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RALEIGH (AP) - Blackbeard has a starrrrin' role in this pirate exhibit at a North Carolina museum as he be the most famous of the swashbucklin' buccaneers, but he's hardly the only one represented thar.

The almost yearlong exhibit, "Knights of the Black Flag," at the North Carolina Museum of History traces the history of the sweet trade from ancient Egypt and Greece to today's pirates off Somalia.

"People have an image of pirates, but what is the reality?" asked Jeanne Marie Warzeski, a museum curator.

To that end, the exhibit opens with paintings of pirates to show "the image that we have in our culture of pirates," Warzeski said.

Those paintings includes works by Frank Schoonover and Edward Arthur Wilson, along with contemporary works by Don Maitz, whose works are used to advertise Captain Morgan Rum.

It moves then to the pirates of the Red Sea; the golden age of piracy; and the largest collection of artifacts ever exhibited from the shipwreck believed to be Blackbeard's flagship, Queen Anne's Revenge. The exhibit also includes a skull from the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., that's purported to be Blackbeard's, although curators at neither museum stand by that claim.

It ends with an interactive exhibit where visitors can open small chests to sniff the smells of the ships - gunpowder and rum included - and test their aim by shooting toy cannons at computerized ships on a screen.

The exhibit opens Friday at the N.C. Museum of History and continues through Jan. 3, 2010.

Much of the exhibit focused on Blackbeard, who terrorized his victims along the North Carolina coast until 1718, when his ship ran aground. The wreckage of what's believed to be his ship was found in 1996 at Beaufort Inlet.

Blackbeard wasn't the most successful of pirates, but he is the most famous, said Mike Carraway, exhibit designer at the N.C. Maritime Museum in Beaufort, where the exhibit originated.

"For some reason, he had really good PR agents," Carraway said.

He noted Blackbeard's penchant for lighting matches in his beard to terrify the enemy, which "made him look like the devil himself.

"He was very much a theatrical guy and knew how to play an audience, apparently, as well as being basically bloodthirsty and cutthroat," Carraway said.

Explorers such as Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh operated under the more genteel name of privateer, but basically were pirates who worked with the winking support of Queen Elizabeth, he said.

Piracy was a "dirty, nasty business" but not much different in that respect from life on land, where "if you worked as a laborer all your life, you got nothing," he said. Pirates, at least, had the chance to make money.

Some myths remain, including that whole bit about walking the plank, which was a rare event, he said. It was easier to simply toss a man overboard or run a sword through them.

Pirates were more likely to leave crews at sea on disabled boats than to kill them outright. If you put up a particularly good fight, you might be offered the chance to join the pirate crew, Carraway said.

History has romanticized pirates, despite the murder and mayhem they created, because they were non-conforming, rugged individualists who sold stolen goods at prices far below those sold with large tariffs, Carraway said.

"They filled a niche and a need at that time," he said. They didn't leave until the people onshore realized real merchants wouldn't open shops until the pirates were gone.

The exhibit makes a full circle, starting in the Red Sea and ending up back there with today's pirates in Somalia, also romanticized by some.

In a recent documentary, Carraway said children in Somalia said they wanted to be like their brother or uncle "because he's walking around with a lot of cash in his pocket all the time because he goes offshore and raids ships.

"I want to be a pirate when I grow up."