Walking the Plank: A Mutineers' Loophole, Slave Ships, and 1820s Pirates

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The bound captive stepping off a board over the sea is the classic pirate image, yet it virtually never happened during the Golden Age of Piracy, from the late 1600s to about 1730. The earliest documented account comes from a 1763 report in the Public Advertiser describing crews near Guadeloupe and the Grenadines who made captured sailors walk into the sea on a plank fixed for that purpose, with one strong swimmer surviving. In 1788 Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue defined walking the plank as a method mutineers used against loyal officers, blindfolded so the killers could claim the victim died by his own steps and avoid a murder charge. The same year, surgeon's mate Mr. Claxton told a House of Commons committee that the captain of the slave ship Garland planned to make enslaved people walk the plank if delayed ten more days, and Thomas Clarkson recorded a similar 1779 threat.

Verified pirate use came a century after the Golden Age, in the Caribbean of the 1820s. In July 1822 the Spanish schooner Emanuel captured the British sloop Blessing and forced Captain William Smith off the plank. In February 1829 the Times reported pirates on the schooner President shooting the commander of the Redpole and making the survivors walk. Later in 1829 pirates in the Leeward Passage made the crew of a Dutch brig walk the plank with cannonballs tied to their feet. Fiction did the rest: Charles Johnson's 1724 General History of the Pirates, Charles Ellms's 1837 Pirate's Own Book with its Walking the Death Plank illustration, Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, and J.M. Barrie's Captain Hook fixed the plank in popular memory.

• A supposed Baltic plank pirate, John Derdrake, is suspected by historians to be fictional.
• Mutineer George Wood's reported 1769 Newgate confession to sending officers down the plank remains unverified.
• Johnson described Roman captives offered a ladder into the sea and freedom if they could swim.
• An 1872 novel had pirate Dominique You confess that Theodosia Burr Alston walked the plank with a smile and a wave.
• The ninja's black outfit came from Japanese theater stagehands, a parallel case of costume replacing history.