ExecutedToday.com

On this date in 1955, Test cricketer Leslie George Hylton was hanged in Spanish Town, Jamaica, for murdering his wife.

Hylton represented the West Indies in six grueling Test cricket matches in the 1930’s. (Career statistics.)

And apparently he had a thing about adultery, because when he found out his wife was having an affair, he shot her dead. Trying to shoot himself, he told John Law, but his alibi was even worse than his aim: she’d been shot seven times, meaning the fast bowler had reloaded.

Hylton is the only Test cricketer known to have suffered the death penalty. Fans took his death in stride:

Australia were touring the West Indies, and when the Jamaican opener JK Holt followed a run of low scores by dropping two catches in the Test at Bridgetown, a play card urged “Save Hylton, hang Holt.”

Cricket officialdom, though, kept such a stiff upper lip that Hylton’s obituary in its leading publication managed not to mention that his passing had involved a noose.

On this date in 1720, Charles Vane’s resilient pirate career finally came to the end of a noose.

Like his onetime lieutenant Calico Jack Rackham, Vane plundered the American coast and the Caribbean during the twilight heyday of the buccaneer.

The man had a gift. From 1716 to late in 1718, Vane looted dextrously, even boldly spurning a royal pardon the better to keep his loot and mounting a flamboyant escape from the armada subsequent sent to detain him.

If he had a weakness, it was not as a mariner but as a manager. A notoriously tyrannous captain, Vane saw one aide turn on him and escape with a ship and a second — the aforementioned Rackham — mount a seaborne coup after Vane judiciously refused to engage a larger French man-o-war.

Nothing daunted by the loss of his command, Vane set about rebuilding his fortunes by resuming the conquest of prizes. Little could he see that the day of piracy was fast drawing to a close, and his own hourglass running faster still.

For all the catastrophes visited on him by his confederates, it required the connivance of nature to do him in. Early in 1720, a hurricane obliterated his ship (and most of his crew); tough old Vane managed to wash up on a deserted island* … but was recognized by his “rescuers” and delivered up to the British governor of Jamaica, who strung him up within the week.

* Straight out of piracy central casting, no? Would you also believe his crew had a renowned “pirate party” rendezvous with Blackbeard’s?

On this date in 1720, the pirate captain “Calico Jack” Rackham was hanged together with his crew by the British governor of Jamaica.

Nicknamed for his flamboyant clothing, the Bristol-born buccaneer plundered the West Indies during the “Golden Age of Piracy”, having ousted his former captain Charles Vane. Rackham is chiefly remembered to history for two who were not hanged with the rest of his crew: Anne Bonny and Mary Read, rare female pirates who served aboard Rackham’s ship.

Immortalized by Daniel Defoe in his pseudonymous A General History of the Pyrates, Bonny and Read came to piracy by different paths but were both every bit the part and leaders aboard their ship — “very profligate, cursing, and swearing much, and very ready and willing to do any Thing on board.” Bonny, at least, was Rackham’s lover — having eloped with him from her husband.

Upon capture, both women “pleaded their bellies” to escape the gallows, and though it’s unclear whether either really was pregnant, it seems the gambit spared both from execution.

Read died in prison shortly after, while Bonny vanished from history — prompting speculation that she had escaped, secured a pardon, been ransomed by her wealthy father, and/or returned again to piracy under a different guise. Reportedly, she castigated Rackham at their last meeting in prison for lying drunk below decks while only the women resisted the capture of their ship: “I am sorry to see you here Jack, but if you had fought like a man, you need not be hanged like a dog.”

As the world’s best-known women pirates, Bonny and Read are recalled as anything from sexualized historical curios to action heroines to proto-feminists.

They feature in Disneyland’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride, the Witchblade comic book series, utopian theorizing, popular history … and the occasional action figure.

Update: A much more detailed foray into the lives of these daring women is at Scandalous Women.