James Cook: This legendary English explorer used Dampier’s maps of winds and currents on his journeys and urged his officers to read Dampier’s Discourse on Winds.

Unfortunately, Dampier’s rickety ship sank on the way home—resulting in a court-martial and fine, but not an end to Dampier’s career.

William Dampier - The Pirate Who Collected Plants Smithsonian Ocean

It's like you said the other day," said Adam.

You grow up readin' about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus' when you think the world's full of amazin' things, they tell you it's really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nucular waste hangin' about for millions of years.

Snot worth growin' up for, if you ask my opinion.

Neil Gaiman

I should like to know which is worse: to be ravished a hundred times by pirates, and have a buttock cut off, and run the gauntlet of the Bulgarians, and be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fe, and be dissected, and have to row in a galley -- in short, to undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered -- or simply to sit here and do nothing?

That is a hard question,' said Candide.

Voltaire

While Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean films are entirely fictional, there is no doubting that the Caribbean was the centre of piracy in the Golden Age of Piracy.

The Golden Age of Piracy Royal Museums Greenwich