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Charles Vane’s origins are unknown beyond time spent in Port Royal, Jamaica. He first appears raiding the salvage camps of the wrecked 1715 Spanish treasure fleet in Florida under Henry Jennings, and by mid-1717 he was a leader of the Flying Gang in Nassau. When King George I offered pirates a pardon, Vane, a Jacobite sympathizer, led the opposition. Captain Vincent Pearse of HMS Phoenix captured him and his sloop Lark in February 1718, released him at the urging of Benjamin Hornigold and Thomas Nichols, and was then harassed out of Nassau by Vane and Edward England.

In July 1718 Governor Woods Rogers trapped Vane in Nassau harbor. His captured 20-gun French flagship was too large for the shallow exit, so he set it ablaze, sent it into the British fleet and escaped in a smaller sloop. Off Charleston, partner Charles Yeats deserted with a cargo of enslaved people to take a pardon, and Blackbeard declined an alliance at Ocracoke Inlet in October 1718. When Vane retreated from a French naval frigate that November, his crew voted him out. He was wrecked in a 1719 hurricane, recognized while trying to join a passing ship, and hanged at Gallows Point in Port Royal on March 29, 1721.

• He beat captives and burned them with lit matches to make them reveal hidden valuables.
• Charleston merchants sent William Rhett after him, but Rhett captured Stede Bonnet instead.
• Hornigold, now a pardoned pirate hunter, captured Vane’s supply man Nicholas Woodall.
• After the crew vote, he and 16 loyalists, including Robert Deal, were left with a small sloop.
• His tarred body was hung in chains at Gun Cay as a warning to other pirates.