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When
Pirates Visit Port Towns...
Pirates often spent long months
on leaky, smelly ships, with short provisions and no company except for
rats and insects. So when they came to port, they could be expected
to get fairly rowdy. However, they also had real work to do. They
were responsible not only for finding supplies for their next journey;
they also had to clean the ship. Thus the pirates were very busy
when they came to port.
When a pirate ship came in,
the first thing its sailors usually did was to go out in search of taverns.
After being crammed on a ship for months at a time with limited provisions,
many freebooters engaged in heavy drinking and gambling, which many captains
discouraged while aboard the ship. Waterfront taverns, not being
respectable places to begin with, also hosted comely wenches who were willing
to trade their bodies for a share of the loot. Pirates came to port
with enough money to buy and sometimes spent the lot of it in a single
night. They also enjoyed pipes of tobacco while on land since fear
of fire kept them from smoking on the ship. Most of the pirate’s
time on land consisted of activities that they could not do at sea.
Members of the crew were also
responsible for provisioning the ship they had to find water, wine and
beer along with dried or salted meat and fruit to prevent scurvy.
Pirates who plied the Caribbean often got supplies from the buccaneers,
who were originally hunters. Ships carried more alcohol than water
not only because the pirates preferred it, but also because it did not
spoil as easily.
A pirate’s least favorite part
about coming to land was careening, or beaching the ship and cleaning the
hull. It was first scraped clean of barnacles and seaweed with an
adz. Holes bored into the hull by shipworms were filled in and old
oakum was taken from the seams, which were resealed with rope and pitch.
Regular careening kept ships in sailable condition. 
A pirate’s life was not all
adventure and glamour. There was hard work to be done in exchange
for drinking, dicing and wenching. There was also danger on land
because they constantly had to be wary of those who would see the sea plied
only by honest folk.
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