“When I say there’s a war coming, I don’t mean with the Scarborough, I don’t mean with King George or England. Civilization is coming. And it means to exterminate us.”

— Captain James Flint, Black Sails

It is commonplace among those of us who love the writing of Robert E. Howard to speculate as to what literary heights he might have scaled had he not chosen to cut his career and life short at age 30 with a bullet to the head. Many speculate that he might have broken through with regional fiction set on his beloved Texas frontier.

Some of us enjoy further speculating as to how REH might have fit into the variegated entertainment world of the 21st century.

I indulge myself with the belief that Howard was, in fact, a ghostly presence in the writers’ room of the STARZ pirate drama Black Sails, where his spectral hand pushed the quill in playing out his foundational theme of civilization vs. barbarism. For that is the underlying theme of this fine, though underrated show.

Black Sails, which aired across four seasons 2014-17, is a bastard child of two lineages: It is a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic Treasure Island, and it is also a tale of the historical Republic of Pirates founded at Nassau in the Bahamas in the early 18th Century. In the show, as in history, the British Empire is the looming menace on the horizon that threatens to overrun this haven of free men and women on the frontiers of the New World.

Robert E. Howard wrote his share of pirate yarns — from the historical tales of Irish pirate Terence Vulmea to the Hyborian Age tales of Conan raiding the Black Coast with Belit, and “The Pool of the Black One,” where he deposes the Zingaran Captain Zaparavo before leading a pirate crew into a desperate adventure on an island filled with weird menace. “The Black Stranger” was written both as a historical Vulmea adventure and as a Conan tale — though it was not published in Howard’s lifetime.

When Charles Vane stalks onto the screen in Black Sails, it is as though he was summoned out of the guts of Howard’s Underwood typewriter to swagger into another century. For my pieces of eight, Vane, as depicted by Zach McGowan, is the most Conanesque character ever to grace a screen.

As we meet Vane, he takes a right cross to the face from former lover, and Nassau’s fence and commercial queenpin, Eleanor Guthrie. He pops her back, right in the mouth. Here is a man who would go out of his way to drop a faithless harlot into a cesspool in The Maze in retribution for turning him in to the Watch. (See “Rogues in the House”).

Vane’s arrogant sprawl, onion bottle of rum on his knee, recalls the delicious moment in “Black Colossus” when the Princess Yasmela reveals to her perfumed nobles their new commander:

“Tomorrow we march southward,” she answered. “And there is the man who shall lead you!”

”Jerking aside the velvet curtains she dramatically indicated the Cimmerian. It was perhaps not an entirely happy moment for the disclosure. Conan was sprawled in his chair, his feet propped on the ebony table, busily engaged in gnawing a beef-bone which he gripped firmly in both hands. He glanced casually at the astounded nobles, grinned faintly at Amalric, and went on munching with undisguised relish.”

McGowan is a small man, without the massive physical presence of Conan — but his scarred Celtic visage and “volcanic” blue eyes are pure Cimmerian, and he lacks nothing in the muscular, “pantherish” grace with which Howard imbued his most famous creation.

But the resemblances are deeper than mere physical aesthetics.

Initial impressions of Vane are that he is a blunt instrument — or, rather, a poniard-pointed one. Vane is the most feral of the pirate captains of Nassau, a barbaric archetype. While other captains — and Guthrie — play a game of thrones, while Captain James Flint schemes to take revenge upon a civilization that has wronged and betrayed him, Vane values only his freedom and the seaborne tools he requires to live as a “proper pirate.”

He has contempt for civilization, reflected in his vividly expressed creed:

“When I take something from a man – his ship, his money, his life – I don’t hide behind a clerk. I don’t hide behind the law. I don’t hide behind anything. I look him in his eye and I give him every chance to deny me.”

Vane’s loves, lusts and conflicts are — so we believe — all personal in nature. He is not to be crossed in his interests, as Ned Low learned to his cost. His forced confrontation with that psychopathic pirate captain gloriously hits the same savage notes as Conan’s forced confrontation with Zaparavo.

Initially, Vane has no interest in going to war against encroaching civilization. That’s Flint’s game. Vane’s attitude toward England is much like Conan’s toward the Black Seers of Yimsha:

“Why, if they imposed upon me, it would be my life or theirs. But I have nothing to do with them. I came to these mountains to raise a following of human beings, not to war with wizards.”

Circumstances eventually force Vane to grapple with an encroaching civilization he cannot evade — and they reveal him to be as capable a strategic thinker as the more erudite Flint. But where Flint is a civilized man who has gone outlaw, Vane is a barbarian, through and through.

Flint longs for the small comforts of a settled life. Vane recoils from those very comforts, which are, to him, nothing but shackles:

“‘Give us your submission and we will give you all the comfort you need.’ I can think of no measure of comfort worth that price.”

(Note: Here be a major spoiler!! Ye be warned!)

Alas for Vane, his golden-haired, supple-figured Valeria cannot be trusted at his back, and instead of becoming a king, the Charles Vane of Black Sails must become a revolutionary martyr. But he faces his executioners with all the grim fatalism of a northern barbarian, growling his own epitaph:

“These men, who brought me here today, do not fear me. They brought me here today because they fear you and because they know that my voice, the voice that refuses to be enslaved, once lived in you. And may yet still. They brought me here today to show you death and use it to frighten you into ignoring that voice. But know this. We are many. They are a few. To face death is a choice. And they can’t hang us all.”