I kicked myself off of Game Control for the Pirate BATH game. I was getting tired of reading about nothing but pirates. Factual pirate research isn't much fun. Pirates were bullies, they killed people, they enslaved people, they set peoples' homes on fire. Awful people, just awful. Pirate fiction is often pretty good, though. Does that count as research? Maybe. I remember that over the holidays, I was talking with friends when conversation drifted, as it does, to Genghis Khan. We were trying to figure out if Genghis Khan had been tall or short. Someone pointed out that in the movie "Time Bandits", Napoleon had mentioned Genghis Khan as one of the small-but-powerful forces of history. I pointed out that in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Genghis Khan hadn't seemed so short. Could we trust Napoleon? In the end, we decided to trust Napoleon because Time Bandits felt like it had been more carefully researched than Bill & Ted.
I forget what my original point was.
Oh, right, so I read Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. If you want to know where that "Black Spot" from the Pirates of the Caribbean movie came from--it's from Treasure Island. "15 Men on a Dead Man's Chest"--that song is either from Treasure Island or else popularized by it. The story itself is fluffy, a ripping adventure yarn. Still, it does a good job of portraying the pirates as horrid people. They are treacherous and dissolute--and that is their undoing. Overall, it was a fun read.