Did Pirates Really Have So Many Missing Body Parts?

Being a pirate looks like a pretty sweet gig. You get to spend your days hanging out on a badass ship, singing and drinking with your buddies. Then, when it’s time for work, you get to plunder treasure, fire guns and swing swords around. All the while, a hilarious parrot sits on your shoulder. 

There does, however, seem to be one notable drawback: You’re likely going to lose multiple body parts. 

In pretty much every depiction of pirates ever, a good number of the rum-chugging seamen are missing an eye, a hand or some portion of a leg. 

But is that accurate? Did they really lose body parts with such frequency?

“Records don’t necessarily show a lot of sailors missing a lot of body parts, but it wouldn’t be too uncommon to be losing limbs,” explains Rebecca Simon, author of The Pirates’ Code: Laws and Life Aboard Ship and Pirate Queens: The Lives of Anne Bonny & Mary Read. “First, it’s an extremely violent situation with swords and guns. There also could be accidents on the ship that come with the general hazards of the job. You’re dealing with gunpowder, which is extremely explosive and, for example, falling masts while you’re repairing a ship. Much of this had to do with sanitary conditions as well. Ships weren’t very clean, and there was only a 50/50 chance any given medicine would work. If someone lost a limb, it was going to be generally because of infection. It wouldn’t be in battle, it’d be from infection later.”

There is one record that kinda serves as proof — the “Pirate’s Code,” which was a series of articles pirates might sign when joining the ranks. It’s possible that the Pirate’s Code was mythical, but Simon says there’s a good chance at least a few captains had such documentation for their recruits. And one of the sections of the Pirate’s Code was the promise of compensation for lost body parts. “If you lost an eye, you’d get maybe 50 pounds,” Simon tells me. “If you lost a finger, you’d get maybe 60 pounds. If you lost a hand, you’d get this. If you lost an arm, you’d get that. So it’s clear that people got disfigured enough to require some sort of financial compensation.”

Although it’s impossible to determine any exact numbers on all of this, Simon says, “I’m going to throw out a speculative educated guess and say a quarter of them were missing some sort of body part. I think that’s a realistic amount.” 

She adds that this ratio would be more than the general population, but less than soldiers, who would have had far more of these kinds of injuries.

The specific missing body parts, however, mostly originate from pop culture. The popularity of Peter Pan’s Captain Hook is why hook hands are so popular, and you can thank Treasure Island’s Long John Silver for the mainstreaming of peg legs (even though he had a crutch, not a peg leg). Eye patches have been proliferated by pop culture too, but pirates did wear them if they lost an eye.

Honestly, one-in-four pirates with some kind of missing body part is pretty much what we see depicted in movies and TV shows, which is surprising that they’d be so accurate. I can only assume that they get the rest of pirate life right, too — and if not, I don’t want to know about it.