Charlotte Badger

Charlotte Badger (b 1778 - d in or after 1816) is widely considered to be the first Australian  female pirate despite being from Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, England. She was also one of the first two white female settlers in New Zealand.
 
Badger came from a poor family, and one day in 1796 she stole several guineas and a silk handkerchief in an attempt to support it, but was caught and arrested. She was sentenced to seven years penal servitude in New South Wales. She served at the Parramatta female factory there, during which she gave birth to a daughter.

In 1806, three years after the end of her sentence, she was travelling with her child aboard 'The Venus, with plans to become a servant. The captain of the ship, Samuel Chase, was in the habit of flogging the women for entertainment, until his charges and crew mutinied.Badger and another convict, Catherine Hagerty, talked the men on board into seizing the ship, while the captain was ashore at Port Dalrymple in northern Tasmania. Badger and Hagerty and their lovers, John Lancashire and Benjamin Kelly, went to the Bay of Islands in the far north of New Zealand, where they settled at the pa at Rangihoua, but led very difficult lives.

Some stories suggest that the other mutineers all fled but were eventually caught and hanged, while others suggest that they went pirating after Badger, Hagerty, Lancashire and Kelly left, despite not knowing how to navigate the ship. Then the Māori captured The Venus, and burned it to retrieve the scrap metal, and cooked the men on board. Meanwhile, Lancashire, and Kelly were also recaptured and Hagerty died of a fever. Badger's fate remains a mystery, although it has been said that she lived with a minor chief at the Bay of Islands, or that she was picked up by a passing American whaler on Vavau in the Tonga Group.

Posted by Under The Black Flag on 1:40 π.μ.. Filed under biographies, charlotte Badger . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0