Anne Bonny (Anne Cormac) reportedly died in South Carolina on April 25, 1782, after remarrying and living a quiet later life.
According to later genealogical and probate research into South Carolina records, Anne Bonny—having returned to her birth name, Anne Cormac, after her piratical career—died on April 25, 1782, in South Carolina. By this point in her life, she had reportedly remarried a man named Joseph Burleigh and raised several children, living what appears to have been an unremarkable, law-abiding domestic life for decades following her brush with execution in Jamaica.
The precise day and month of her death are not attested in a surviving headstone or a single definitive primary document; rather, this date has been reconstructed by later biographers and genealogists cross-referencing colonial-era probate and parish records. This stands in contrast to the vivid, well-documented final months of her piratical career, underscoring how thoroughly Bonny receded into ordinary life after 1720.
If accurate, this death date closes out an extraordinary arc: from a woman narrowly escaping the gallows as a convicted pirate to decades of quiet domesticity in colonial America. It also stands as a powerful counter-narrative to the many legends and fictionalized endings—some claiming she was executed, others that she vanished at sea—demonstrating how Bonny's afterlife in popular memory diverged sharply from the mundane reality suggested by archival research.