Wooden Legs, Hooks and Eye Patches
From the early pages of Treasure Island we are warned to beware the man with one leg, and in Peter Pan the children are terrorised by a pirate with only one hand. Since that time the pirates of popular culture have often been depicted as one legged, one eyed, or missing a hand (the film Cutthroat Island for example features characters missing each of those appendages), and the clunk of a wooden leg on a deck is a sound indelibly associated with pirates.
Such injuries were not limited to pirates in reality, buccaneers were no more likely to lose a leg in battle than any other seaman of the time, but due to the works of Robert Louis Stevenson and J.M. Barrie we tend to forget that such primitive prosthetics as a wooden leg or hook might be found on any law abiding citizen as well. Wooden legs are perhaps the most interesting of these prosthetics, for their origin in myth is more obscure than their true history. Contrary to popular belief Long John Silver did not have a wooden leg, he hobbled along on one leg and a crutch, the idea of a false leg perhaps came from that other great fictional seafarer Captain Ahab of Melville's Moby Dick. However, the use of wooden legs by historical pirates is well documented. The sixteenth century French buccaneer Francois le Clerc was nicknamed "Jambe de Bois" because of his wooden leg, and the life of Captain England in Captain Johnson's General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most Notorious Pirates contains the following passage. |