Eat like a real pirate ?

From culturemap.com

Last Friday the Houston Museum of Natural Science’s Real Pirates: The Untold Story of the Whydah from Slave Ship to Pirate Ship opened. The exhibit tells the tale of the slave ship Whydah that was captured near the Bahamas by the dread pirate “Black Sam” Bellamy and his motley crew in 1717.

For two months the crew sailed the Whydah, plundering more than 50 ships, before setting sail for the captain’s Cape Cod home. Unfortunately, the ship met a violent storm, hit a sandbar and sank just miles off shore. Her plunder sunk to the bottom of the ocean as 102 pirate corpses floated on the waters, including Black Sam. Only two crew members survived.

Her wreckage was finally discovered by underwater explorer Barry Clifford in 1984 and it's firmly established as the only authentic pirate shipwreck to date by the ship’s inscribed bell, and now the treasures have become a traveling museum blockbuster.

You really need to go.

There’s a lot of cool educational stuff and artifacts and some creepy Disney-esque pirate scenes like the one where a pirate’s leg is getting sawed off. Arrr, matey, it’s a great Halloween outing.

Oh, wait, this is a food column, right?

OK, so I’m looking at the stuff recovered from the wreckage and there are these pewter plates and big knives and I’m reading the text that says the pirates ate buckets of meat with ship’s biscuits “which might or might not be infected with weevils or maggots.” Ewwwww.

So all those old swashbuckling films where the captain is swilling rum and feasting on giant turkey legs at a table laden with food are fiction ?

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