By this I mean the pirates of the mid 17th to early 18th century the whole "golden age of piracy" period. Did fictional stories about pirates appear during this period with the same themes of adventure and almost romanticised image of pirates or were they a later invention? If not what was the literature about them like during this period? Cheers.
You could literally go on for days on this subject. I will first recommend two good academic books on this subject:
British Pirates in Print and Performance by E.M. Powell
Treasure Neverland: Real and Imaginary Pirates by Neil Rennie
The quick answer is this: There were fictional accounts of pirates already appearing during the Golden Age of Piracy itself, especially about Henry Every and his supposed (but fictional) pirate kingdom on or near Madagascar. Add on top of that the tendency of mixing a little fiction onto the facts of "histories" published at the time (which literary scholars refer to as "factual fiction") - crime stories and of nefarious people became quite popular in the early eighteenth century.
But for your starting point of the modern renditions, especially the adventure stories, the late 19th century is the place you'll want to go. During that time, with the cultural concern of manhood still running strong (World War I kind of changed things though), boys were given plenty of reading material regarding adventure and presenting what the period perceived as strong masculine role models. The genre of sea adventure and pirate stories was really popular, especially since this period also marked a new age in the western world's perception of the western hemisphere's tropical zone as a pleasurable place rather than a deadly and corrupting place. This is the period that produced Treasure Island and the famous artist Howard Pyle (his paintings and illustrations are famous for pirate stuff).