Some girls want to be princesses when they grow up; Sadie Farrell had a different dream: to become a pirate, and the meanest one at that! Growing up in the crime-filled slums of Victorian New York, Sadie knew how to throw a punch. Described as ‘slight of build, but mean and vicious’ (surely a euphemism for ‘skinny bitch’) she became a ruthless mugger at a young age and even developed a legendary signature move: headbutting her victims in the stomach. It earned her her fighting name ‘Sadie the Goat’.

One night, Sadie got into a bar brawl with 6-foot tall female bouncer named Gallus Mag who had a gruesome signature move of her own: a headlock during which she would bite off your ear. After winning the fight, Gallus displayed Sadie’s ear in jar as a trophy in her bar. That was it! Pent-up and humiliated, Sadie decided to pursue her childhood dream, no matter the cost. She convinced a gang of river pirates that they needed a new leader and within a week, with ‘Captain Sadie’ at the helm, they had hoisted the Jolly Roger and captured their first boat.

For a year, the gang terrorized the Hudson and Harlem river, attacking ships and pillaging wealthy estates. « Her ferocity far exceeded that of her ruffianly followers, » Herbert Asbury wrote about Sadie in his 1927 book ‘Gangs of New York’. Inspired by the pirate stories of her childhood, Sadie even made some of her crew ‘walk the plank’* when they didn’t do exactly as she said. But after a while, sick of the raids, local farmers along the river started greeting Sadie and her crew with guns while the seaborne police was getting hot on their heels.

Too risky, Sadie decided. She returned to her old haunts where she was now hailed as the ‘Queen of the Waterfront’. Sadie had enough money to open her own gin mill, but first she wanted to make amends with the formidable woman who had ripped off her ear. Moved by the gesture, Gallus Mag gave Sadie the jar with her ear. According to Herbert Asbury, Sadie wore her severed ear in a locket around her neck for the rest of her life.

And this is where her story ends. There are no pictures, no written records, no birth- or death certificates of Sadie the Goat. Was she even a real person, or merely an urban legend? Real or not, Sadie’s spirit deserves to live on: badass enough to take on serious criminals, playful enough to fly a Jolly Roger. A fun, ferocious, feminist legend.

* The practice of making bound captives walk off a wooden plank over the side of a ship.

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