Did pirates really wear eye patches and make people walk the plank?

Partly. Some pirates lost eyes or limbs, as many sailors did, so eye patches and peg legs are not pure invention. They were not a standard pirate look, though. Walking the plank, by contrast, is generally described by historians and museums as a product of fiction, with no solid record of it being a regular pirate punishment. [1] [2]

Seafaring was dangerous, so pirates, like other sailors, suffered serious injuries. Authors David Cordingley and John Falconer, quoted by the National Maritime Museum, note that some pirate crews included men with wooden legs or a lost eye. Historian Rebecca Simon writes that patches were used to cover an empty eye socket after an injury. She adds that the popular idea of a patch keeping one eye adjusted to darkness has no historical evidence behind it, and that experiments on the idea, including a 2007 MythBusters test, were inconclusive. [1] [3]

Simon also says there are no eyewitness accounts of peg legs on pirate ships, though they may have existed given the risk of injury. National Geographic's Jamie Goodall says some pirates did have a wooden leg or hook hand, but it probably was not the norm, since amputation at sea often meant death from infection or blood loss. A pirate who survived could still be useful, for example as a cook. [3] [2]

The image owes much to Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Long John Silver has a crutch and a missing leg in the book, but the Maritime Museum points out he has no eye patch there. Later adaptations added it. Stevenson was likely influenced by disabled American Civil War veterans he met and by his friend William Henley, who had a leg amputated. [1] [3]

Victims were thrown overboard, marooned, lashed, or in some accounts keelhauled. Marooning meant leaving someone on an uninhabited island, and could be used to maintain discipline. Simon says a person who refused to join the crew but promised silence might be left with a bottle of water, a bottle of gunpowder, a pistol and one bullet. The most famous marooned man, Alexander Selkirk, was a privateer rather than a pirate, and inspired Robinson Crusoe. [1] [5] [2]

The plank's fame is credited to J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan and later pirate films. Many crews also had written codes, such as George Lowther's, which compensated a man who lost a limb in a fight. [1] [2]