Walking the plank

For the amusement of the perpetrators and the psychological torture of the victims, captives were bound so they could not swim or tread water and forced to walk off a wooden plank or beam extended over the side of a ship.

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.

[8] 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.

[11][12] 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.

[13] 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.