The country (England) which was called a nation of pirates in the years around 1600 would eventually become the pirates' greatest scourge, not just in English waters but throughout the world.
My second tattoo was a pirate ship on my arm. My friends and I, you know, we all called ourselves pirates, you know, so we felt like, you know,we was the pirates of the Caribbean around the way.
With a decrease in the number of pirates, there has been an increase in global warming over the same period. Therefore, global warming is caused by a lack of pirates. Even more compelling: Somalia has the highest number of Pirates AND the lowest Carbon emissions of any country. Coincidence?
The arrival of the Barbary pirates radically changed English attitudes. Instead of patriotic pirates plundering foreign cargoes and bringing them homes to enrich their countrymen, the 'Turks' were in the usual Mediterranean business of slave-raiding - and now the English were the victims. The West Country men suffered the heaviest, and did not appreciate the irony. The Newfoundland fishery, dominated by Devon ports, lost at least 20 ships in 1611 alone.
Pirates are the very essence of profit maximising entrepreneurs described in neoclassical economics. Yet, whilst films such as 'The Pirates of the Caribbean' and 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' have gone a long way to popularise both pirates and outlaw behaviour, the truth of the matter is that piracy is illegal, and it kills.
[Pirates] are a victim of their own success. People have identified with pirates in a comic and caricature sense.
Privateers, military contractors - these aren't pirates. They have bosses. Real pirates are sellswords on missions of their own making.
I am part of this generation with 'Pirates of the Caribbean' and 'Peter Pan.' I think we all grew up in this culture of pirates.
You can't go wrong with pirates. I mean, they're pirates. It's what everyone wants to be when they're a kid. Ninja, assassin, or a pirate - and now you can kind of be all three.
What happen to the pirates we are supposed to see? Then we go down the chutes, and it's where the pirates were. But they're all gone. There is nothing but skeletons down here!
Pirates did not store all their treasures in treasure chests, then bury them and draw maps to them. That's a movie invention. In reality, pirates spent their money as fast as they could steal it because they knew they were living on borrowed time. They didn't want to wait around to enjoy the money.
I played cops and robbers and pirates and all the rest when I was a kid, but I didn't want to grow up and be an actor and play cops and robbers and pirates. I wanted to grow up and be that, be cops and robbers and pirates.
Pirates almost never sailed with women. Just four or five are known to have worked as pirates during the Golden Age. Two of them - Mary Read and Anne Bonny - became famous, dressing as men and fighting alongside one of the most celebrated of all pirate captains, 'Calico' Jack Rackham.
In the movies, I loved Errol Flynn whether he was playing a soldier or a pirate. I dug pirates. In fact, my first exposure to live performances was when my paternal grandfather took me to a D'Oyly Carte performance of 'The Pirates of Penzance' which impresario Sol Hurok imported from London. I loved every minute of it.
The pirates are serving a purpose right now. They come from regions which have been completely ignored, and Westerners have tried to destroy these regions by their constant plundering of resources and by the illegal dumping of nuclear waste. The pirates really began in order to discourage these actions - initially. And then the business became lucrative.
It was mid-November 2008. There were pirates taking ships with impunity in African waters, terrorists punching holes in Indian security, China sinking towards depression because Americans were afraid to buy cheap goods for Christmas, and the richest nation in the history of the world was talking about how to keep a budget.
The more I learned about real pirates, the more exciting they seemed to me. They appeared to be even more dramatic than pirates of the movies or TV shows.