Female Pirate Costumes

This is a great source for realistic and cheap pirate costumes for girls in our family! When I was a girl, I loved to play dress-up along with friends and family.  Obviously, my favorite time of the year was Halloween and I always loved to dress in my pirate girl costume.

Click here at Girl Pirate Costumes … realistic and cheap pirate costumes for girls!

If your daughter is in her teens, teen girl pirate costumes are very comfortable and easy to use at Halloween or school parties they may be attending. They are cute and manageable and ready to fit the active teen.

My Mom had bought my brother an eye patch one year to go along with his costume but it was too small so I would use his eye patch and one of my Dad’s red handkerchiefs for my head scarf. I looked every bit the pirate when we went out trick-or-treating in our neighborhood.

We had a lot of fun and I enjoyed those times with my family. I use to pile in the back of the station wagon with my brothers and sister with Dad and Mom and they would take us throughout the neighborhoods. We were lucky one year when Dad let us walk home under a moonlit sky.  The last one I remember was when I was just a young girl…it just added to the mystique of Halloween when we did that!

We were fortunate to be able to build memories with our kids. The costumes you see here on this page and the ones on the other pages were such a help to us…I can’t imagine trying to make these costumes! They are well made and reusable year after year. However, if you or your daughters have the time to make your own teen girl pirate costumes, just click this link for a YouTube video on a great way to make your own. I was really impressed with how this girl made the costume!

I was doing some research online some time ago and found that there were woman pirates that sailed the seas with the men. I found this great video where two authors and historian discuss the lady pirates of the day and the pirate men who loved them. I have included the transcript of their discussion for you to follow along below the video:

From the video above:

The videotaped discussion is taking place between Andrew Mills, Historian/Author (red hair) and Charles A. Mills, Author of -Legend of Pirate Gold-

Charles: “Well… and you shouldn’t leave out women pirates because there actually women pirates as well.”

Andrew: “That is true. We usually think of pirates as being a boy’s club mentality. You always hear about the male pirates…you hear about, most notably of course, Blackbeard but there are women pirates. Most notably, Anne Bonny, who is the most famous of all female pirates. Her exploits…she was as tough as anyone could get when it came to being a pirate.”

Charles: “That is true but the thing that is really interesting about Anne Bonny is that she came from a very good family. She was born into wealth and she ran away from home. She hooks up with this pirate named Jack Rackham and starts sailing with him. She dresses like a man a fights on the deck with a cutlass and a pistol. Finally off of Jamaica, the entire crew is hung over from a drinking binge the night before, except for Anne and up pops a British Man-of-War. The crew all runs below and hides except for Anne but not withstanding her resistance they take them prisoner. They hang them all except for Anne and she claimed her belly…she was pregnant! So they did not hang her and they were going to wait until after she had the baby but here she vanishes from history. And a lot of people think that her rich father came down, bailed her out, and that she and the baby then returned to a life of respectability, drinking tea and eating biscuits.”

Andrew: “That is an interesting story about Anne Bonny but also interesting is that one of the books up here ‘Blackbeard and Other Pirates’ actually talks about that story and that Anne Bonny on the ship with Rackham was not the only female pirate. They talk about a woman by the name of Mary Read, I believe it is, who basically was raised as a boy for her entire life. She was raised as a boy….she was seen as a house boy a house servant. She learned to fight like a man and when Anne discovered this second women on board, Rackham became jealous because he thought that Anne was having and affair. But when he discovered there is a second woman on board, it’s all of a sudden ‘Oh…not only do I have one female pirate I have two!’ So when a ship gets taken, just imagine the bruised ego of a captain when he finds out that he has to surrender to a woman of all people! Not to sound sexist but at a time where women are traditionally seen as being always at home and never going out to adventuress lifestyle, this is something that would stun society as a whole. And the belly story as well…both woman plead that they are pregnant is something that comes up and off and on they are always going to be executed. But Mary Read disappears from history. Anne Bonny…certainly there is some speculation that she goes back to living with her family and ends up living in South Carolina I believe from what I recall and ends up just raising her family and she has to keep her wild tendencies buried down.

Charles: “You know you talk about capturing these ships and I think what most people don’t realize about pirate battle tactics is they were really just interested in having the ships that they were attacking surrender as quickly as possible. That is one of the reason that they ran up the black flag…if you resist, there will be no quarter. They were trying to scare people into surrender right away. They weren’t too subtle. They were in small ships with narrow drafts so that they could sneak into shallow waters and to coves and inlets. They were not that interested in engaging in battle if they didn’t have to. When they did board, the tactics weren’t very subtle either. Whereas a European gentleman or soldier might have his rapier and run you through, a pirate got there with a cutlass and he was just interested in hacking and he usually would go for your legs. He wanted to disable you and get you out of the fight as quick as possible. Nothing honorable here. Just take care of business.”

Andrew: “Oh…certainly that is very true. Pirate tactics alone…these aren’t stupid men. Let’s face it…usually a merchant ship would know that a pirate ship was hunting them because crews would only number about a dozen men. But if you found a ship overloaded with men, traditionally they always declare that this was a pirate ship now let’s get out of here. But when that pirates would board, certainly you would have the black flag go up… the skull and crossbones and some pirates would change their flag. Blackbeard had a devil with a pierced heart as his flag. And the scare tactic alone would of course be there. Speaking of Blackbeard, here is a man who used scare tactics when it came to theatrics. This is a man who would tie filaments into his hair and his beard and set them on fire! Imagine Black beard boarding a ship in the middle of the night about to take it and all of a sudden you see this man with fiery glow around his face and people believed the devil himself was coming to attack them. And on top of that, he was armed to the teeth as you could get! Cutlasses around his waist…..bandoleers of pistols across his chest, this was a man who was ready to fight and kill you. And so just the shear image of this pirate scares people and literally, it is just all about theater and dramatics. How can you awe your enemies… a ‘shock and awe’ treatment basically.”

Charles: “You know…when they attacked cities, once again, their terrible reputations proceeded them. In many cases the only people defending these especially Spanish colonial cities, were local militia. And nine times out of ten, they were more interested in taking off into the mountains than standing firm against the pirates. Usually the defense of the city would consist of a couple of volleys and then they would take off. Because, as I said, if you got the pirates mad in resisting, they were very apt in slaughtering everyone that they could get their hands on.”

Andrew: That’s true and just imagine living in a town. If a pirate decides to retire in that town, the reputation of that pirate alone…just imagine that you have his ship and you have his crew and he has that fierceness, could almost become your protection in a way because it’s ‘go ahead…I dare you to us, we got this pirate who’s know for sinking your ship after he’s got your surrender just because!’ I mean it’s a mentality like that can use their own success and go ahead and protect you. Now a successful pirate when we think about them always comes down to how much treasure they get. And so, is there really buried treasure out there….I mean do you think there is? We always here legends of it….”

Charles: “Well I think we aught to talk about some of the most successful pirates. I mentioned Drake (Part I)…he certainly accumulated a lot of treasure. I turned that into Queen Elizabeth. Henry Morgan called the ‘Pirate King’. Sacked the city of Panama. He had ten ships and two thousand men…a very successful pirate. Are there really buried treasures? Well, a lot of pirates, especially the ones that you don’t hear about…the ones that aren’t the Drakes, just your run-of-the-mill pirates, they’d spend what they got as quickly as could. You know they’d go drink and wench and do all those pirate things….”

Andrew: “….a nice time at Tortuga (Isle of Tortuga)!”

Charles: “Yeah…but on the other hand these are guys who could die at any time so if they wanted to sock anything away before they went into battle, they could very well decide that I am going to hide it on Tortuga or near a place we often come to. And so there are small treasures that had been found. One of the greatest treasures that had been found occurred in the 1980′s who was called the Whydah and it was the pirate ship of Captain Bellamy. It sank in a storm 1500 feet off the Cape Cod beaches in twenty five feet of water. Treasure hunter Barry Clifford found this in the mid eighties. It’s worth $400 million which will give you some idea of the wealth that they could be carrying. He didn’t have time to spend it and he didn’t have time to bury it.”

Andrew: “….certainly not…. now, when we think of buried treasure every story that comes out you know you have the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean‘ of course we know about that…a good example where a child’s imagination really comes into play is from the 1980′s movie ‘The Goonies’ where they think about buried treasure and the kids just call it ‘rich stuff’ and they just have this idea in their minds of what it could be and low-and-behold they find the treasure of the pirate One-Eyed Willie…what would a traditional pirate loot look like?”

Charles: “Well pieces of eight, doubloons the Spanish gold doubloon which is this little item here and of course the pieces-of eight were silver….and ‘The Goonies’ weren’t so far off because there are actually a couple of treasure islands that treasure hunters are still going to.”

Pirates may not be you or your family’s choice for costumes but I encourage you to take some time to build some memories with your children by picking costumes that start your family’s traditions.  If you are looking for last minute costumes for girls ideas, I encourage you to click on the links provided to the upper right.  There are so many costumes that it will take you a good while to review them for the costumes that best fits your needs.

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