In the spring of 1718, Blackbeard ran his own flotilla aground at Topsail Inlet, off the North Carolina coast, then rowed away and left roughly 25 of his own men stranded on a sandbar nearby. He had just accepted a royal pardon and wanted fewer people to argue about it, or to share what was left of the loot. Two days later his old associate Stede Bonnet found the men and rescued them. It is one of the best-documented cases of marooning in the historical record, and it shows the practice for what it really was: a tool pirate captains used on their own crews, not just a punishment for captured enemies.
Written into the pirate code
Marooning was not an improvised cruelty. Captains Bartholomew Roberts and John Phillips both wrote it directly into their ships’ articles, the sets of rules every crew member signed before a voyage, as the specified penalty for cheating fellow crew members, concealing plunder, or bringing a woman aboard in disguise. Pirates had a grim euphemism for it: the condemned man was said to have been “made governor of an island.”
How it actually worked
The standard method was to leave a man on a deserted island or an exposed sandbar with almost nothing: a small ration of food, a container of water, and a loaded pistol, understood by everyone involved to be for suicide if thirst and starvation became unbearable before the tide or the sun finished the job. Some victims were stripped of their clothes first. A rougher variant put the offender adrift in a small boat with no oars, or only one, leaving the outcome to current and weather rather than dry land. Either way, marooning was built to be a slow death sentence, not a survivable exile.
When crews marooned their own captains
The punishment could run in the other direction. In 1720, pirate captain Edward England was marooned by his own crew off Mauritius, alongside several loyal officers, after they judged him too lenient toward the crews of ships they captured. England and his companions spent about four months on the island before building a small boat and sailing on to Madagascar. It is a reminder that pirate crews were not simply obedient to their captains; marooning was one of the few checks a crew had on a leader they no longer trusted, alongside deposing him outright.
The case that became a novel
Not every marooning was a punishment. In 1704, sailor Alexander Selkirk asked to be put ashore on the Juan Fernández Islands, off the coast of Chile, after a dispute with his privateering captain over the seaworthiness of their ship. He reportedly regretted the decision almost immediately, but the captain refused to take him back aboard. Selkirk survived alone for more than four years until he was rescued in 1709 by a ship under Woodes Rogers, another privateer captain later governor of the Bahamas. His ordeal became one of the acknowledged inspirations for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.
A punishment that outlasted piracy
Marooning did not disappear with the Golden Age of Piracy. In 1807, a Royal Navy seaman named Robert Jeffery was marooned on Sombrero Island in the Caribbean by his own captain, over a matter as small as a suspected theft of rum; he was found alive after eight days by a passing American ship. The case caused enough scandal in Britain that his captain was court-martialed and cashiered. It is a useful corrective to the pirate-only image of marooning: the practice belonged to the wider culture of the sailing ship as much as to pirate crews specifically, which is exactly why real pirate captains could rely on it as a punishment their men understood and feared.
Sources consulted: Wikipedia’s entries on marooning and Blackbeard; World History Encyclopedia’s “Pirate Punishments in the Golden Age of Piracy”; History.co.uk’s “Dead men tell no tales: 9 painful pirate punishments from history.”
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