Board game:Captain Kidd Junior Walking the Plank A Game

Robert Louis Stevenson's coming-of-age novel "Treasure Island" was first published as a book in 1883. The book found much fame and popularity both in Europe and the United States and inspired many other literary events, plays, and eventually television versions. In 1926 the Parker Brothers firm of Salem, Massachusetts, produced a pirate-themed game for young children, featuring a theme of walking the plank. In reality, pirates probably never made captives walk the plank, but the term was romantically used first by "Robinson Crusoe" author Danial Defoe, in his 1724 "General History of the Pyrates." Stevenson is one of many authors to make use of the phrase in later literary swashbucklers, and the phrase found its way into a game title as well.