George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
A family had refused to pay the ransom for a prisoner taken in a recent raid, so the captain shouted “Keel-haul the landlubber!”
Keel-hauling involves tying a rope to someone and dragging them under the boat, scraping them along razor-sharp barnacles that have grown on the hull.
George, who was in charge of the keel-hauling crew, ended up tangling the entire boat in ropes, and the prisoner escaped.
After the ropes were untangled, the captain hung George upside-down from the mast for a week.