If you ever wanted to get a taste of what it would really have been like to have been going on the account during the Golden Age of Piracy, you recently had a new option to consider: Sailing aboard the Carnival Triumph.
Oh, don’t look at me like that! Hear me out:
Consider what conditions were like aboard any vessel during the Age of Sail, which not only covers the early 18th Century, but goes a few years beyond, right through the Civil War. There are some good online accounts of life amid ships during that time; if you look even harder, you can find in passing how they went to the bathroom during this time…
And you could probably also read here and there about the challenges the Flota de Plata faced as it made the next to last leg of the journey, hazarding the waters of Yucatan and trying to stay out of the doldrums in the Gulf of Mexico, lest you be stuck adrift with very little to eat and the stench of your existence offending you.
Or, you could do it the way 4,200 other souls did and be aboard the Carnival Triumph when her engine room caught fire and left her a hulk adrift for five days, that only this evening got towed to Mobile. It wasn’t pretty, as the photos tweeted by passengers attest to, but if you wanted something authentic, the way real pirates braved the Spanish Main, well, this was the place to be…
At least the Coast Guard dropped in sandwiches; imagine the First Class passengers dealing with hard tack…
James Ryan 