Pirates -

I follow the same pattern of thought as Billy Connelly, so bear with me on this.

Billy has a condition called Attention something. It means that he loses a grasp of what he's talking about as his brain makes links to other things as he talks. For instance, he might mention Pirates, then as he's talking about them, mention boats. This might lead him to think about the story about the new destroyer that was just completed and launched to great fanfare on the Clyde, where it duly slipped down the, umm, slip and straight across the river into the wall on the other side. This can sometimes go on for a while, skipping through subjects like a blob of sodium across a pond.

Anyway, so Pirates have been moulded over the past few hundred years such that their image now is of some sort of Robin Hood type characters. This is mainly due to stories such as Peter Pan, and musicals like Pirates of Penzance. Other musicals of note are Cats and Phantom of the Opera. I saw the punultimate show of Cats on Broadway a few years ago. It had been running for quite some time, so it was a bit historical. Now, most people think of pirates as being ragamuffins who run around in their ship plundering treasure galleons all the time. In general this actually refers to Privateering, which is a kind of licensed pirating. For instance, as Spain was killing off the Aztecs and the Incas and shipping the amazing amount of trasure home to finance the growth of the Spanish empire (Yes, they had one too), Britain was a bit peeved about this so licensed various people (including Francis Drake) to captain ship and go steal. Interestingly enough, Francis Drake started out by travelling with his cousin, Jim Hawkins before growing up and going it alone.
The biggest fleet of pirates was actually Chinese, some bird had an incredible amount of ships and people and ended up more powerful than a large number of nations (in terms of their naval fleet, at least).

So, that's what I've read so far, I'll update when I learn more, or can be arsed, whatever.