There is a certain sense of the surreal to read news stories about pirates. Real news stories about real pirates. Not Johnny Depp arrr-harrring in another “Pirates of the Caribbean,” but pirates hijacking ships in the Gulf of Aden, for example.

Last week, the Pentagon reported that “39 ships have been hijacked in the Gulf of Aden, and U.N. Secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said that pirates off Somalia had taken in an estimated $25 million to $30 million in ransom in 2008,” according to the Associated Press.

Meanwhile, the report included that the British killed a number of pirates during a shipboard battle. India sank a pirate boat. German helicopters thwarted a piracy situation aboard a British ship.

With exception of helicopters, it certainly sounds like something from a pirate movie. These situations aren’t set several hundred years ago but in the 21st century. Yet, they revolve around an age-old Middle Eastern standard in piracy: Ransom, which bears resemblance to our nation’s first war on terror and one of the United States’ first military operations.

The opening lines of “The Marine Hymn” refer to America’s past battles with pirates: “ ... to the shores of Tripoli.” Granted, the Barbary Coast pirates waged a different kind of terrorism on Americans than al Qaida. The pirates preyed on American and European ships at sea usually for gold and plunder, but it was a campaign of terror all the same.

“There are, to be sure, significant differences between the predators of long ago, and the mass murderers of today,” wrote Lewis Lord in a 2002 edition of U.S. News & World Report. “The Barbary (pirates), from the rogue states of Algiers, Morocco, Tripoli and Tunis, specialized in what (President) John Adams termed ‘avarice and fear.’ Preferring plunder to politics, the pirates terrorized people not to satisfy an ideological passion but to collect blackmail and ransom for the deys, beys and bashaws who ruled what was known as the Barbary Coast.”

By the late 18th and early 19th centuries, piracy was nothing new. It had been around for centuries.

“Piracy is an ancient profession,” writes David Reinhardt in his book, “Pirates and Piracy.” “In the Mediterranean, piracy flourished as an adjunct to the growth of the maritime commerce.”

Piracy plagued the Greeks and the Romans. King Minos of Crete built a navy to battle pirates. And though pirates were feared and despised by powerful nations, many poorer populations found the idea of piracy, and becoming a pirate, appealing.

Thucydides, a Greek historian living from approximately 460-400 B.C., wrote of pirates (translated): “Such a profession, so far from being regarded as disgraceful, was considered quite honorable. It is an attitude that can be illustrated even today by some of the inhabitants of the mainland whom successful piracy is regarded as something to be proud of ...”

In destroying the navy of Rhodes, which had policed piracy for years, Rome inadvertently inspired hundreds of sailors to become pirates in the second century B.C. Though the Romans attempted to crush piracy, the pirates developed a pattern of control within the Mediterranean during the next 40 years.

“Ports in Italy were closed,” Reinhardt writes. “The pirates even raided Rome’s home port of Ostia, where according to Marcus Tullius Cicero (a Roman politician, speaker, and philosopher), ‘almost before Rome’s eyes the consul’s fleet was captured and destroyed.’”

At the time, Rome was the world’s superpower. Pirates threatened the Roman way of life, inhibiting Rome’s dependency on food from its colonies. Threatened with starvation and economic ruin, Rome’s senate set out to eliminate the pirates and, within three months, the threat was mostly eradicated.

But pirates persisted. They were dealt a stronger blow when the Roman Empire collapsed and trade upon the seas no longer flourished. While their numbers dwindled in the Middle Ages, pirates survived but limited their attacks on merchant ships of North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.

In many ways, America spurred the rebirth of piracy.