Walking the plank

Definition

The legendary pirate execution method of forcing a victim to walk blindfolded along a plank extended over the side of the ship until they fell into the sea. The image is one of the most iconic in modern pirate literature; the documentary evidence for the practice in the Golden Age is almost non-existent. The earliest documented use of the phrase appears in 1769, when mutineer George Wood confessed at Newgate Prison that he and his fellow mutineers had sent their officers to walk the plank; the phrase received its first formal printed definition in 1788, in the second edition of Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue — both records falling well after the close of the Golden Age. The convention seems to have entered the visual vocabulary of pirates through nineteenth-century illustrated retellings of Charles Johnson’s 1724 chronicle and to have stuck.

Documented Golden Age pirate executions of prisoners were ordinarily more direct: shooting, the cutlass, or hanging from a yardarm. The plank, attractive as it is to the imagination, was almost certainly an embellishment.