Pirates Never Made People Walk the Plank (It's Fiction)

Every pirate movie has the scene: a terrified captive forced at cutlass-point to walk a wooden plank extending over shark-infested waters. It's one of the most iconic images of piracy. There's just one problem—it never actually happened.

The Golden Age of Piracy, spanning roughly 1650 to 1730, has not a single documented case of anyone walking the plank. Not under Blackbeard, not under Captain Kidd, not under any of the era's notorious pirates. The practice appears in zero trial records, zero ship logs, zero firsthand accounts from that period.

So Where Did This Come From?

The myth traces back to 18th and 19th century fiction. Captain Charles Johnson's 1724 book A General History of the Pyrates helped popularize the phrase, though even it lacked concrete examples. Later, adventure novels like Treasure Island (1883) cemented the image in popular culture. Howard Pyle's dramatic illustrations for Harper's Weekly turned the plank into visual shorthand for pirate cruelty.

By the time Hollywood got its hands on the concept, walking the plank had become pirate gospel—despite being almost entirely made up.

The Handful of Real Cases

There are exactly five documented instances of plank-walking in all of maritime history, and they're all from the 1700s-1800s, long after the Golden Age:

• 1769: Mutineer George Wood confessed at London's Newgate Prison that he and fellow mutineers forced their officers to walk the plank (though historians question the confession's reliability)
• 1822: The captain of the British ship Redpole was forced off a plank by pirates from the Emanuel
• 1829: Pirates captured the Dutch brig Vhan Fredericka and made the crew walk the plank with cannonballs tied to their feet

These rare incidents happened decades or even centuries after piracy's heyday, and were considered shocking anomalies even then.

What Pirates Actually Did

Real pirates had a simple philosophy: don't kill people if you don't have to. If you murder everyone on every ship you raid, word gets around. Soon every merchant crew fights to the death because they know they're doomed anyway. That's terrible for business.

Smart pirates wanted victims who'd surrender quickly and tell other ships to do the same. So most pirate attacks ended with stolen cargo and a crew set adrift in a lifeboat—alive.

When pirates did punish people, they used methods that were efficient and sent a message:

• Hanging: The most common execution, usually done publicly. London had a special spot called Execution Dock just for hanging pirates
• Marooning: Leave someone on a deserted island with minimal supplies—basically a slow death sentence for serious crimes like theft from fellow pirates
• Keelhauling: Drag the victim underwater along the barnacle-covered bottom of the ship, shredding skin and clothes
• Flogging: Simple, brutal, and didn't waste valuable prisoners who could be ransomed

Why the Plank Makes No Sense

Beyond the lack of evidence, walking the plank is just impractical. Why rig up a plank when you can just throw someone overboard? Why give them a theatrical death when a quick cutlass or pistol shot is faster? Why waste wood building an execution device on a ship where space is precious?

The answer: you wouldn't. Real pirates were pragmatic criminals, not theatrical performers. The plank exists because it makes for great drama, not because it's an effective execution method.

The myth persists because it's visually striking, easily dramatized, and fits our romanticized view of pirate life. But history tells a different story—one where pirates were far more interested in profit than pageantry, and where the iconic plank was invented by authors, not actual buccaneers.