Did pirates really make people walk the plank, bury treasure and wear eyepatches?
Almost every pirate cliché comes from novels written long after the pirates were gone, and the plank also turns up in old accounts of slavers and mutineers.
Mostly no, or at least not in the way the films show. Walking the plank has been a pirate in popular culture since the 19th century, but few instances are documented, all well after the Golden Age of Piracy ended by 1730. Buried treasure was rare too, and there is no evidence of eyepatch-wearing pirates before several popular novels of the 19th century.
Start with the plank. The phrase shows up in a 1788 book on the slave trade, recording a 1779 incident in which slave-ship captains said that if they ran out of water and food they would make their slaves jump overboard. Francis Grose's 1788 dictionary described it as a way destroyed officers by blindfolding them and making them walk off a plank. One of the few documented pirate cases is from July 1822, when the captain of the British sloop Blessing was forced to walk the plank by a Spanish pirate crew. A related story, a ladder rather than a plank, was told by Charles Johnson about pirates of classical Rome.
The cliché
- Pirates force everyone to walk the plank
- Treasure buried under an X
- Every pirate has an eyepatch
The record
- Few documented cases, all late
- Burying treasure was rare
- No evidence before the 19th-century novels
Then the treasure. Pirates burying treasure was rare, and the most famous story is that of William Kidd, who is believed to have buried at least some of his wealth on Gardiners Island, hoping it would be a to avoid punishment. It did not work, and he was hanged. Historian David Cordingly says that the idea of treasure maps leading to buried treasure is an entirely .
The eyepatch is the most interesting case. Pirates rarely wore eyepatches aboard ships, but one theory says they wore them to keep an eye adjusted to the dark before boarding a ship. MythBusters found this plausible in 2007, but it has never been documented in any historical naval manual.
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Recap
Few cases of walking the plank are documented, buried treasure was rare, and eyepatch-wearing pirates are not documented before the 19th-century novels.
💡 A trick to remember it · Plank, map, patch: three props, mostly from novels.
Surprising fact · Kidd's treasure was a bargaining chip, and he was hanged anyway.
Connects to
Sources (3)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (15 claims) cites at least one of these.