Did pirates really make people walk the plank?
One of the world’s foremost experts on pirates, David Cordingly, suggests in his book Under the Black Flag that real pirates didn’t typically stand on such ceremony and that accounts of pirates making people walk the plank are rare and more likely the product of popular fictionalized accounts like Peter Pan. Most victims were dispatched by far more bloody and expeditious means: “Seamen who resisted a pirate attack were hacked to death and thrown over the side.” However, according to Wikipedia, plank walking was a latecomer to pirate culture. It emphasizes at least two such accounts, from the 19th century on.
