Hardtack biscuit
Pressed banana meal and flour, twice-baked. Four-year shelf life in a dry hold, and markedly less weevil trouble than wheat tack.
£12 / 40 lb sack
Home/Provisions
Provisions & ServicesTools for modern buccaneers
Four provision lines and four fleet services, cured, coopered and crewed from the same yard at Port Royal. Everything below ships to any of our 43 delivery ports.
Provision line 01
Cask-Cured Bananas
The mainstay of the house, and the reason most fleets come to us. Salt-cured green, sealed in oak, and still fit to eat eighteen months into a voyage.
- Three grades. Fine for the captain’s table, Common for the mess, Crew for bulk victualling and long hauls.
- Certified ascorbic charge printed on every head, tested by the Port Royal assay house at cure and again at six months.
- Half-cask, full cask or pallet. A full cask victuals twelve hands for a nine-week crossing.
- Cooper’s mark and cure date stamped on the head, so any dispute is settled by looking at the barrel.
£38 / full cask · £21 half · £340 pallet
The cure, in short
Nobody has copied it in three hundred years, though the Tortuga yards keep trying.
- Cut at three-quarter fill, never from the ripening shed
- Brined 14 hours in Caribbean sea salt
- Six days over slow cedar smoke, turned twice daily
- Headed and pitched the same afternoon it comes off the rack
Tasting note
Banana skin and burnt sugar on the nose, a long oily finish, and rather more heat than the label admits. The Admiralty ration board rated it “acceptable for issue at sea, inadvisable in port.”
- 43% ABV, pot-stilled twice
- Rested nine months in ex-cure oak
- Cases of twelve, or 25-gallon ration barrels
Provision line 02
Banana Grog & Rum
Distilled from the overripe crop that would otherwise go over the side. It began as thrift and ended up as the thing half our customers order first.
- Ration barrels sized to Admiralty issue — a 25-gallon barrel covers a crew of forty for six weeks at the standard tot.
- Bonded storage at Port Royal and Nassau, so you pay excise on what you land, not what you buy.
- Own-label bottling for fleets that would rather their own arms were on the glass. Minimum forty cases.
£26 / 12-bottle case · £74 / ration barrel
Provision line 03
Banana-Fibre Rigging
Stem fibre, retted in fresh water and laid into three-strand line. It began as a way to use the waste and turned into our fastest-growing line four seasons running.
- Does not rot in the tropics. The fibre carries its own wax; hemp does not, which is why hemp goes soft by the second wet season.
- Holds a splice better than hemp at the same diameter, tested to 2.4 tons on ¾-inch line.
- A third cheaper than imported hemp, because it is made from something we were already throwing away.
- Sold by the fathom or the coil — ¼-inch to 2-inch, plain-laid or cable-laid to order.
£4 / fathom · £188 / 60-fathom coil
Against hemp, measured
| Fibre | Hemp | |
|---|---|---|
| Breaking load, ¾″ | 2.4 t | 2.5 t |
| Wet-season life | 4 yr | 2 yr |
| Cost / fathom | £4 | £6 |
| Splice strength | 94% | 88% |
Provision line 04
Banana Hardtack & Meal
Dried, milled and pressed. The part of the crop that is too small for the cask, turned into the two things that keep longest of all.
Green banana meal
Stone-milled, sifted twice. Thickens a burgoo, stretches the flour ration, and keeps five years sealed. The cook’s quiet favourite.
£9 / 40 lb sack
Leaf wrap & wadding
Dried leaf, pressed into sheets. Wraps salt meat, lines a cask, wads a cannon at a pinch. Sold by the bale, and no, we do not recommend the last use.
£6 / bale
Fleet services
The parts that are not cargo
Provisioning a single sloop is a transaction. Provisioning a fleet on a schedule is a relationship, and these are the people who keep it running.
Standing fleet provisioning
A named quartermaster, a fixed schedule and an agreed manifest per hull class. Your ships are victualled on arrival without anyone raising a requisition. Reconciled monthly.
Dockside delivery, 43 ports
Alongside at your berth, tide permitting, anywhere from Nassau to Cartagena. Same-tide delivery in eleven ports; next-tide everywhere else on the chart.
Manifest & excise filing
We file the customs and excise paperwork before you berth. Your purser signs one sheet. For a nineteen-ship fleet that is a working day a week handed back.
Cargo brokerage
Sailing out light? We broker outbound banana cargo on commission and settle at the far end. Many captains find it pays for the provisions twice over.
Questions from the dock
Frequently asked
Does eighteen months really mean eighteen months?
It means eighteen months in a dry hold below the waterline, cask
unopened, in the ordinary temperature range of the Caribbean and Atlantic runs. Once a cask
is broached the fruit keeps about five weeks. Every head is stamped with its cure date, so
there is never a question about which cask to open first.
What happens if a cask turns?
We replace it and we do not ask you to prove anything. Send us the
cooper’s mark off the head and a replacement goes out on the next sailing to your port,
carriage paid. In a normal season we replace under one cask in four hundred.
Do you deliver outside the 43 listed ports?
Regularly, by arrangement. Anything on the Caribbean and Gulf charts
we can usually reach within two tides of a scheduled run. Further afield — the Guinea coast,
the Brazils, the Carolinas — we quote per voyage. Ask the quartermasters.
Can you provision on credit?
Fleet accounts settle at 30 days as standard, 60 by negotiation once
we have traded a season together. New accounts pay half on order and half alongside. We
take sterling, doubloons, pieces of eight and, for the right customer, a share of cargo.
Are you licensed victuallers?
Royal Warrant since 1740 and Admiralty-approved for naval victualling
since 1755. Our assay certificates are lodged with the Port Royal customs house and copies
travel with every pallet.
Build your manifest
Give us the route, the tonnage and the crew and our quartermasters will cost the whole voyage — provisions, grog, rigging and paperwork — in two days.