Born: 1630, Haiti
Died: 1663
Country most active: International
Also known as: NA
Jacquotte Delahaye was a pirate who roamed the Caribbean sea. She reportedly worked with Anne Dieu-le-Veut, but there is no concrete evidence from period sources that she was a real person. Stories of her exploits are attributed to oral storytelling and Leon Treich, a fiction writer from the 1940s.
Delahaye reportedly came from Saint-Domingue in Haiti, the daughter of a French father and a Haitian mother. Her mother is said to have died in childbirth with her brother, who had a mild mental disability, and was left in Delahaye’s care after her father’s murder, which was also what led to her career as a pirate.
Delahaye was a war hero who faked her own death and took on a male alias to escape her pursuers, living as a man for many years. When she returned, she became known as “Back From the Dead Red” due to her striking red hair.
She led hundreds of pirates, and took over a small Caribbean island in 1656, which they called a “freebooter republic”, but died several years later in a shoot-out defending it.
Though no official documentation of any children exists, she reportedly had a daughter named Dinah Delahaye, who shared her mother’s striking red hair, and who grew up to become a master swordswoman, and pirate commanding a small fleet of ships.