What's always surprised me is how much of the cartoony image is real. There really were pirates with peg legs, hooks for hands and eye patches, pirates that talked with lower-class English accents and kept parrots as pets. There were swashbuckling captains feared all over the seas that held their crews of convicts and scalawags to surprisingly strict codes of honor. As the author says here, a lot of these things only happened in certain places and times, but the fact that these people did really exist is pretty fun and amazing.