Dead men tell no tales

WE HAVE, perhaps, watched Errol Flynn buckling his swash once too often, read too many comic-book versions of “Treasure Island”, gone to too many fancy-dress parties with eyepatches and stuffed parrots. Pirates seem delightfully colourful, though fairly innocuous, figures from the past, bit players in the pageant of history. But this kind of attitude infuriates the world's shipowners. For them, and the crews who man their ships, piracy remains a serious, and bloody, business. And in Asia at least, it is on the rise again.