Well, it turns out they all quit, because being a real man kind of sucked. All of those badass jobs they made movies about were all pretty much worse than the job you have now. Such as...

Whatever happened to the real men? The gunslingers and swordsmen who charged into adventure on horseback?

5 Pirate: Boredom, Disease and Uncontrollable Shitting

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Recently, Disney and Johnny Depp have reassured us that pirates were the awesomest people ever. They lived on the seas, they had monkeys and wenches and giant squid that did their bidding.

Real piracy has been around since about the 13th century BC, and it's likely that every single pirate in all of that span was less effeminate than Orlando Bloom. The Vikings were the most badass of the bunch, with a reputation for taking what they wanted and burning the rest. So if you had nice stuff, you didn't want to hide it in anything flammable because then no one would get to enjoy it.

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When the New World was discovered, pirates branched out and started stealing loot, or booty if you will, from exotic new places like the Caribbean. There they were apparently forced to deal with skeleton warriors and family-friendly fights to the death.

Why it Sucked:

Despite what you may think after seeing Kiera Knightley's extremely well-groomed piratess, the real world of pirates tended to involve a lot more wallowing in filth and near-starvation.

They didn't exactly have refrigerators on the boats, so basically they were restricted to eating the kind of shit that can sit in a barrel for months without rotting into slime. Hard tack was a staple of a pirate diet, dry biscuits made of flour, water and salt. They were often eaten in the dark, tapping them on the table a few times to make the weevils crawl out. When even that was unavailable, they'd occasionally resort to eating leather or slaves, if they had some handy.



That's a weevil. That's what a weevil is. It was in their food.

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Day to day routine consisted of ship upkeep, the same tedious physical labor over and over, all day, every day. Also, uncontrollable shitting.

That part is thanks to scurvy, which is what happens to somebody who doesn't get enough Vitamin C in their diet. Your teeth fall out, blood runs freely from your gums and nose, and shit runs freely from your ass. If your pirate friends don't rush you to get medical care (and they won't), you'll basically diarrhea yourself to death and they roll your putrid corpse overboard.