In recent years, with the development of battery technology, hybrid electric ship (HES), as a promising solution to reduce the fuel consumption and emissions, has become a research hotspot. However, frequent use of the battery will accelerate the aging of the battery, and the replacement of scrapped battery will increase the cost of the ship. Therefore, it is necessary to consider delaying battery aging into the energy control strategy of HES. The equivalent consumption minimization strategy (ECMS) is a feasible energy control strategy because it can be implemented in real time. However, under the condition of uncertain initial state of charge (SOC) of the battery, ECMS cannot effectively reduce the fuel consumption unless the equivalent factor (EF) is optimized in real time. In this paper, an adaptive equivalent consumption minimization strategy (A-ECMS) is proposed, which extracts the global optimal EF trajectory from the dynamic programming (DP) solution and uses the back propagation (BP) neural network to adjust the EF in real time. A trade-off between the fuel consumption and battery aging is made in the cost function by introducing a weight coefficient. Finally, the effectiveness and the adaptability of the proposed strategy are verified in MATLAB.