Fanny Campbell, the Female Pirate Captain

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 spread these rumors and then takes command of the Constance, turns the ship and its crew into pirates, and continues on to Cuba.

The two ships stop briefly in Cuba, then capture another British sloop whose crew informs her that Great Britain and the American colonies are at war.

Her teeth were regular and white as pearls, and her hair was a very dark auburn, worn parted smoothly across her brow, and gathered in a modest snood behind her head, while it was easy to see by its texture that if left to itself, it would have curled naturally.

"[5] Literary critic Barbara Cutter described Fanny Campbell in 2003 as one of a series of books in American antebellum literature that helped establish the cultural ideal of the assertive, redemptive woman.

[8] Maud Buckley, a captain's wife who eventually got her own license called her three masted schooner the Fanny Campbell, which she commanded on the Great Lakes in Michigan for several years in the 1870s:[9] The book's popularity created a fashion for female pirates in scrimshaw artwork that continued for several decades in the 19th century.

Gretchen J Woertendyke who examines the novel in Hemispheric Regionalism: Romance and the Geography of Genre states that Fanny Campbell was based on actual historical figures and circumstances.

[15] Jo Stanley, Anne Chambers, Dian H. Murray, Julie Wheelwright, Bold in Her Breeches: Women Pirates Across the Ages, Pandora, 1995