ladybusiness | (Reply)

From:

So. I mean. It's not totally unlikely they'd get tied to the mast and beaten to death.

Because I'm now onto Rediker's Villains of All Nations, and this point came up -- yep, this generally didn't happen even to bad captains; you had floggings and sometimes executions for captains deemed to have abused their crew, but not torture-killings (unless you had an atypically-sadistic pirate captain, like the historical Ned Low).

However, torture did get used if a captain had refused to surrender his ship to the pirates and had then been overcome. So it's the carrot and stick: strong motivation to surrender immediately because you might actually be treated okay, knowledge that if you resisted and lost it might be horrific.

Torture also got used sometimes if a captain was deemed to be concealing information about hidden treasure/goods of value (which Flint believes to be the case here).

So yeah, both of these apply in ep 1.