Although pirate captains could be very cruel-often torturing and killing their victims making you walk the plank seems to be a myth!
Pirates did make people walk the plank every now and then, but historical records seem to indicate the practice was extremely rare. In fact, pirates preferred not to kill their victims. If they gained a reputation for killing everyone on board of every ship they took, crew members would simply fight to the death every time a group of pirates hopped on deck. That would be an awful lot of work for the pirates, who usually just wanted to take the gold and run. If they did need to get rid of someone, it was much faster to simply push them overboard rather than set up a plank and have them do it themselves.
That being said, there are known instances of pirates having people walk the plank, with the generally accepted reason behind this practice simply being that the pirates did it to amuses themselves on those rare occasions there actually was time for it. Another theory as to the reason for making people walk the plank was that people were forced to do this so that the pirates couldn’t be tried for murder—after all, the people walked off the plank themselves. This latter reason is considered somewhat unlikely, however, because pillaging and piracy were generally hanging offenses anyway; if they were caught, a murder charge on top of everything else wasn’t going to make much of a difference.
But the more bloodthirsty pirates loved the psychological torture inflicted on their victims before making them walk the plank, right? Not exactly. Black Bart—also known as Bartholomew Roberts—was a pirate captain known for his somewhat psychotic tendencies. He was an incredibly successful pirate who is reported to have taken over 400 ships and accumulated some £50 million in stolen goods. He also had a reputation for being violent and torturing his victims; yet Black Bart is only known to have made one person walk the plank in all his years of pirating.
As to some specific other examples of pirates having people walk the plank, one of the more well-known cases was on board the Dutch ship Vhan Fredericka. In 1829, pirates boarded the ship near the Virgin Islands and murdered almost every crew member by tying cannonballs to their feet and having them walk overboard. However, all in all, there are only about five cases of “walking the plank” that can be definitively proven by historical records. It’s possible that other instances occurred that were not recorded or whose records have been lost to time, but most likely the practice wasn’t nearly as commonplace as fiction would lead you to believe.
The phrase itself, “walking the plank”, dates back to 1769, with the first documented reference being when a seaman named George Wood confessed to a chaplain that he had made several men “walk the plank.” However, while the confession certainly took place, whether or not Wood actually made people walk the plank is still open to debate, owing to the lack of direct evidence.
Credit : Today I Found Out
Picture Credit : Google
