"I would have died if I'd lost the part of Anne," said Jean Peters. "The costumes are delirious, any girl would look good in them.; they have tight-fitting trousers and open throat shirt down to here, and free top boots --- I'm in rags, really but so picturesque and flattering. And the character is terrific, she's a complete primitive, a girl raised by Blackbeard, the pirate, who knows no other life than the law of might. Just an animal. I can't wait to begin it. Of course, I'm aware it's a dangerous part, too. You could make an awful fool of yourself if you went overboard."
Although Herbert Ravenel Sass' short story was loosely based on the adventures of real-life pirate Anne Bonny (1700-?), the film is not a biography of Bonny, nor of Edward Teach, more commonly known as Blackbeard (d. 1718).
La regina dei pirati (1951) based on the short story "Anne of the Indies" by Herbert Ravenel Sass in The Saturday Evening Post (1 Nov 1947).
Studio production chief Darryl F. Zanuck instructed the writers to incorporate unused footage shot for the Twentieth Century-Fox pirate film Il cigno nero (1942), starring Tyrone Power.