Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl goofs

(at around 49 mins) The word "Scallywag", used to describe a fellow pirate, was actually not coined until the 19th century — appearing after the American Civil War as a term for white Southerners who collaborated with Reconstruction governments.

(at around 43 minutes) When Will Turner goes to help break Jack Sparrow out of his cell near the start of the film, the cell bars are welded together using modern welding methods that were not developed until the 19th century.

The films portray the Governor's Mansion as being in Port Royal, but that town was almost completely destroyed by an earthquake in 1692, whereupon the capital of Jamaica was relocated to Spanish Town. The signature of George I on Norrington's orders places the films at least twenty-two years later.

In a number of close-ups of Barbossa, he appears to be wearing yellow contact lenses.

Jack Sparrow is portrayed wearing a headscarf that features a contemporary Adidas logo.

HMS Dauntless and HMS Interceptor are depicted flying the British Blue Ensign. Before 1864, the colour of a Royal Navy ship's ensign depended on the station to which it was assigned. The Caribbean squadron's ensign was red, so the Dauntless's and the Interceptor's should have been red (blue was used for the South Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans).

(at about 58 minutes) When Elizabeth realises that the pirates are cursed, a pirate can be seen sitting on the capstan playing a concertina. The concertina had not been invented until 1829.

We are repeatedly informed that the accursed crew of the Black Pearl have been on their quest for 10 years. Yet the ship's initial appearance in the opening sequence must occur at least 12 years earlier: the Royal Navy vessel shown at the start bears the coat of arms of William III (1689-1702), while a fleeting glimpse of a document signed 'George R' indicates that the bulk of the film is set during the reign of George I (1714-27).

Both the Interceptor and the Dauntless are painted in the Nelson chequer — black and yellow bands with black port lids. This scheme dates to Admiral Nelson's command of HMS Victory in 1803. While Nelson's ships were repainted in this style, it did not become widespread until after the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805; both before and after that captains were free — and often did — to paint their ships as they saw fit.

At roughly 1 hour 35 minutes into the film, the port of Nassau is still called New Providence.

(at roughly the 42-minute mark) At the start of the scene when Will Turner is about to free Jack Sparrow from his prison cell, as Jack lies on the floor talking with Will, a modern shoe print is visible beneath Jack's right arm.

(at about the eight-minute mark) As Elizabeth and the Governor leave the house for the promotion ceremony, distinct car tyre tracks are visible.

(at about 16 minutes) When Jack tears Elizabeth's skirt off beneath the surface, a loud ripping sound—like dry fabric being torn—can be heard.

(at around the 49-minute mark) When Will draws his sword aboard the Interceptor and tells Jack that his father wasn't a pirate, the blade emits a metallic scraping sound, despite being tucked into his belt with no scabbard at all.

(at approximately 23 minutes) [DVD two-disc Edition] During the blacksmith scene, when Will says he has threatened Elizabeth, Jack replies "Only a little." on one audio track; on a different audio track he says "Just a little bit."

(at around 11 minutes) In the British military the phrase used to tell people to keep away from an area is "Out of Bounds", not the American "Off Limits". These are British troops, so they wouldn’t have used "Off Limits".

(at about 8 minutes) When he first appears in the film carrying the sword to Governor Swann, Will Turner is nearly clean-shaven (only a hint of a small moustache). In his subsequent scene (at about 22 minutes), set in the blacksmith's shop — which in the film takes place on the same day, perhaps an hour later — Will sports a small goatee and an almost full moustache.

(at around 19 mins) Not long after Jack pulls Elizabeth Swann from the water, he is placed in handcuffs. Yet when he soars through the air and lands on the cargo boom, his arms are seen flailing as if unshackled. Later, as he slides down the zip wire, the 'chains' are clearly far too long.

(at around 18 minutes) When Elizabeth attempts to rescue Captain Jack Sparrow, just before he fastens the chain of the handcuffs around her neck, the medallion alternates between being inside and outside her dress between shots.

At roughly the 45-minute mark, when Jack and Will board the Dauntless after walking beneath the water with the rowing boat held above their heads, their clothes are bone-dry by the time they clamber onto the deck and declare they are taking over the ship.

(around 35 minutes in) During the Black Pearl’s assault on Port Royal, Will Turner is shown fighting the pirates with his waistcoat and shirt unbuttoned; when a pirate knocks him unconscious at the end of the scene and he falls to the ground, his shirt and waistcoat are almost entirely buttoned up again.

(at around 1 hr 28 mins) After Jack escapes from the Black Pearl's dungeon and takes hold of the rope (immediately after the line "Thanks very much"), his ponytail lies over his bandanna on the left, rather than the right.

During the clash between the pirates and Norrington's men inside the cave, one of the two guards from the quay who had been killed only moments earlier has reappeared alive and is now fighting the pirates on the deck.

(at around 1h 50 mins) As Jack Sparrow is speaking with Barbossa just before their final duel, he lifts a large golden idol and flings it away. In the very next shot, the idol has returned to its original spot.

(at around the five-minute mark) Early in the film, when Elizabeth awakens from her dream and her father begins knocking at her door, two maidservants enter. One is wearing a red dress and the other a printed, beige-coloured dress. Their positions swap between shots: in the first shot the maid in the beige dress is holding the box while the one in red opens the curtains; in the next shot the red-dressed maid is holding the box and the beige-clad maid is opening the curtains.

(around the 1 hour 30 minute mark) When Elizabeth and Jack are forced to walk the plank, Jack plunges in to retrieve his scabbard; as he swims down to the seabed his feet are bare, yet when he pushes off the bottom towards the surface he is wearing boots.

(at approximately 9 mins) On Jack Sparrow's initial appearance the sky is a pale blue peppered with white clouds, suggesting it is midday with the sun high, yet in close-ups of Jack the clouds take on a deep yellowish hue, as though it were sunrise or sunset.

(at around 4 mins) When Elizabeth first meets Will and examines his medallion, it hangs from a cord around his neck, but when she turns to look at Norrington the cord has vanished.

(at around the 12-minute mark) While Jack is speaking to the two guards on the quay, a man can be seen in the background rowing a small boat towards the vessel by the cliffs. As the camera alternates between the guards and Jack, the boat's progress is visible. However, at one point the boat abruptly disappears, even though it would not have had time to have been rowed beyond the camera's view.

(at approximately 1 hr 18 mins) When Elizabeth retrieves the medallion from its secret hiding-place, her nails are short. When Captain Jack rescues her from being shot at during the battle between the two ships (at approximately 1 hr 29 mins), her nails are long and manicured.

(at approximately 1 hour 30 minutes) While Will Turner negotiates for the lives of Elizabeth Swann and the Interceptor's crew, Elizabeth's hair repeatedly falls into and out of her face.

(at around three minutes) In the opening scene Governor Swann approaches the young Elizabeth on a crowded deck and asks her to accompany Will. His body is seen being lifted and carried by sailors. In a later shot Elizabeth is shown standing on an empty deck, looking at young Will's body lying on the planks.

(at about 1 hour 2 minutes) When Jack reunites with his crew in Tortuga, the hand Anamaria uses to point at him switches from her right to her left, then back to her right again while they discuss replacing her ship.

(at approximately 2 h 5 min) In the closing scene, with Will and Jack surrounded by soldiers, the subsequent shot aimed at Jack shows no troops behind him — they are visible only to his sides.

Approximately four minutes into the film, the young Elizabeth Swann takes a pendant from the neck of the young Will Turner. At first glance the pendant appears to hang on a thin cord or a delicate chain. Several minutes later, when Elizabeth examines it, a noticeably heavier chain lies in the palm of her hand.

In the opening frames, as the young Elizabeth sings at the bow of the ship, the posts on either side of her are wound with rope. Shortly afterwards, the post to her right no longer has any rope coiled around it or hanging from it.

Elizabeth walks the plank. Some time after Jack dives from the ship, they both reach the beach together and are dry straight away. They had no matches — so how did they light the fire?

(at about 17 minutes) When Jack cuts off Elizabeth's corset, spots her medallion and asks her about it (i.e. during the close-ups of her chest), Elizabeth is wearing a bra beneath her undergarment. When she stands up and before her father can cover her, she is left wearing only the thin white fabric.

(at approximately 2 hours 20 minutes) In the after-credits scene, Jack the monkey is seen treading water at the Isle de Muerta. He climbs out of the water onto the chest, and when the camera cuts from the sea to Jack perched on the chest, he is entirely dry.

As Elizabeth flees Pintel and Ragetti, the medallion is not visible on her neck. When she is hiding in the cupboard she holds it in her hands while the chain hangs round her neck.

(at around 2 hr 10 min) Just as Jack says, "On deck, you scabrous dogs," at the extreme left-hand edge of the frame over Jack's shoulder a member of the grip crew, wearing a tan cowboy hat, a white short-sleeved T-shirt and sunglasses, is visible simply standing and looking out to sea.

(at around 1h 40 mins) While the Commodore and Jack are discussing how to assault the cave and the Pearl, the film pulls back to show the two small boats. In the boat carrying Jack and the Commodore, if you glance to the right in the water you can spot a green diver's fin breaking the surface.

As Jack Sparrow prepares to walk the plank and speaks with Barbosa, a number of shots show metal scaffolding visible behind him.

The Royal Navy did not station any 100-gun ships of the line in the Caribbean. Such vessels were simply too large and had too great a draught to be practical in those waters. The British bases in the region could not support ships of that size. Moreover, at the time depicted in the film the Royal Navy possessed only six such ships worldwide.

At approximately 1 hour and 8 minutes into the film, the chest of cursed Aztec gold, which Cortez was allegedly said to have taken from Mexico, displays four representations of the principal image from the Sun Gate of the Tiahuanaco civilisation, situated just outside La Paz, Bolivia.

When the Governor opens Elizabeth's window, we are shown the headland from the same viewpoint that Jack has while standing atop the mast of his sinking boat.

When Jack first sails into Port Royal, there's a shot from behind him looking towards the boat's front, with land clearly visible across most of the field of view. After Jack jumps down, a side shot shows him beginning to walk towards the back of the boat. The next shot again looks towards the boat's front from the stern — which is indisputable, since Jack is completing the same strides from the previous shot — yet no land is visible at all.

(at around 45 minutes) As Jack and Will wade underwater towards the vessel they intend to steal, they hold an inverted rowing boat above their heads to trap air, allowing them to breathe. This would be impossible in real life, because the boat is made of wood (which floats), and owing to the buoyant force of the trapped air Jack and Will would need to weigh several tonnes between them to keep the boat submerged.

(at around 27 mins) Bed-warming pans wouldn't be required in a tropical climate.

(at about 21 minutes) Jack Sparrow places the chains from his handcuffs against the wooden teeth of a cogwheel in a mill. Wood is softer than metal and therefore could not have snapped the chain.

As Elizabeth and the medallion sank towards the seabed, it remained suspended, weightless in the sea water. The Aztec gold would weigh almost as heavily as it does on dry land.

When Sparrow first makes his escape from Captain Norigton, both his hands are shackled together. He then climbs to the top of a mast and winds his chain around a rope that has been tied down so he can slide down. However, with both hands restrained and the rope secured at one end, it would be impossible for Jack to wind the chain around the rope.

In the Royal Navy at the time in which the film is set, the rank of commodore was a temporary appointment conferred on a captain commanding a squadron, normally the most senior captain; after the deployment he would revert to the rank of captain. It's only a permanent rank in the US Navy.

(at around 39 minutes) While Elizabeth is aboard the Black Pearl she holds the medallion over the water to demonstrate that the pirates truly desired it. Although the crew can walk beneath the waves without suffering harm, they still flinched when she pretended to drop it, acting on an instinct to stop it being lost. Breathing underwater is not a natural human condition, so they probably retain largely human patterns of thought. Moreover, a tiny piece of gold drifting on the sea at night would be difficult to locate, even for the undead.

Throughout the whole film, we are led to believe that anyone who possesses one of the cursed pieces of gold becomes one of the undead. So the question is how Elizabeth wasn't part of the undead when she possessed one of the pieces of gold all those years. The explanation is that only those who take the gold directly from the chest are affected. Otherwise Will would have been undead as a boy too, since his father passed it to him, not to mention countless undead merchants, barmen, prostitutes, etc. who received the coins as payment. Jack only became undead towards the end because he took one directly from the chest.

(at about 1 hour 30 minutes) Captain Barbossa, after telling Elizabeth to take off her dress before leaving her on the island, lifts the garment to his face and says, "Still warm." The pirates are not meant to feel anything, so he may have been being facetious.

(at around 29 mins) When the Black Pearl attacks Port Royal, large explosions erupt at every point where her cannonballs strike. Cannons in the age of sail did not employ explosive shells.

When Elizabeth is taken on board The Black Pearl, the deck hums with activity and the water surrounding the ship lies calm; there is no sign that the fort is firing directly at them.

Early in the film, when the young Will Turner is discovered drifting in the sea, it becomes clear his vessel had been wrecked and was ablaze on the surface of the water. There is no way the crew aboard Elizabeth's ship could have failed to notice such a blaze on an otherwise calm sea.

When Barbossa explains the curse to Elizabeth, he recounts how he and his crew gradually came to realise they were cursed — losing their sense of taste and smell and even the ability to feel. That suggests the "skeleton in the moonlight" aspect of the curse was something that emerged over time. Yet when Jack takes a coin from the chest and thus curses himself, he becomes a skeleton in the moonlight almost instantly, despite having taken the coin only a few minutes earlier.

(at around the 16-minute mark) When Elizabeth's held captive by Jack during their first meeting, the gold medallion is plainly visible around her neck. Jack notices it and even remarks on it — he ought to have taken it during his escape.

(at around 1h 50 mins) When Pintel and Ragetti are rowing (dressed as women) towards the Dauntless, Ragetti knocks Pintel's umbrella away. When Ragetti threw his away, he gradually turned into a skeleton as the moonlight shone on him (meaning that while the umbrella cast a shadow over half his face, only the exposed half appeared skeletal). However, Pintel remains entirely human until the umbrella is completely out of his hands, and then he becomes a skeleton in a single frame.

(at around the 20-minute mark) After Jack has just escaped and is circling the pole, the soldiers are ordered to open fire on him. Many of them continue to fire without reloading.

(at approximately 49 minutes) After Will and Jack take control of the Interceptor, the vessel is seen from above, sailing on a beam reach (a point of sail where the boat is about 90 degrees to the wind). When Jack knocks Will off the ship with the boom, he gybes the boat, causing the sail to shift position suddenly. To achieve that from the previous heading he would have had to turn the ship almost completely around, which would have taken well over a minute. Jack performs it in under three seconds. The sail is also filled on the wrong side as it sweeps Will off the deck.

When Will is struck from behind and rendered unconscious during the attack on Port Royal, the blue pad used to cushion his fall is plainly visible over his shoulder as he topples backwards.

(5 minutes 17 seconds) When Elizabeth takes Will's medallion out of the drawer, it leaves a clean patch on an otherwise dusty base of the drawer. However, the compartment was a completely covered false bottom, so it could not have become dusty as though it had been directly exposed to the air.

(at about 48 mins) The men aboard the longboat dive overboard and the launch is smashed by the Dauntless. However, the launch begins to break up well before the Dauntless's bow even touches it.

(At about 1 hour 49–50 minutes) As the cursed crew emerge from the sea and clamber up the ropes, the moonlight does not always fall on them because they pass into the ship's shadow, yet they still appear in their skeletal form. Earlier shots only revealed skeletal features on the parts of the body directly lit by the moon.

During the battle between the Interceptor and the Black Pearl, grappling hooks can be seen flying through the air; one of them clearly catches on a rope in the centre of the frame and remains suspended in mid-air.

(around the 25-minute mark) During the fight between Jack and Will at the blacksmith's forge, just after the conversation with the eunuch, Will vaults/flips/rolls over the turnstile being pulled by the donkey. It is apparent this was not Orlando Bloom, but a stunt double.

(at around 1 hour 55 minutes) During the clash aboard the Dauntless, when Norrington boards and confronts a skeletal opponent, a man can be seen in the background waving his sword. If he had been fighting someone, their shadow would have been cast on the deck and visible to the audience.

(at around 25 minutes) When Jack and Will are sword-fighting and balancing on the wheeled wagon, the wide shots show stunt doubles rather than the actors.