1906 engraving of buccaneers under the command of Henry Morgan sacking the town of Puerto del Principe (Camagüey, Cuba) in 1668. Image of men with cannon, muskets, and pikes attacking a defended town, defended by a small, but similarly armed force.
16 September 2021
A buccaneer is a pirate, but the word’s origin is rooted in a method of barbeque (cf. barbecue) used by the Indigenous people of the Caribbean region. A boucan was a grill used for roasting meat and vegetables, and the term buccaneer was first applied to hunters in Hispaniola who killed and smoked wild cattle on boucans. That was a rough lifestyle, and when the term was borrowed into English, the sense became that of a pirate, either because the hunters of Hispaniola had turned to piracy, or that piracy was a similarly rough profession.
Both buccaneer and boucan are borrowings from French: boucanier (a hunter of wild cattle) and boucan (grill for barbequing). The French words, in turn, derive from the Tupi, or another Indigenous Brazilian language, buka (grill for barbequing).
We first see a reference to boucaned meat in an English translation of René Goulaine de Laudonnière’s 1587 history of European exploration of Florida:
They eate all their meate broyled on the coales, and dressed in the smoake, which in their language they call Boucaned. They eate willingly the flesh of ye Crocodil: & in deed it is faire and white: and were it not that it sauoureth too much like muske we would oftentimes haue eaten thereof.
And in 1598 a translation of John Huygen van Linschoten’s account of his voyage to the Americas refers to a boucano as a grill for cooking:
The Brasilians haue twoo sorts of rootes, called Aypi and Maniot, which béeing planted, in three or foure Moneths become a foote and a halfe long, and as bigge as a mans thigh, which beeing taken out of the earth, are by the women dryed by the fire vppon a Boucano.
Linschoten goes on to give a rather grisly description of cannibalism among the Tupi people in which he describes a boucan. The veracity of this, and similar, accounts of Native American cannibalism are a matter of debate among anthropologists, and to the extent the accounts of cannibalism like this one are true, they are probably exaggerated. I have omitted the more disturbing portions of the passage:
In this sort one, two, or thrée prisners, or more, as it falleth out, being slaine and rosted, all the company that are present, assemble about their boucans or girdirons of wood, for that the Indians rost no meate vppon spittes, as some men paynt them to do.
Some sixty years later, we see buccaneer used for one who hunts wild cattle. The description is that of Hispaniola in Edmund Heckeringill’s 1661 Jamaica Viewed:
He can empannell an Army, instead of a Iury to make good the Claime; the which he can hardly levie upon Hispaniola; it being so thinly peopled, that he can scarcely muster five hundred fighting men, (in the whole Island) though he should put forth a general Presse (enforc’d with the strictest Commission of Aray;) except only in the Town of St. Domingo; which is distant above one hundred and fifty miles from the forementioned Mine; and are not able with all their skill and strength to root out a few Buckaneers or Hunting French-men, that follow their Game, in despight of them, though they cannot number three hundred at a general Rendezvouse: and those dispersed at three hundred miles distance from one another, on the North and West sides of the Island.
And a bit later on in Heckeringill’s book:
A thousand English Souldiers being now an over-match to all the power, that the Spaniards in Hispaniola, can bring into the field; unable at this day to ferrit out a new French Buckaneers, or Hunting Marownaes, formerly mentioned; who live by killing the wild Beeves for their Hides; and might grow rich by the Trade, did not their lavish Riotings in expence (at the neighbour—Tortudoes) exceed the hardship of their Incomes. Their comfort is, they can never be broke whilest they have a Dog and a Gun; both which, are more industriously tended then themselves.
The use of buccaneer to refer to pirates comes by 1676, in this account by James Heath of events that took place in 1666, during the second Anglo-Dutch War:
The War continuing between the English and the Dutch, the beginning of this Year brought Intelligence from America, where the Governour of Jamaica resolves to Attaque their American Plantations; and accordingly, by the Assistance of the Buccaneers or Hunters upon Hispaniola, made themselves Masters of Sancta Eastachia, Salia, St. Martins, and Bonaira; and took the Island Tabago by Storm.
And Elisha Coles, in his 1677 dictionary, defines buccaneer thusly:
Buckaneers, the rude rabble in Jamaica.
But the work that cemented the sense of buccaneer as pirate and cemented the word in the English language was the 1684 English translation of Alexandre Exquemelin’s The History of the Bucaniers, originally published in Dutch in 1678 with the title De Americaensche Zee-Rovers:
The American Pirates or Bucaneers, are the Subject of this History; a sort of People who cannot be said to deserve any other Title, as not being maintain'd or upheld in their Actions by any Soveraign Prince. For certain it is, that when the Kings of Spain have complain'd by their Embassadors to the Kings of England and France, of the Molestations and Robberies done upon the Spaniards, both at Land and at Sea, by those Pirates upon the Coasts of I, even in the Calm of Peace, it has been always answer'd, that such persons did not commit those Acts of Hostility and Piracy, as Subjects to their Majesties, and therefore his Catholick Majesty might proceed against them as he should think fit.
Sources:
Coles, Elisha. An English Dictionary. London: Peter Parker, 1677. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Exquemelin, Alexandre. The History of the Bucaniers. London: Thomas Malthus, 1684, 1. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Heath, James. A Chronicle of the Late Intestine War in the Three Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland, second edition, London, J.C. for Thomas Basset, 1676, 548. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Heckeringill, Edmund. Jamaica Viewed: With All the Ports, Harbours, and Their Several Soundings, Towns, and Settlements Thereunto Belonging, second edition. London: John Williams, 1661, 33–34, 51–52. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Laudonnière, René Goulaine de. A Notable Historie Containing Foure Voyages Made by Certayne French Captaynes into Florida. London: Thomas Dawson, 1587, 4r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Linschoten, John Huygen van. His Discourse of Voyages into ye Easte and West Indies. London: John Wolfe, 1598, 246, 255. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. buccaneer, n., buccaneer, v., buccan, v., buccan | bucan | boucan, n.
Image credit: Unknown artist, 1906. From John Masefield. On the Spanish Main. New York: Macmillan, 1906, 142. Public domain image.