Gilbert and Sullivan would be having a field day right now with pirates in the news so much. So it got me thinking. What did pirates eat? Not the pirates of today which have access to full kitchens and refrigeration units, but the pirates of yore. The ones with the peg legs and the parrots.
The answer isn't pretty -- but it's not as bad as you might think.
As on all ships at the time, general hygiene aboard a pirate ship was
not exactly a priority. As one historian put it, "there was a pervading
smell of unwashed humanity." Unlike Columbus' men who had to sail with
enough provisions for months on end, pirates usually stayed closer to
port so that they could go on shore as often as possible. Besides
having better food, shore also had beds (a ship only had sleeping
quarters for the captain) and women.
When they did have to
sail for an extended period is when things got really ugly. According
to the National Maritime Museum in Britain, sailors would often eat in
the dark to avoid seeing the maggots and other pests that were in the
food. Weevils were a particular problem in hard tack and sailors would
pound the tack against a surface to get most of them out.
Besides
tack, other popular choices were pickled or salted meats, dried fruits
and honey (the perfect food from nature in that it does not go bad).
In
the drink department things were slightly better and yes, pirates did
drink a lot of rum -- though rum's popularity comes less from its favor among pirates than from the fact
that the British Navy gave out daily rations of it to its
soldiers until the 1970s.
It's
unlikely Captain Morgan (who always carried a letter of marque
from the British crown and therefore was technically a pirate) drank
anything resembling Capitan Morgan. The rum of the olden days was the
offshoot of leftover sugar cane or molasseses and more likely to be
spiced with lime than with today's rum spices of cinnamon and
coconut. Modern Drunkard Magazine has a long, long article on pirates and rum that manages to sap the fun out of the subject.
Not
surprisingly, the rum of the pirates was slightly more potent than most
rums today. Let's take Captain Morgan again, the original version of
which is 70 proof or 35 percent alcohol. Historically, rum wasn't considered drinkable until it was, at a bare minimum, 100 proof, or around 50 percent alcohol.
Blackbeard,
it is said, could drink six pints of rum by himself in one night. At 50 percent
alcohol and a 16 ounce pint, that's basically the equivalent of two
thirty-packs of domestic beer. Yo ho ho and a case of alcohol poisoning
is more like it. -- By Owen Morris
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