Fanny Campbell, the Female Pirate Captain

Fanny Campbell, the Female Pirate Captain: A Tale of the Revolution is an 1844 American novel by Maturin Murray Ballou, about a woman who goes to sea to rescue her fiancé and becomes commander of a pirate ship. The popularity of its heroine continued long after the book was published, with some writers publishing accounts of Fanny Campbell as if she were real.

Fanny Campbell, the protagonist, is a young woman who lives in Lynn, Massachusetts in the 1770s. She has a childhood sweetheart named William Lovell, who becomes a sailor. After his first voyage, Lovell asks Campbell to marry him. Campbell says she will marry Lovell when he returns from his second voyage. In 1775, just before the American Revolution, William Lovell and ten other Americans, are seized and put in irons by the captain and crew of the British ship the Constance, which sets sail for Cuba. Fanny Campell decides to rescue her fiancé. She dresses as a man, calls herself Channing, and signs on as a deckhand on the Constance. On board the ship, rumors begin to circulate that the captain is going to take the entire crew to England and force them to join the British Navy. Fomenting a mutiny, Campbell helps to spread the rumors, then takes command of the Constance, turning the ship and its crew into pirates, and continues on to Cuba. After she has freed her fiancee and the other ten prisoners, Campbell asks Lovell to promise not to reveal that she is really a woman. On the way to Cuba, the ship encounters the British barque the George, whose captain senses something is amiss and orders his crew to open fire. Despite the superior firepower of the George, Campbell and her crew manage to win the battle, capturing the George and taking it along with them.

The two ships stop briefly in Cuba, then capture a British sloop of war whose crew informs her that Great Britain and the American colonies are at war. The crews of both ships, except for four men, decide to join the Americans and become privateers, fighting against the British. Eventually the Constance and the George sail back to Massachusetts, landing at Marblehead because British troops have occupied Boston. Fanny Campbell and William Lovell travel home to Lynn. They get married and have papers drawn up that commission them as privateers. William returns to sea to privateer throughout the Revolutionary War, but Fanny stays home to take care of their children. She continues however to shoot, ride and practice her sailing, keeping her cutlass in the closet of her home.

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