Ever since freelance booty-hunters spotted the vulnerability of Homeric-age galleys forging trade routes in the Mediterranean, pirates have been a scourge of the high seas.

Three thousand years later and the pirates holding out for a $25 million (£17 million) ransom for the Sirius Star are heirs to a niche enterprise that has sometimes been romanticised, but has always been the preserve of the daring, the desperate and the despicable.

All that has changed is some of the methodology used to get the loot, and the general disinclination of modern-day pirates to engage in the same level of ruthless murder and gruesome torture that characterises the blood-soaked annals of piracy.

Pirates tend to move in where there is a power vacuum, or where authority is disputed and national powers are distracted. During the golden age of piracy, from the 1680s to the 1720s, rich pickings were to be had off West Africa and the Caribbean as colonial powers jostled with each other. Today the pirate menace is particularly severe off Somalia because that country has no effective central authority.

The potential rewards of piracy are great but the risks of capture or death are considerable enough to ensure that the line of work attracts those on the margins of society. In the Caribbean heyday, pirate crews were made up of unemployed sailors, disaffected servants, runaway slaves, mutineers and men (there were very few women) desperate to improve their lot. They did so in the full knowledge that, like William Kidd, they could be strung up at Execution Dock in Wapping (the first rope snapped but a second finished Kidd off). Modern Somali pirates appear to come from impoverished backgrounds in a war-ravaged country with very few legitimate careers available.

Pirates need safe ports and in the Caribbean and New England there were corrupt governors willing to provide them with a place to unload their treasure.

Port Royal in Jamaica was the most famous pirate port, where successful raids were celebrated with wine, women and gambling. According to the 18th-century historian Charles Leslie, pirates “have been known to spend 2,000 or 3,000 pieces of eight in one night; and one gave a strumpet 500 to see her naked. They used to buy a pipe of wine, place it in the street and oblige everyone that passed to drink”.

Celebrated prostitutes in Port Royal included Buttock le Clink and Mary Carleton, a thief and bigamist who was hanged in 1673 and described as “as common as a barber’s chair: no sooner was one out, but another was in. Cunning and hot in the pursuit of her designs”.

The oldest profession continues to be intimately linked with piracy. A night with a Somali pirate captain can be worth $3,000. Havens for Somali pirates are provided by local warlords, with reports that pirates are being supplied with weapons and training by the Islamist insurgents in exchange for shipping-in arms.

Modern pirates adopt a different strategy from their antecedents, relying on a ransom for the ship and crew of anything upwards of $1 million. Roman pirates were known to use ransom, including on the occasion of the capture of Julius Caesar, who was sold back to his family. But therafter pirates tended to rely on their ability to trade the cargo they captured - an option pretty much closed to modern pirates.

In tactics, too, modern-day pirates take a different approach. A relatively small band will take a ship using the threat of overwhelming firepower, including machineguns and rocket-propelled grenades.

In the golden age, pirate captains relied on a large number of lightly armed men to swarm over a ship, shouting, screaming and brandishing cutlasses and pistols. Bart Roberts, a Welshman regarded as perhaps the most successful pirate of the golden age – capturing more ships than Blackbeard or Captain Kidd – had a crew of 228 on his ship the Royal Fortune, and another 140 on the Good Fortune.

In contrast to modern times, pirates of the past were often extremely violent to their captives. The bloodthirsty Edward Low was so furious when the captain of a captured Portuguese ship let a trove of gold fall into the sea that he “cut off the said Master’s lips and broiled them before his face, and afterwards murdered the whole crew being thirty persons”.

The cruellest tortures were applied to prisoners, with the idea of forcing them to reveal where their valuables were hidden. The 17th-century French pirate L’Olonnais would “hack the man to pieces with his cutlass and lick the blood from the blade with his tongue” if the prisoner did not confess where his treasures might be found.

Worse was the pirate Montbars, also from France, whose way with Spaniards was to cut open their stomachs, nail their intestines to the mast, apply a torch to naked backsides and force them to dance to their deaths. There are few documented cases of walking the plank, but it certainly happened on occasions in the 19th century.

By then, however, the golden age of piracy was over. The arrival of the Royal Navy as the most effective seaborne fighting force in the world routed the pirates of the Caribbean and the Atlantic coasts in the 1720s.

The Royal Navy is once more at work against the pirates, and it appears that the only solution to the huge increase in piracy off Somalia will be concerted application of armed force. Wherever there is an opportunity for piracy, there will be pirates.

Tim Travers is the author of Pirates: A History

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