Anachronism Stew / Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

• The Pirates of the Caribbean movies have always been set in an indeterminate 18th century setting (this one being around the 1760s), but the film has Jack Sparrow facing the guillotine (mentioned as a new addition and shown to have been used at least twice already), which was invented in 1789 and first put into effect during The French Revolution. By this point, in the 1790s, the era of piracy was well and truly dead in any meaningful sense. Due to being called the guillotine by name and stated to be a new addition, it is unlikely to be based on the Halifax Gibbet of Halifax, West Yorkshire (disassembled in 1650) or the Scottish Maiden of Edinburgh (last used 1716), which were precursors to the guillotine (it is unknown if Dr. Guillotin was even familiar with either device).
• It's also far too late to have a woman^note Or man, as unlike today, "witch" was not a gendered term, and could be and was applied to men; there were a number of men charged with witchcraft in the Salem Witch Trials formally charged with witchcraft in an English court; while the belief remained much later, the last such case was in 1712 and was considered something of an embarrassment even then. It's also possible all the overt supernatural shenanigans could have caused a witch trial hysteria, however witchcraft had been decriminalised in 1735 and prosecutions moved into the vagrancy act (i.e. if you claimed you could do magic, you were a con artist) and even before then it was an offence of degrees that didn't always merit capital punishment. Hence it's really weird for a government official to push for a hanging (even with a bloodthirsty mob) for someone who didn't actually harm anyone.
• The term "bootleg turn" originated during the Prohibition era in the United States, about two centuries after the events of the film.
• When Carina enters the astronomy store early in the movie, the astronomer says that "No woman has ever handled my Herschel". The first problem is that William Herschel was born in 1738 and wouldn't construct telescopes until the 1770s, roughly 10-20 years after the film's timeframe. The second is that technically the telescope was handled by a woman; William Herschel had a sister, Caroline Herschel, who was known as an assistant and helped him in his researches.
• Historically, the island Saint-Martin was divided between the Dutch and French; however, the island in the film is largely ruled by the British.
• Jack Sparrow encounters Uncle Jack in Saint Martin prison singing the song "Maggie Mae." The earliest reference to the song was recorded in 1830, around three quarters of a century after the events of the film.
• When Jack wakes up in the middle of the night on the Dying Gull, he shouts "Spaghetti wolf!". The word "spaghetti" was first used in 1824 (as a diminutive of the word spago ^note Italian for "string/twine"), again roughly three quarters of a century after the movie's events.
• The coat of arms on the stern of the Silent Mary (itself bizarrely-named, given it's a Spanish ship with a English name) belongs to the Spanish Bourbon dynasty. However, the largest sail on the mainmast is decorated with the double-headed imperial eagle, the symbol of the Holy Roman Empire and the Spanish Habsburg dynasty which went extinct with the death of King Charles II in 1700. The timeline is admittedly fuzzy, given the Silent Mary has been hidden in the Devil's Triangle since Jack's teenage years, so it's possible that the battle around the triangle took place aroun 1700, but having both symbols would be very unusual.
• Hector Barbossa claims to steal the diary of Galileo Galilei from an Italian ship; however, in the 1760s, Italy was divided into many states and none of them went by the name "Italy" (which was only a geographic term referring to the whole peninsula).
• Jack briefly mentions how the French invented mayonnaise, a 19th-century invention, as he's being led to the guillotine. This was a Development Gag to a line Jack said in The Curse of the Black Pearl^note which resulted in the famous "I like mayonnaise" line which was ironically cut because it was anachronistic.
• One of the pirates at the Shotgun Wedding plays Felix Mendelssohn's Wedding March on a makeshift violin (and it sounds dreadful). It was composed in 1842.
• Carina says that she was named after the brightest star in the North. However, the brightest star of the North is Sirius and Carina itself is not a star, but, at that time, a part of the Argo constellation; later, it was separated as independent constellation.
• At the beginning of the film, Henry remarks that the pirate ship the Royal Navy is chasing was "probably stolen by the pirate Bonnet." This presumably references historical pirate Stede Bonnet, who died in 1718, about 40-50 years before the film takes place.

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