The pirates couldn’t get enough of it all. Leading lives dangerous and often measured in months, they spent money with abandon. Said one contemporary historian of the pirates of Port Royal: “Wine and women drained their wealth to such a degree that, in a little time, some of them became reduced to beggary. They have been known to spend 2 or 3,000 pieces of eight in one night and one gave a strumpet 500 to see her naked. They used to buy a pipe [105 gallons] of wine, place it in the street, and oblige everyone that passed to drink.”
