Other historians look more closely at the French world and call them “serfs” (it’s important to remember that, during this time period, the ancient medieval governing systems were still partially in place). This isn’t a very pleasant word, either. A still smaller group look at the facts of servitude and just call them slaves.

Whatever, if Vane was part of this bunch, he would have been transported from France to Martinique. There he would have encountered an unusual situation. You see, when other countries seized undesirables and sent them out as – let’s call them slaves – those people didn’t have much in common with the people they were sold to. The Protestant English enslaved the Catholic Irish, the Spanish enslaved Native Americans and those English/Dutch that they could catch, and pretty much everybody enslaved Africans.

But Martinique was populated, not by French Catholics, but by other Huguenots, richer and luckier, who had seen what was coming in French politics and had bought land in the new colony of Martinique. These people weren’t comfortable with enslaving folk so like themselves, so in 1688 they all threw the system over and left the island, removing about 1/3 of its population in a peaceful revolt.

Most of these Protestant French headed for the English colonies, and it would have been 17 years before we get our first good report of Charles Vane, living in the old pirate town of Port Royal. This would have given the young man plenty of time to Anglicize himself, and plenty of reason to, asked if he was French, to reply “No!”

In 1715 or 1716, Vane signed on to the privateering crew of Henry Jennings. Jennings was legal (not a pirate – yet) but he was also part of a vast illegal movement to overthrow the sitting English king George I, and replace him with the Stuart (Scottish) James II. Jennings was one of the founders of the pirate colony of Nassau. He stood in opposition to Ben Hornigold, and even went so far as to offer James II a full navy, composed entirely of pirates, if James would recognize Nassau as an independent nation.