Charles Vane

Charles Vane was among the most violent and least governable of the pirates of the Bahamas, and the one who refused the king's pardon most publicly. His birthplace is unknown. He learned the trade under Henry Jennings, raiding the Spanish salvage camps working the wrecks of the 1715 treasure fleet off Florida. By 1717 he had his own ship and was a leading figure of the Flying Gang, the loose republic of pirates operating out of Nassau. Court records describe him beating and torturing captured sailors for information, and his own crews thought him grasping even by their standards. When Woodes Rogers arrived in 1718 as governor with a royal pardon for any pirate who took it, most of Nassau accepted. Vane sent Rogers a defiant letter, set a captured ship on fire and sailed it at the incoming squadron, and escaped in the confusion. He briefly shared an anchorage and a drinking party with Blackbeard off North Carolina. His end came from his own rules: after he declined to engage a French warship, his crew voted him out for cowardice and put him off in a small sloop, and Calico Jack Rackham took the ship. He was wrecked and marooned on an island in the Bay Islands in 1719, recognised by a passing captain who knew him, and carried to Jamaica. He was hanged at Gallows Point, Port Royal, in March 1721 and his body hung in chains as a warning. His flag, a white skull on black, is one of the few pirate colours described in contemporary sources rather than invented later. Vane appears as a character in Daniel Defoe's General History of the Pyrates, published two years after his execution, which is the origin of much of what is popularly believed about the period.

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