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Thief, Convict, Pirate, Wife
Thief, Convict, Pirate, Wife: The Many Histories of Charlotte Badger | Jennifer Ashton
1 post | 1 read
Charlotte Badger is a woman around whom many stories have been woven: the thief sentenced to death in England and then transported to New South Wales; the pirate who joined a mutiny to take a ship to the Bay of Islands; the first white woman resident in Aotearoa; the wife of a rangatira, and many more.In this remarkable piece of historical detective work, Jennifer Ashton shows what we know about Charlotte Badger, and how the stories about her have shifted over time. From a Worcester courtroom to the outskirts of Sydney, from the English countryside to Wairoa Bay, Ashton brings to life the maritime and wider imperial world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries & and the convicts and runaways, sailors and soldiers, governors and missionaries who filled that world. The author shows how history and historical figures like Charlotte Badger are made and remade over time by journalists and historians, painters and playwrights.Charlotte Badger's was a life that is at once more remarkable, more curious and more mundane than has previously been written. Jennifer Ashton tells the fascinating story of a remarkable, curious, ordinary woman and her place in history.
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Megbert
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Mehso-so

Well the title and the blurb drew me in, a “remarkable piece of historical detective work” about Charlotte Badger. Except that the book begins with a disclaimer that we don‘t really know that much about her and all we can do is piece together what we do know. We know that she happened to be on a boat called the Venus that was stolen in 1806 by Benjamin Kelly, first mate of the captain Chace who was left ashore. Does that really make her a pirate??