What Would It Cost to Outfit My Own Pirate Ship?
22nd January 2014
Let’s start with the ship. I’m assuming you want a classic wooden vessel, and from your specifications I gather you want something huge, on the order of Blackbeard’s pride, the Queen Anne’s Revenge. While this isn’t something you can price on Amazon, we can make estimates based on other reconstruction efforts. A 27-meter replica of the Black Pearl, with room for 70 tourists, eight crew, and six functional bronze cannons, was listed for sale online at $2 million a while back but later reduced to $750,000. In 2009 the cost to build a replica of Blackbeard’s sloop Adventure, a much smaller ship than the Queen Anne’s Revenge, was estimated at $3.7 million. Since that was an 80-ton ship, I’ll take a flyer and project the cost to reconstruct the 200-to-300 ton Revenge at $11.6 million.
Next, the crew. Most pirate ships were fairly small, with maybe a dozen guns and crews of around 50, but some carried crews of more than 200, and the Queen Anne’s Revenge carried 300 to 400. You want 300, let’s figure payroll for 300. Pirate crews back in the day typically worked for a share of the plunder, but this is the 2010s, when even cutthroats expect a regular paycheck. In addition to general-purpose crew, you’re going to need a captain, first mate, quartermaster, boatswain, and so on. To estimate your likely outlay, I took current U.S. Navy pay rates and multiplied them by 1.4 to cover everything from Social Security and Medicare to 401(k) contributions (look, be glad I didn’t include stock options), arriving at an annual cost of $11.3 million — spreadsheet on request.