Walking the Plank
The origins of walking the plank are lost in the mists of time, but it is fair to say that for the last century or so at least it has been as popular pirate motif as buried treasure. By 1930 when Ransome wrote Swallows and Amazons it was firmly enough established as the favourite pirate method of execution that the Blacketts and younger Walkers thought it was the logical conclusion to their capture of Uncle Jim's houseboat. In almost every film from Cutthroat Island to Carry On Jack somebody has been made to edge their way along a narrow plank before falling into the deep below them.
In actual fact, while pirates seem to have used almost every other torture under the sun, walking the plank does not feature in any account from the early eighteenth century at all. Pirates sometimes employed a torture known as "sweating", when they were made to run round and round the mast of the pirate ships until they could run no more and collapsed. More cruel perhaps were the pirate crew who in 1718 tied one of their prisoners to their main-mast and threw glass bottles at him, before putting him out of his agony by using him for target practice. Victims of the pirates who refused to reveal the whereabouts of their possessions or treasure if they had any could expect to be tortured until they told the pirates of its whereabouts. Placing lighted tapers between a victim's fingers was a torture used by a number of pirates including the sixteenth century Stephen Heynes and the eighteenth century Edward Low, Heynes in fact was so cruel that on one occasion his crew of battle-hardened cutthroats begged him to stop torturing his victims as they themselves could stand to watch no more. Women were not exempt from pirate cruelty either, for when Avery captured the Gang I Sawai his men repeatedly raped all the women on board, even the elderly. In the Caribbean, Spanish ladies might be stripped naked (even more humiliating then than it would be now) and tortured, or threatened with torture until they gave up their jewellery, one lady was forced to stand in a barrel of gunpowder with lighted match held near her face until she revealed the hiding place of her treasure. |