Walking the plank

Walking the plank was a method of execution practiced on special occasion by pirates, mutineers, and other rogue seafarers. For the amusement of the perpetrators (and the psychological torture of the victims), captives were bound so they could not swim or tread water and forced to walk off a wooden plank or beam extended over the side of a ship.

Although forcing captives to walk the plank is a motif of pirates in popular culture in the 19th through 21st centuries, few instances are documented, so how common the practice was is debatable.

The phrase is recorded in English lexicographer Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, which was published in 1788 (first published in London in 1785). Grose writes;

Walking the plank. A mode of destroying devoted persons or officers in a mutiny on ship-board, by blind-folding them, and obliging them to walk on a plank laid over the ship's side; by this means, as the mutineers suppose, avoiding the penalty of murder.

In 1769, mutineer George Wood confessed to his chaplain at London's Newgate Prison that he and his fellow mutineers had sent their officers to walk the plank. Author Douglas Botting, in describing the account, characterized it as an "alleged confession" and an "obscure account... which may or may not be true, and in any case had nothing to do with pirates".

A Mr. Claxton, surgeons-mate aboard the Garland in 1788, testified to a committee at the House of Commons about the use of the plank by slavers:

The food, notwithstanding the mortality, was so little, that if ten more days at sea, they should, as the captain and others said, have made the slaves walk the plank, that is, throw themselves overboard, or have eaten those slaves that died.

In July 1822, William Smith, captain of the British sloop Blessing, was forced to walk the plank by the Spanish pirate crew of the schooner Emanuel in the West Indies.

The Times of London reported on February 14, 1829 that the packet Redpole (Bullock, master) was captured by the pirate schooner President and sunk. The commander was shot and the crew were made to walk the plank.

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