- Imagine being at sea for weeks on end.
The supply of food and water is running out.
There's no hitting up an Arby's or a Long John Silver's
drive-through and pulling into a major port to restock
isn't an option because pirate ships are not welcome.
How did pirates survive?
Well, let's bite into this and this.
Max Miller from Tasting History is going to
demonstrate a Buccaneer inspired recipe.
- Chewy.
- I'm Joel Cook, and this is Rogue History.
[orchestral music]
I tend to get a little hangry after not having
an afternoon snack.
So I can't imagine how hangry pirates got on a trans oceanic
journey with very few stops along the way.
The first few weeks at sea were great
while their vessel was stocked with perishables
cheese, vegetables, and meat, real hearty feast
compared to what would come next.
After several weeks those perishables would've run out
or gone rotten and the crew would be forced to turn in
their supply of dried foods, beans, salted meat,
hardtack biscuits.
Pirates also kept a limited supply of livestock aboard.
- The one thing that pirates wanted more than anything else
was fresh food, as you could imagine.
And so even pirate ships would commonly have livestock
on board.
You would have poultry that would've been put in coops
on the quarter deck.
You could typically have pigs or goats
and have free rein wandering on the decks.
Sometimes you'd have sheep.
One account, a sailor recalled yesterday our captain brought
free Spanish hogs.
The roughness of the weather made them so seasick
that no man could forebear laughing to see them when they're
reeling and spewing about the decks.
- They would also hunt for fresh meat
such as wild pigs when they went ashore.
We know from accounts written by 18th century privateers
that these crews relied on the hunting and trading skills
of indigenous and African descended people in order to eat.
They often took captives to secure provisions for them
since they knew how to communicate in local languages,
fish, hunt, forage and prepare edible items.
In fact, the name Buccaneer came from indigenous people
in the Caribbean.
Buccan or boucan is the native South American
and Caribbean name for a wooden framework or hurdle
on which meat was slow-roasted or smoked over a fire.
- And this was a method of technique that they learned from
the Taino and other sources, so the indigenous groups
on these islands for sure, and it's quite a tragic story
for me too, or a terrible story.
It's so typical of like this colonial process
that's happening.
And this is the exact period when the native peoples
on these islands were actually killed by disease
and enslavement at the same time they're giving,
they're passing on their techniques of surviving
and sustaining themselves to these pirates.
- It's possible, or even likely that these crews
wouldn't have been able to survive without this knowledge.
But did native people give this information freely?
- I got to speak to one indigenous person who had traveled
a lot and had actually written down memories of his people.
And he actually said, "Well, yes,
we cooperated with pirates.
We cooperated with anybody who seemed beneficial
to our goals."
So, it's much more complex, usually different groups that
would act in different ways and have different
lines of conflict.
- Much more so than buried treasure,
the pirate focus was so often on food.
In "Villains of All Nations" Marcus Rediker talked about how
sailors would try to trade for fresh provisions
whenever possible.
If given the opportunity they would trade things like
bells and knives for sheep and potatoes.
Other local provisions that they traded for or took
included freshwater, fish, foul and turtles.
- So the favorite food of pirates were always turtles.
The meat was soft, which is really useful
at a time period where people's teeth were terrible.
They were easy to catch, of course 'cause they were slow
and they were plentiful on islands in the Caribbean
or in the Galapagos.
They're also really easy to transport across long distances.
So if you were gonna cross the Pacific it was common to go
to the Galapagos, grab a bunch of tortoises
and you can flip them on their backs
which meant they wouldn't wander around the decks the way
other sort of livestock animals would.
And one problem with eating turtles is it also
makes you defecate black and urinate green.
And pirates noted this on number of occasion.
- As you can imagine,
they often didn't have fresh fruit
which means they often didn't get their fill of vitamin C,
which means scurvy.
You've probably seen the most notorious symptom of scurvy
in TV and movies.
- Hello, my teeth keep falling out.
- [Joel] Scurvy led to muscle weakness,
swollen and bleeding gums, loss of teeth
and bleeding under the skin,
not to mention tiredness and depression.
So to avoid the dreaded scurvy, they would seek out these
citrus fruits whenever they could go ashore.
- You find the oranges?
- Ah, no bad luck on that front, I'm afraid.
- [Joel] With a little storytelling magic
Seed and his crew eventually find oranges.
- Ripe oranges.
- But what happened when the fresh food ran out or went bad
while at sea?
Unfortunately, sickness and death.
One 18th century crew ran into a crisis
after traveling through warm climates,
"Their penguins began to corrupt",
as one account put it.
"And their bread in them a most loathsome and ugly worm
of an inch long."
The discovery of the worms came too late
for some of the crew who had already eaten the penguin.
- Keep in mind, the crews were often in worse shape
than the ships.
Poor diet, harsh discipline, exposure to heat.
Then the rationings became even more extreme
now they're living on a bigger portion of dried biscuits,
dried beans, salted beef.
And of course the tensions would increase as the,
as they got logged into their voyage.
- Those entrees certainly weren't for the weak.
Maybe the drinks were a little better.
- There's a phrase called rats and vats.
And there were literally rats in the drinking water.
They would have slime in their water, but beer, wine
and especially rum that lasted a lot longer than water.
And so of course, rum was their savior.
- And a bottle of rum.
- So pirates really did love rum as much as pop culture
makes it seem.
But what happened when they really couldn't get their hands
on anything to eat or drink?
Well desperate times called for desperate measures.
In dire straits, pirates were ready to eat anything,
including leather.
After being stranded crew members serving under Henry Morgan
were forced to eat leather satchels by soaking them in water
and then cooking them over a fire.
Max Miller, from Tasting History is going to demonstrate
a similar method to make leather edible.
- So first I cut up a few pieces of the leather
and then soaked them in water for about a half an hour.
Then I took them out and pounded them for a good 10 minutes
with a mortar and pestle.
And then I repeated this five or six times.
So after about 30 minutes of boiling I took the leather out
and hoped it was edible.
And here we are.
Some leather, I have to say it looks pretty horrible.
It's kind of translucent, obviously very,
very soft and wiggly like a worm.
Or, you know what, it kind of reminds me actually
of the jellyfish tentacles from a couple months ago.
Okay, okay, I'm gonna do this.
How big of a piece and I'm curious if I can get it off
with my teeth.
If you're my dentist, don't watch this.
Actually really quite soft but....
Chewy.
Okay, so the flavor is none.
There is like no flavor whatsoever.
You could smell it kind of like, it smelled like leather.
The texture, like I said, softer than I thought it would be
but it kind of, it's spongy, but firm.
And so now it's all in my teeth.
It's gonna take me a long time to get it out.
And I just had a piece this big,
I don't think I could eat much more.
- As Alexandre Exquemelin put it,
"He who objects to eat this stuff never knew hunger
as the Buccaneers knew it."
And oftentimes lack of food would lead to mutiny on board
sailing vessels and lead some crews to actually rebel
against their captain.
And there was an old dark joke
that if the captain was to sentence them
to hanging for mutiny, the weight of their starving bodies
wouldn't be enough to kill them.
So on the surface, the answer is pirates ate and drank
whatever they could in order to survive.
But by looking a bit below the surface,
under the sea if you will,
it's likely that pirate activity affected people's sense
of identity through food for both the crews
and the local populations that they relied on.
I hope this has given you a lot to chew on.
'Til next time.
Special thanks to Max Miller for cooking and eating leather
in the name of research.
Don't forget to check out the full episode
of Tasting History where he dives even deeper
into the history of this technique.
♪ Ye mariners all as ye pass by ♪
♪ Come in and drink if you are dry ♪
♪ Come spend my lads, your money brisk ♪
♪ And pop your nose in a jug of this ♪