A shipwrecked captain who spent time among pirates in the early 1700s described his captors as a "rude drunken crew" capable of "keeping at it sometimes a week together." The reputation was earned, but it obscures a plainer fact: most of what a pirate ate on a normal day was determined less by taste than by what would survive weeks at sea without spoiling.
Salt Beef and Ship’s Biscuit
The core of the shipboard diet, on pirate vessels as on navy and merchant ships alike, was salted or dried beef and pork, dried or salted fish, and ship’s biscuit — hardtack, a flour-and-water dough baked hard enough to last for months. A study of 18th-century British sailors’ skeletal remains found the standard ration running to bread, beef, an occasional dab of butter or cheese, and a gallon of beer a day. Dried peas, reconstituted in water, and oatmeal porridge (called burgoo) rounded out the diet when it was available. None of it was appetizing by the time it was eaten; salted beef could turn so tough that sailors carved the leftover scraps into buttons and belt buckles rather than chew them.
Buying, Taking, and Fishing
Pirates did not grow or raise their own food, so provisions came from wherever they could be gotten. Documented accounts of how sailing crews of the era obtained food show purchase and trade as the single most common method, with outright seizure from captured vessels a close second — and pirates account for the clear majority of those seizure cases. Fishing supplied crews far more often than hunting did, simply because most of a voyage was spent at sea rather than ashore; turtles, caught in the Caribbean and sold or eaten fresh, were prized both for meat and for how long they could be kept alive on deck as a walking larder. Live chickens, goats, and pigs were sometimes carried for the same reason.
Weevils and Worse
Ship’s biscuit did not stay clean. After a few weeks at sea it was reliably infested with weevils, and sailors developed the habit of tapping a biscuit on the table before eating it, or eating in the dark, rather than watch what came out. Fresh water fared even worse: stored in wooden casks, it turned slimy and foul within days, which is the practical reason beer, ale, and rum were the preferred shipboard drinks. Alcohol simply kept longer than water did, whatever role it also played in crew morale.
Rum, Not Yet “Grog”
Pirates were, by every account, heavy drinkers, and captains sometimes treated it as a management tool rather than a problem: Blackbeard is said to have argued that a well-supplied crew was less likely to mutiny. It cut both ways — when Calico Jack Rackham’s sloop was boarded off Jamaica in 1720, his crew was reportedly too drunk to fight or flee. The now-familiar term “grog,” for rum cut with water, is often loosely applied to this era, but the Royal Navy did not formalize a watered rum ration under that name until 1740, roughly a decade after the Golden Age of Piracy had wound down. Diluting the day’s rum to make it last, or as a punishment for misconduct, was standard naval discipline by the mid-1700s, illustrated here in an English naval scene from the following century; pirate crews of the earlier period drank rum by their own rules, with considerably less ceremony.
When the Provisions Ran Out
Stores did fail, and the results could be grim. Henry Morgan’s men, stranded and starving during the 1670 march on Panama, reportedly resorted to shredding and frying their own leather satchels for something to chew. It was an extreme case, but it points to the real texture of pirate life at sea: long stretches of monotonous, half-spoiled rations, broken by the occasional stolen delicacy when a well-stocked prize ship was taken.
Sources consulted: National Geographic, “Eat Like a Pirate”; The Pirate Surgeon’s Journal (piratesurgeon.com) on obtaining food at sea.
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