Black Sails is a series about pirates. As I mentioned in another blog, there were very few women pirates in historical reality (many more, of course, in fiction).

While Black Sails does include the notorious Anne Bonny, one of the best known women to sail under the black, it mostly addresses femininepower in other ways.

In fact, Anne is presented as having masculine power…she’s a good fighter, a good sailor, and a decent commander, and all of this is coded as male in this world.

So I’m not going to talk much about her, although she’s well presented and ably played by Clara Paget.

Instead, I’m going to talk about three other women in the show – Eleanor Guthrie, Max, and Madi. (pronounced more like the French word for Tuesday, by the way).