On his first voyage to the New World Christopher Columbus landed on an island that the Taíno
natives referred to as Haití, which meant “Mountainous Land”. Columbus named the
island Insula Hispana, latin for “the Spanish island” and began trading with the indigenous
people. The natives offered vast quantities of gold which led Columbus to believe that
more gold would be found inland. A small herd of cattle was left behind before Columbus
returned to Europe where the news of adventure and the prospect of getting rich in the New
World would have spread like wildfire.
It’s no surprise that Spanish settlers weren’t the only ones interested in Hispaniola and
soon enough English, French, and Dutch adventurers were exploring the tropical island, eager
to carve a piece of the New World for themselves. These men learned they could hunt the wild
boars and feral cattle the Spanish had left behind. Eventually they came into contact
with the Taíno and Carib natives who slowly smoked meat, commonly manatee, on wooden frameworks
over fires. The natives referred to these frameworks as boucan and the French coined
a word, boucanier, for hunters who used this method. That word was anglicised to buccaneer
by the English. The Spanish, seeing the Taíno natives using this process, referred to it
as barbacoa which eventually became the English word “barbecue”.
The early buccaneers would hunt the game, smoke it using the method they learned from
the native peoples, and sell this meat to passing ships. Some of these passing ships
were corsairs that attacked Spanish shipping and settlements. The Spanish aimed to drive
the buccaneers off of the island by killing the wild game as well as by attacking the
buccaneers directly. By 1630 the buccaneers were forced to flee to the island of Tortuga.
Originally the buccaneers worked again as hunters, but with fewer resources they gradually
transitioned to piracy. They wanted revenge against the Spanish as well as a way to survive,
and were quickly joined by more French, Dutch, and English adventurers turned pirates. The
buccaneers would attack Spanish galleons in the windward passage using small craft and
with the support of the other European powers eventually grew strong enough to travel to
the Spanish Main - present day Mexico, Central, and South America - where they attacked cities.
Buccaneers would attack their naval targets in small boats, often under cover of darkness.
The men would silently climb onboard, without raising an alarm, and rapidly kill the officers.
They quickly developed reputations for cruelty and, eventually, most crews would surrender
without a fight in the hope that they would be spared. When they were attacking cities
the buccaneers would land their ships a good distance away, quickly march inland, and attack
from the, usually less fortified, landward side.
By 1663 it was estimated that there were one thousand buccaneers, English, French, and
Dutch, operating fifteen different ships raiding the Spanish in what they referred to as buccaneering.
Sir Thomas Modyford, the Governor of Jamaica, invited the buccaneers to base from Port Royal
as the English viewed the buccaneers as a cheap way to wage war on Spain. The English
also realized that by providing these buccaneers with letters of marque, which legalized the
pirates as privateers (who were then required to share a percentage of their proceeds with
the crown), they could earn a nice bit of money as well.
The practice of employing privateers made Port Royal the richest city the Caribbean,
and the practice continued regardless of whether England was at war with Spain. The phrase,
“No peace beyond the line”, came to mean that regardless of what was happening in Europe
nations could and would attack each other in the Caribbean. The “line” here was
a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands that the Portuguese and Spanish agreed
would divide the newly discovered lands. Portugal and Spain respected this treaty, but the other
European powers did not sign and they largely ignored it.
Buccaneers worked on a commission based system that Governor Modyford referred to as “no
purchase, no pay”, meaning that there was no salary for these crews so they were paid
only from shares of plunder. They also had an early social insurance system which paid
out fixed prices for common injuries. The English buccaneers on Jamaica went on to lead
numerous raids on Spanish cities under the leadership of Henry Morgan, but in 1680 the
English and Spanish signed a treaty which acknowledged Englands right to trade in the
West Indies and finally brought peace “beyond the line”. After this the buccaneers were
viewed as pirates and by the 1690’s the buccaneers had turned either to all-out piracy
or legal work.
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