“Our food isn’t very exciting, actually it’s very dull. We normally have some kind of salt meat or fish and ships biscuits. Occasionally we have butter, cheese or dried peas.”
“Pork is one of my favourite meats, especially ham or bacon, but often we get just salt pork. The cook wastes very little of a pig – we eat nearly all of it. I don’t like the funny bits and pieces that don’t look like meat! Sometimes the meat is pickled in vinegar or beer which makes a change – we call it souse.”
“We put ships biscuits in our bowls and put the meat or souse on top. The gravy then makes the biscuit a bit softer. You can hardly eat the biscuit when it’s hard and dry. If you want to make ships biscuits the cook has written the recipe for you.”
“I use a spoon and my knife to eat. This knife is one of my best and most useful things. I use it to eat, to cut rope and oakum, throw at rats for target practice, clean the dirt from under my fingernails and, I suppose, in a fight with pirates if I have to!”
“You’ll be surprised to know that I drink beer, and I’m only 10 years old. The water isn’t safe to drink; it goes slimy and rancid very quickly in the barrels, so we all drink beer. We don’t drink milk either – it goes sour in less than three days, the milk we have has been turned into butter and cheese. I drink out of a wooden beaker, lined with pitch to keep it waterproof. Some of the crew drink out of leather tankards or bottles; these are lined with pitch too. The captain and the Master drink out of goblets and the table is set with plates, spoons and allsorts of things; they even have a special dish for the salt.”
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