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It was not much fun to travel on one of the old sailing ships. Life was hard for both passengers and crew. 17th century sailing ships were small and roiled heavily in rough seas, so most of the passengers were seasick.
There were no toilets, and the spaces below deck where passengers had to stay during gales were often not more than 5 foot high. Water was scarce and the little water they got was brown and smelt terrible.
Food was a problem, too--there was only salted meat, ship' s biscuits and cheese, but the cheese was so hard that sailors often made buttons out of it for their jackets and trousers. There were no vegetables or fruit, so the people on board often fell ill.
The sailors, however, were a bit better off than the passengers. They each had a bottle of beer a day, and they needed. The work they had to do was hard and dangerous. Courage was nee-ded, for the heavy sails had to be set and taken down in all kinds of weather, and quite often sail-ors were swept overboard in a gale. Almost the worst thing about the voyages was the time they took up to 70 days for the journey across the Atlantic. Not surprisingly,, everybody was overjoyed when they at last approached land and stepped ashore. But some ships never arrived.