Walking the plank

Earliest documented record of the phrase

The phrase is recorded in English lexicographer Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, which was published in 1788 (first published in London in 1785). Grose writes;

Walking the plank. A mode of destroying devoted persons or officers in a mutiny on ship-board, by blind-folding them, and obliging them to walk on a plank laid over the ship's side; by this means, as the mutineers suppose, avoiding the penalty of murder.

Historical instances of plank walking

In 1769, mutineer George Wood confessed to his chaplain at London's Newgate Prison that he and his fellow mutineers had sent their officers to walk the plank. Author Douglas Botting, in describing the account, characterized it as an "alleged confession" and an "obscure account... which may or may not be true, and in any case had nothing to do with pirates".

A Mr. Claxton, surgeons-mate aboard the Garland in 1788, testified to a committee at the House of Commons about the use of the plank by slavers:

The food, notwithstanding the mortality, was so little, that if ten more days at sea, they should, as the captain and others said, have made the slaves walk the plank, that is, throw themselves overboard, or have eaten those slaves that died.

In July 1822, William Smith, captain of the British sloop Blessing, was forced to walk the plank by the Spanish pirate crew of the schooner Emanuel in the West Indies.

The Times of London reported on February 14, 1829 that the packet Redpole (Bullock, master) was captured by the pirate schooner President and sunk. The commander was shot and the crew were made to walk the plank.

In 1829, pirates intercepted the Dutch brig Vhan Fredericka in the Leeward Passage between the Virgin Islands, and murdered most of the crew by making them walk the plank with cannonballs tied to their feet.

It was said that forcing loyal seamen to walk the plank was supposed, by the perpetrators, to "avoid the penalty for murder", but this legal argument would hardly have worked. Not only would most legal authorities not have hesitated to prosecute any person who forced another to his death, but piracy and mutiny were also capital crimes. Given the occasions on which it was known to have been employed, it appears more likely to have been an elaborate and unusual form of sadistic entertainment rather than a regular method of murdering unwanted captives.

In literature

Despite the likely rarity of the practice in actual history, walking the plank entered popular myth and folklore via depictions in popular literature.

Daniel Defoe, in his 1724 book "A General History of the Pyrates", described a similar practice (using a ladder rather than a plank) in the Mediterranean of classical antiquity – Roman captives were offered the ladder and given their freedom, provided they were willing to swim for it.

The title page of Charles Ellms's sensationalist 1837 work The Pirates Own Book, apparently drawing on Defoe's description, contains an illustration titled "A Piratical Scene – 'Walking the Death Plank'".

Robert Louis Stevenson's 1884 classic Treasure Island contains at least three mentions of walking the plank, including at the beginning where Billy Bones tells bone-chilling stories of the practice to Jim Hawkins. (Treasure Island also popularized other now-common pirate motifs such as parrots, peglegs, and buried treasure.)

Modern usage

The term has been used in modern times to describe the resignation of a public figure which occurs amidst controversy, or was demanded by the public, corporate shareholders and suchlike.