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Walking the plank
Walking the plank was a method of execution practised 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 has been a motif of pirates in popular culture since the 19th century, few instances are documented, all of which took place well after the classical "Golden Age of Piracy" which ended by 1730.
The act is described in a 1763 article about pirates from The Public Adviser:
Philadelphia, May 12. ... And it is also said, that four other small Vessels were cruizing about the Grenades and Guadaloupe, in the same Manner, manned by Spaniards and Caribbee Indians, who had taken several Vessels; among them one belonging to the Grenades, whose Crew they obliged to walk into the Sea, on a Plank fixed for that Purpose, but that one of them got ashore by good Swimming.
The phrase appeared in a 1788 book on the slave trade, which recorded a 1779 incident in which slave-ship captains declared that if they ran out of water and food, they would save themselves by making their slaves jump overboard:
He then asked them what they had intended to have done with their slaves ... They replied, "to make them walk the plank," (i. e.) to jump overboard.
The phrase is also recorded in the second edition of English lexicographer Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, which was published in 1788. Grose wrote:
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.
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Walking the plank
Walking the plank was a method of execution practised 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 has been a motif of pirates in popular culture since the 19th century, few instances are documented, all of which took place well after the classical "Golden Age of Piracy" which ended by 1730.
The act is described in a 1763 article about pirates from The Public Adviser:
Philadelphia, May 12. ... And it is also said, that four other small Vessels were cruizing about the Grenades and Guadaloupe, in the same Manner, manned by Spaniards and Caribbee Indians, who had taken several Vessels; among them one belonging to the Grenades, whose Crew they obliged to walk into the Sea, on a Plank fixed for that Purpose, but that one of them got ashore by good Swimming.
The phrase appeared in a 1788 book on the slave trade, which recorded a 1779 incident in which slave-ship captains declared that if they ran out of water and food, they would save themselves by making their slaves jump overboard:
He then asked them what they had intended to have done with their slaves ... They replied, "to make them walk the plank," (i. e.) to jump overboard.
The phrase is also recorded in the second edition of English lexicographer Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, which was published in 1788. Grose wrote:
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.