Because of the way pirates are portrayed in the movies or on tv, they are often thought of as colorful characters. In reality pirates were criminals, many of them were vicious and violent and caused fear over the oceans of the world, at the mention of their name. The definition of piracy is an act of violence and robbery at sea. The image of an eye patch wearing, rum drinking guy with a hook hand or a peg leg is a real image of many pirates. Pirates were initially found in the straits of the Mediterranean and the English channel. Their victims were easy to find because they were traveling through narrow shipping lanes that made it easy to catch them and many times easy to capture the ships. Many times the crew were also allowed to join or forced to join the pirates instead of being killed. It was a good recruiting method. When the pirates would capture a slave ship, most of the slaves would join the pirates, it was much better than being a slave. Sometimes they would kill the crew of the ships they robbed, sometimes they would sink the ship after taking the cargo. Sometimes they would take the cargo and let everyone go, sometimes they would even give the captured crew their ship and take the captured ship if it was better. It all depended on the situation and how much the captured crew resisted. Many times a warning shot was all it took for them to surrender. Most ship crews were not fighters, they were shipmates and preferred not to die. They would rather give up the cargo to live. Pirates were actually organized with a code of conduct and rules that they had to live by to keep everyone from fighting with each other. They even had a form of worker's comp. Piracy was a dangerous business. They would many times get injuries that would affect how they could do their job. If you lost a limb, they would get compensation of a certain amount. If they lost an eye, there would be compensation, and so on. Serious injury would be the end of a pirates career. If they couldn't do the work on the ship, they could not be pirates. Some of them were just thieves and were there to take things from others to make their life better. Some of them were really evil and ruthless. Most pirates initially started as workers for governments of countries. Their job was to capture ships and cargo from the enemies of these countries as part of warfare, they were called privateers