Buccaneer
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- This article refers to the type of pirate. For other uses, see Buccaneer (disambiguation)
| PIRATES AND PRIVATEERS |
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Pirates • Privateers |
| Jolly Roger |
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| Places: |
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Piracy in the Caribbean |
| Famous Pirates and Privateers: |
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Sir Francis Drake • Sir Henry Morgan |
| Naval officers: |
Buccaneer is a term that was used in the later 17th century in the Caribbean Islands. The term "buccaneer" comes from the French word "boucanier". Boucaniers originally were French hunters who were poaching cattle and pigs on western Hispaniola. They would smoke the meat on wooden frames, "boucans", so that it could be saved for a later time. The boucaniers were taught this technique by the local Arawak tribes from Santo Domingo, calling the method Barbicoa - which is where the word and method of Barbecue originated. The word was adopted in English as "buccaneer."
Conflict with Spanish forces from the east of Hispaniola drove many of the buccaneers from the mainland to the island of Tortuga. Here, they turned to piracy against Spanish shipping, generally using small craft to attack galleons in the vicinity of the Windward Passage. English settlers occupying Jamaica began to spread the name with the meaning of rebel pirates sailing in the Caribbean ports and seas. The name became universally adopted in 1684 when a book, The Buccaneers of America was written by Alexandre Exquemelin and translated from Dutch into English.
[edit] History
The Buccaneers were pirates who attacked Spanish, and later French shipping in the West Indies during the 17th and 18th centuries. The term is now used generally as a synonym for pirate. However, properly speaking only native Caribbean pirates, the original boucaniers or their later allies, are buccaneers. Generally, buccaneer crews were larger, more apt to attack coastal cities, and more localized to the Caribbean than later pirate crews who sailed to the Indian Ocean on the Pirate Round in the late 17th century or who bedeviled the world's shipping in the early 18th century during and after the War of the Spanish Succession.
About 1630, some Frenchmen who were driven away from the island of Hispaniola fled to nearby Tortuga (now part of Haiti). They lived by hunting wild cattle and selling the hides to Dutch traders. The Spaniards tried to drive them out of Tortuga, but the buccaneers were joined by many other French, Dutch and English and finally became so strong that they attacked Spanish ships and even sailed to the continent of Spanish America and sacked cities.
Viewed from London, buccaneering was a low-budget way to wage war on their rival at the time, Spain. So, the crown licensed pirates as "privateers", legalizing their operations in return for a share of their profits. The Buccaneers were invited by Jamaica's Governor Modyford to base ships at Port Royal. Buccaneers were commissioned by the British to attack the French, Dutch and Spanish shipping and colonies, making Port Royal the most prosperous city in the West Indies. There even were navy officers sent to lead the buccaneers, such as Christopher Myngs. Their activities went on irrespective of the fact whether England happened to be at war with Spain, the United Provinces or France.
Among the leaders of the buccaneers was a Frenchman named Daniel Montbars, who destroyed so many Spanish ships and killed so many Spaniards that he was called "the Exterminator." Another noted leader was a Welshman named Henry Morgan, who sacked Maracaibo, Portobello, and Panama City, stealing a huge amount from the Spanish. Morgan became rich and went back to England, where he was knighted by Charles II.
In the 1690s, the old buccaneering ways began to die out, as European governments began to discard the policy of "no peace beyond the Line." Buccaneers were hard to control and might embroil their colonies in unwanted wars. Notably, at the 1697 joint French-buccaneer siege of Cartagena, the buccaneers and the French regulars parted on extremely bitter terms. Less tolerated by local Caribbean officials, buccaneers increasingly turned to legal work or else joined regular pirate crews who sought plunder in the Indian Ocean, the east coast of North America, or West Africa as well as in the Caribbean.
[edit] Buccaneer culture
Traditionally, buccaneer crews operated as democracies: the captain was elected by the crewmen and they could vote to replace him. The captain had to be a leader and a fighter—in combat he was expected to be fighting with his men, not directing operations from a distance.
Spoils were evenly divided into shares; while the officers had a greater number of shares, their portion was still far less than that of Royal Navy officers' shares of prize money. Crews generally had no regular wages, being paid only from their shares of the plunder, a system called "no purchase, no pay" by Modyford or "no prey, no pay" by Exquemelin. There was a strong esprit de corps among buccaneers. This allowed them to win sea battles: they typically outmanned trade vessels by a large ratio. There was also, for some time, a social insurance system guaranteeing compensation for battle wounds at a worked-out scale.
A common myth about buccaneers is that they were racially egalitarian and liberated slaves when capturing slave ships. In fact, buccaneers fully participated in the slave society of their time, selling slaves as captured booty and even giving slaves to wounded buccaneers as compensation. Nevertheless, it is quite true that the relationship between officers and men among the buccaneers was much more egalitarian than that aboard merchant or naval vessels of the time.
