Just wondering if the scandanavians had a large amount of pirates in the renaissance or colonial era. Not talking about the viking age of the 700-1100's, wondering if that viking tradition carried on into renaissance or colonial era.
During the period you're asking about continuity from, there's already significant changes from start to end. The military technology of the viking kings, based on that of the viking raiders, continues in some sense from the 1000's into the 1400's, gradually fading away as material and practices are replaced with more effective or fashionable items. (The boat building tradition, scaled down, is still going on; Norwegian craftsmen like to brag that building new war-size ships was mostly a matter of minimal trial and error while figuring out how to scale things back up.)
There's several theories about this, but this is the one I find makes sense: The raiding of the 600-700's seems to have originated as a kind of ritualised intertribal feuding and raiding, like Irish cattle raids. Then when the raiders found unusually rich booty, first on the baltic fur and amber trade routes, then on the atlantic coasts, capitalism kicked in. Surplus loot was invested in more ships, equipment and personnel, which brought more loot, scaling up raiding season after raiding season until things like the Great Heathen Army and the ransom of Paris was possible. Raids opened oportunities for trade, which in turn opened oportunities for colonisation or settlement, creating a Norse diaspora across Europe.
Each generation of this process would be doing somewhat different things in different contexts. Only the raiders of the earliest phase may have tought of themselves as vikings, and only while they were actually engaged in viking activity. Once they got off the boat back home, they'd be farmers again, or possibly the kept hirdmen of a local strongman.
There is work being done trying to discern how all these diasporic groups may have constructed their identity - there's hints everywhere, in language, cloak pin styles, burial customs, political and trade networks and so on. Nothing much indicates that having been on a viking raid continued to be something that gave you social credit past the 1200's. Some have pointed to rather the opposite; the viking was a figure associated with piracy, the pagan past and uncivilized stupidity and brutality. As Scandinavia was increasingly integrated into medieval christendom and the European cultural sphere, the kind of raiding or piracy we see in the early viking age became not only unsustainable and outright impossible to get away with, but unthinkable.
However, there are some indications that awareness and some kind of appreciation of the viking past did continue in some form - German mercenaries and pirates attacking Norwegian coasts are referred to as "vikings" in the 16th century, and, surprisingly, "Viking" turns up as a name or patronymic of several people in Norwegian legal documents between 1400-1600.
But this is a very long-winded way of saying "no". Between the end of viking raids in the 1000's and the start of the era of piracy, military technology, strategy and political organisation changed many times over. Reformation and age of sail Scandinavians, while having a very large mercantile presence, did not have any extra predilection for piracy or privateering; when it did happen, it happened on the same contexts as in the rest of Europe, without obvious callbacks to the medieval past.
One fact that illustrates this is that by the 18th century, the high cultural circles of Scandinavia had forgotten what a norse war ship looked like. Until actual examples were excavated in the the late 19th century, they were imagining and depicting them as something like classical triremes - while just down by the harbor, poor peasant fishermen were building and sailing miniature versions of the real thing.