hey little jimmy

yeah what's up do you like pirates of

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

shuckling and wife buckling and c0cksåckle

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 fåcking 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

favorless it 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

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

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