October 22, 1720, the pirate sloop commanded by John 'Calico Jack' Rackham, aboard which Anne Bonny had been serving as an active crew member, was overtaken by an armed sloop commanded by privateer and pirate hunter Jonathan Barnet. The confrontation occurred in the waters off Negril Point, on the western coast of Jamaica, a region notorious for pirate activity in the early eighteenth century.
Accounts from the period, most famously Captain Charles Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates, claim that most of the male crew fled belowdecks in a drunken stupor while Anne Bonny and fellow female pirate Mary Read fought fiercely on deck alongside a single other crewman. Whether or not this dramatic detail is fully accurate, contemporary court records confirm that Bonny was captured aboard Rackham's vessel on this date.
This capture marked the end of Bonny's brief but notorious piratical career, which had begun only a year or two earlier. It set in motion the legal proceedings that would make her one of the most enduringly famous women in piracy history. The event is significant not only for concluding her raiding activities in the Caribbean but also for the way it fed into the growing legend of women who defied eighteenth-century gender norms to take up arms and command respect among hardened criminals.