Passage between the Virgin Islands, and murdered most of the crew by making them walk the plank with cannonballs tied to their feet. 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. Captain Charles Johnson, 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 Charles Johnson's description, contains an illustration titled "A Piratical Scene – 'Walking the Death Plank'". In Charles Gayarré's 1872 novel Fernando de Lemos: Truth and Fiction, the pirate Dominique Youx confessed to capturing the schooner Patriot, killing its crew and making its passenger Theodosia Burr Alston (June 21, 1783 – approximately January 2 or 3, 1813) walk the plank. "She stepped on it and descended into the sea with graceful composure, as if she had been alighting from a carriage," Gayarré wrote in Youx's voice. "She sank, and rising again, she, with an indescribable smile of angelic sweetness, waved her hand to me as if she meant to say: 'Farewell, and thanks again'; and then sank forever." Because Gayarré mixed fact with fiction, it unknown whether Youx's confession was real or not. 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.) The concept also appears in J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, where Captain Hook's pirates helped define the archetype. See also Burial at sea Golden Age of Piracy Illegal disposal of bodies in the water Keelhauling Marooning Mutiny West Indies Squadron References Further reading Don Carlos Seitz, Under The Black Flag, Dail Press, 1925 (republished by Dover Publications in 2002, ) Samuel Pyeatt Menefee, "Pirates: 2. Walking the Plank" [Answer], The Mariner's Mirror, vol. 80 (May,1994), p. 204 Pirate customs and traditions Naval mutinies Criminal homicide Maritime folklore