Why It Sucked to Be a Pirate

hey little jimmy yeah what's up do you like pirates of the caribbean yeah that's all right so do you think it'd be fun to be a pirate yeah well guess what you couldn't be more wrong oh [ __ ] yeah i know at some point every kid has dreamed about being a swashbuckling corn shuckle and wife cuckle and cocksuckle and pirate but trust me when i say it was really not all it's cracked up to be first we'll talk about the food so one staple of the pirate diet was salted meat usually wild oxen or pork and i love jerky as much as the next guy but this wasn't like a bag of jack links in fact it was probably closer in texture to your shoes than any meat you've ever eaten in those days you couldn't just snap into a slim jim that's a modern luxury that we take for granted back then the slogan was gnaw on a slim jim for minutes on end grinding it between your molars while the gallons of salt turn your mouth into a desert until the mangled hunk of flesh in your mouth is just soft enough to be shoved down your greasy [ __ ] pirate throat without tearing a hole another essential food item was known as hard tack this was essentially just flour and water baked into a cracker-like brick beyond the fact that it was totally flavorless heart attack was also extremely dense to the point where pirates would often have to slam their fists down on it in order to break it into pieces small enough to fit in their mouth as long as it was kept dry heart attack almost never spoiled although it often became infested with weevils um excuse me sir i'm a vegan so like can i have a new piece one without any of mother nature's beautiful creatures in it thanks wait a minute is this gluten free this better be hemp rope now but the weevils didn't make you sick or changed the taste all that much so and this is true the crew would just eat it in the dark so that way they couldn't tell if they were eating a normal chunk or a weevily one then there's the crowding so pirate ships typically packed in as many crew members as possible because more pirates means more manpower when you go to board an enemy ship of course the downside to that is that you're basically like a bunch of hairy unwashed sardines let me illustrate what a typical night below deck was like so you're sprawled out on the damp musty wood floor everything's pitch black you can't see a thing the smell of the filth and the mold forces you to only breathe through your mouth suddenly your left hand feels wet probably just seawater leaking through the hull you sniff your hand nope no that's piss you feel something furry rub up against your elbow it was either the body of a diseased rat or the beard of your diseased crewmate either way that's probably where the piss came from some guy is moaning loudly in the next room hopefully he's just jerking off because if he's dying that's one more body to deal with in the morning rinse and repeat for eight hours and then it's daytime the poor diet and cramp conditions led to disease being a huge problem aboard pirate chips the most well-known of these diseases is scurvy where you don't get enough vitamin c when scurvy first begins you just kind of feel tired all the time no big deal then you get weird spots on your skin and your gums start bleeding this progresses until all your teeth fall out and all of your body's mucous membranes start gushing blood and pus causing you to die so that's a lot of fun there were tons of other diseases too i won't go through them all but here's a few honorable mentions also some people say that alcoholism is a disease i might just be disturbed but that's one sickness i could definitely get down with if it is a disease then yeah just about every pirate had this one if anything though i'd call that one of the few upsides of pirate life finally there's the combat so you've gone through all these disgusting horrible living conditions but at least you can enjoy the thrill of battle right swinging from rope to rope sword in your mouth long intense saber duels that kind of thing but that's typically not how it went down for one thing when pirates boarded a ship nine times out of ten they'd just surrender immediately because what are a bunch of well-groomed merchants gonna do against a horde of disgusting barbarians if the defending ship did decide to fight back though the resulting brawl wouldn't be anything like the movies it'd be way worse like immediate r rating because pirates rely a lot on brutality both because they don't have much real training and because it scares the [ __ ] out of people if you were a deckhand on an invaded ship and you were stupid enough to fight back you wouldn't be dancing around doing flips and [ __ ] none of that instead they'd probably shoot you in the stomach with a flintlock pistol kick you to the ground chop off your shoulder blade with a hand axe gouge out your eyes with a marlin spike wind your intestines around the prow and then toss your twitching body overboard and that's only a slight exaggeration honestly if jack sparrow got attacked by actual pirates he wouldn't last a second it's kind of like a used car salesman going to prison like i'll be fine if anybody tries intimidating me i can get out of it with my quick weight and charming personality boy you look real pretty from behind oh wow i'm boned so yeah in short if you're thinking about pulling a captain phillips anytime soon i'd advise against it that's all for today till next time i'm sam mannella and thank you for watching you

Channel: Sam O'Nella Academy

Views: 18,749,631

Keywords: piracy, buccaneers, 17th century, 18th century, caribbean, pirates of the caribbean, hardtack, brutality

Id: ORmUUhh6O-8

Length: 5min 2sec (302 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 25 2016