Pirate Theme Party

Still contemplating a pirate party idea? Well consider again what life was like for the characters that lived during that time. Believe it or not, ships at sea could become absolutely infested with rats! This would seem unlikely because rats normally congregate in urban centers. The ship offered rats the easy pickings of grain, and allowed them the space to breed and multiply. Today we consider rats to be nuisance, or at worse, unsanitary, but during the Golden Age of Piracy, they were the very embodiment of death! Yikes! Just a few hundred years earlier, rats were the cause of the worst plague ever to have swept the earth. They carried fleas that were infected with the bubonic plague and they created a pandemic of absolutely enormous proportions. Over one third to one half of the entire population of Eurasia succumbed to disease. There were so many dead that they piled up in the street because the cemeteries had become filled. Not a pretty picture, but that was the reality of the day. Because of this, there was a real fear of rats and the diseases they could carry. So for your next pirate party idea, try including some fake mice to make the scene, and don’t forget their place in pirate history!