Gibbet

A pirate in a gibbet.

"Climb up here and lower me cage. I'll make it worth yer while..."

―Cursed Captain's skull to a pirate

The gibbet was any instrument of public execution (including guillotine, beheading, hanging gallows, or related scaffold). Gibbeting was the use of a gallows-type structure from which the dead or dying bodies of criminals were hanged on public display to deter other existing or potential criminals. Occasionally, the gibbet was also used as a method of execution, with the criminal being left to die of exposure, thirst and/or starvation. The practice of placing a criminal on display within a gibbet is also called "hanging in chains".

History

In the Age of Piracy, the penalty for piracy was death by hanging or gibbeting. During Jack Sparrow's boyhood pirating days, he'd seen the gibbets too many times, with their dangling bodies. At the Turkish prison, a prisoner in a gibbet was graphically pecked to death by crows. Gibbets could also be found hanging around the infamous White Island prison.

By the quest for the Fountain of Youth in 1750, Blackbeard burned his victims in a giant, flaming, gibbet-like lantern on the stern of the Queen Anne's Revenge, using the bones of his victims in the design of the Revenge. While serving as a privateer under King George II and commanding the British Navy, Captain Hector Barbossa threatened Joshamee Gibbs, saying that he would be hanging from a gibbet with a mouth full of flies, which forced Gibbs to join the Navy and its quest aboard the HMS Providence.

Behind the scenes

"I'm on a tight schedule, Mr. Gibbs. The Providence sails at first light and if you do not care to be hanging from a gibbet with a mouth full of flies by then, speak now."

―Hector Barbossa to Joshamee Gibbs

Gibbets were first detailed in the souvenir book for Walt Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean, which included concept artwork by Marc Davis. Although unidentified by name, gibbets appeared in the Turkish Prison scene near the beginning of the 2006 film Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. The word "gibbet" would first be used in the junior novelization for On Stranger Tides and A. C. Crispin's novel The Price of Freedom, both published in 2011.

In Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio's screenplay for On Stranger Tides, at least one draft has Hector Barbossa threaten Joshamee Gibbs to be hanging from a gibbet, though the line was removed in later drafts, and so was not featured in the final cut of the film. Despite this, the line was retained in the film's junior novelization. But as noted in a Wordplay post by Terry Rossio, the execution yard set had been built without gibbets, so Barbossa logically wouldn't say the word gibbet. And so despite loving the word "gibbet" as spoken by Geoffrey Rush, the dialogue was revised to "Hanging here dead with a mouthful of flies" which Rossio wrote has a certain iambic pentameter lyrical quality, in which Rush delivered the threat "with a bit of a sing-song" as he did threatening Elizabeth Swann in the first movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.

Appearances

• The Price of Freedom (Mentioned only)
• The Black Heart of the Pearl
• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (First appearance)
  • Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (video game)
• Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (video game)
• Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (junior novelization) (First identified as gibbet)
• Sea of Thieves: A Pirate's Life (Non-canonical appearance)

Sources

• Walt Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean: The Story of the Robust Adventure in Disneyland and Walt Disney World (First pictured)
• The Art of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

External links

• Gibbeting on Wikipedia