Imagine capturing a Spanish ship, you climb aboard expecting treasure, gold perhaps silver or spices.

Something valuable enough to justify all the chasing, cannon fire and general unpleasantness that came with being a pirate.

Instead, according to one of chocolate history’s most entertaining stories, the English raiders found sacks filled with small brown objects.

They apparently took one look at them and decided they were sheep droppings.

So they threw them away. The whole cargo? Cacao beans.

If the story is true, it must rank as one of the more spectacular failures to recognise a business opportunity.

Because those unimpressive-looking brown beans were part of a product that would eventually become one of the world’s great food obsessions Chocolate.

And that is why, when Talk Like a Pirate Day comes around on 19 September, I think there is a better story to tell than parrots, wooden legs and people shouting “Arrrr”.

There is a genuine connection between pirates, Caribbean trade and cacao.

And hidden inside it is a rather good lesson about business. The pirates who apparently threw away the treasure

The story usually dates to 1579.

An English vessel is said to have captured a Spanish ship carrying cacao, the English sailors apparently had no idea what the strange brown beans were and supposedly mistook them for animal droppings, depending on which version you read, they either burned the cargo or threw it overboard. It is a brilliant story It's also one I would treat cautiously.

The anecdote has been repeated many times in histories of chocolate, but the precise details are difficult to verify from a contemporary primary account.

So I wouldn’t swear on a ship’s Bible that every detail happened exactly as told but the story survives for a reason.

It demonstrates just how unfamiliar cacao still was to many Europeans during the sixteenth century.

Spain had encountered cacao through its conquest and colonisation of Mesoamerica, but knowledge of cacao and chocolate spread unevenly through Europe.

To someone who had never seen cacao beans before, they wouldn’t have looked remotely like treasure.

No gold, no sparkle or obvious value, just a sack of brown beans.

And there’s the first lesson.

Value is often invisible if you don’t understand what you’re looking at.

Cacao really was valuable cargo

By the seventeenth century, however, European interest in chocolate was growing substantially.

Chocolate drinking became fashionable among wealthy consumers, and cacao became an increasingly important commodity moving through Atlantic trading networks.

That meant ships and wherever valuable cargo travelled aboard ships, there were people perfectly willing to take it sometimes legally., sometimes semi-legally with a cannon.

The Caribbean during the seventeenth century became a complicated world of merchants, colonial governments, privateers, buccaneers, smugglers and outright pirates.

And the distinctions weren’t always particularly tidy, aman regarded by England as a useful privateer might simultaneously be regarded by Spain as a pirate.

The British Caribbean port of Port Royal in Jamaica, for example, became closely associated with privateers and buccaneers during the seventeenth century. Historical accounts describe English freebooters using Jamaica as a base and a market for captured goods.

Tortuga, off Hispaniola, likewise became famous as a buccaneer base and trading point for plunder.

So the Hollywood image of pirate ships roaming Caribbean waters isn’t entirely fantasy.

Although the reality was probably considerably smellier.

Pirates weren’t only interested in gold that's another mistake popular culture gives us.

Pirates didn’t spend their entire lives searching for treasure chests stuffed with Spanish doubloons.

Ships carried commodities.

Wine, sugar, tobacco, indigo, textiles, food, animal hides, and, increasingly, cacao.

A captured cargo didn’t need to glitter, it just needed to be something that could be sold.

That makes cacao considerably more interesting, because once Europeans developed an appetite for chocolate, those small brown beans acquired a monetary value that somebody else was prepared to steal.

The supposed 1579 pirates may not have recognised that, but later generations certainly did.

Chocolate and smuggling

Piracy wasn’t the only illicit activity surrounding cacao, smuggling was rife too, colonial governments attempted to regulate trade, control ports and collect taxes.

Merchants frequently attempted to avoid them.

It is perhaps comforting to know that several centuries of bureaucracy have apparently failed to remove this particular human instinct.

The Caribbean’s geography made illicit trade especially difficult to suppress.

Hundreds of islands, long coastlines and rival European colonial powers created opportunities for merchants and smugglers to move goods outside official channels.

Research into Caribbean contraband networks shows islands including Curaçao and Tortuga functioning within wider systems of unofficial commerce.

Cacao therefore belonged not just to the history of chocolate, it belonged to the history of trade.

Legal trade, colonial trade, contraband trade, and occasionally stolen trade.

The Caribbean deserves more than the pirate stor, it would be very easy to turn all of this into:

Pirates + rum + chocolate = entertaining blog.

But the Caribbean’s cacao history is much richer than that.

Cacao moved through a region shaped by European colonial rivalry, Indigenous cultures, African forced labour, plantation economies and international commerce.

So while pirates make a brilliant doorway into the story, they shouldn’t become the whole story.

Chocolate history contains uncomfortable things.

Slavery, exploitation, colonialism, violence, huge inequalities in who produced commodities and who profited from them.

If we tell chocolate stories properly, we shouldn’t edit those parts out simply because they don’t fit nicely onto an Instagram graphic.

Food history is human history and human history is rarely tidy.

So what does any of this have to do with selling chocolate today? Quite a lot, actually.

Because Talk Like a Pirate Day is celebrated every year on 19 September. 

Most businesses that acknowledge it will probably do something predictable.

A pirate hat. An “Arrrr”. Possibly a chocolate coin.

Nothing wrong with that, but there is a much better opportunity.

Tell the story.

The calendar is full of dates that businesses can use as marketing hooks, the mistake is assuming that simply mentioning the day constitutes marketing, it doesn’t.

The interesting bit is finding a genuine connection between the event and what you do, in this case, the connection actually exists.

Pirates, the Caribbean, maritime trade.

Contraband, Cacao, Chocolate, now we have something to work with, the Pirate Chocolate Tasting

Imagine a tasting called: Pirates, Smugglers & Chocolate Immediately you’ve created curiosity.

Not: “Chocolate tasting, £35.”

Instead: Follow cacao through the Caribbean world of pirates, smugglers and merchants while tasting chocolate along the way.

Now you have an experience.

You could explore chocolate origins while introducing Caribbean flavour references:

cacao nibs, coffee, ginger, lime, coconut, allspice, tropical fruit, and rum-inspired flavours where appropriate.

Each chocolate becomes another stop on the journey.

The tasting sheet could even be designed like an old chart or treasure map.

But the important thing isn’t dressing everybody like Captain Jack Sparrow.

It’s giving people something to discover.

A Chocolate Treasure Chest

There is also an obvious retail idea.

The Chocolate Treasure Chest

A seasonal collection released around 19 September.

 

Not cheap plastic coins.

Not novelty chocolate with no connection to the story.

A properly curated collection based around cacao and Caribbean-inspired flavours.

 

Perhaps accompanied by a small card telling the story of the pirates who supposedly threw away cacao because they didn’t recognise its value.

Suddenly the customer has something worth talking about.

 

And thats important 

Because people rarely photograph the sentence:

“I bought some chocolates.”

They might photograph:

“Apparently English pirates once captured cacao and thought it was sheep poo.”

Now you’ve got them.

 

The Corporate Chocolate Safari®

For me, perhaps the bigger opportunity is an experience.

 

Pirates, Smugglers & Chocolate: A Caribbean Chocolate Safari®

This could work brilliantly online.

Part history, part chocolate tasting.

Part quiz, part storytelling.

 

You start with the 1579 anecdote.

Then move through Caribbean piracy, colonial trade, cacao, smuggling.

 

Chocolate.

Participants taste along the route.

That is far more interesting than another corporate chocolate tasting where somebody explains that dark chocolate contains more cocoa solids.

 

We can do better than that.

Chocolate has travelled around the world for centuries.

There are stories everywhere.

Use them.

What the pirates got wrong

And this, for me, is the real business lesson.

Those pirates supposedly looked at cacao and saw rubbish.

Other people looked at exactly the same thing and saw opportunity.

The bean hadn’t changed, just their understanding had.

Business is full of things like that.

Ingredients, waste products, stories, traditions, skills, old recipes, seasonal events.

Things sitting directly in front of us that we’ve stopped noticing.

My own work around cacao increasingly looks beyond the chocolate bar itself.

The cacao pod contains considerably more than beans.

Pulp can become juice, syrup and other products.

Shells have uses.

Cacao vinegar can be extraordinary.

Farmers and makers at origin are developing products that challenge the assumption that cacao exists simply to become another European chocolate bar.

The interesting question is often not: “What is this worth?” It’s: “Have we understood its value yet?”

Never throw away the sheep poo

So this Talk Like a Pirate Day, I’ll happily join in.

Possibly even an occasional:

Arrrr.

But I’ll also be thinking about those sailors staring into a sack of cacao beans.

Because whether or not every detail of the 1579 story happened exactly as later writers tell it, the lesson remains rather wonderful.

One person’s sack of apparent sheep droppings can become another person’s treasure.

Chocolate has always been about transformation.

A strange fruit growing from the trunk of a tropical tree becomes beans.

Those beans are fermented, dried, roasted, cracked, ground, refined, tempered.

And finally transformed into something people will cross a city, country or even continent to taste.

That isn’t magic, It’s knowledge, perhaps the real treasure was never simply the cacao.

It was knowing what to do with it, and more than four centuries later, that remains a pretty useful business lesson.

Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day. Just don’t throw the cacao overboard.