Fun fact: there was apparently no such thing as “walking the plank”. And when you think about it, it would be pretty stupid to have the ship’s carpenter rig up a platform when you could just have the victim jump off the side and accomplish the same thing. There was a punishment known as “walking the yard” where the recipient was forced to climb a mast and then walk out on one of the yardarms (the cross-pieces that held the sails) into the sea. It wasn’t automatically fatal, although the chance of that depended on which yardarm they made you walk - the topmost ones were pretty damn high up.
I know once you reach a certain height hitting water is like kitting concrete. But even from the tallest of masts I would think it’s the drowning that kills you, rather than the impact. So again I’d still think why bother making them climb when you could just push them overboard from the deck.
