![]() ![]() There are some words that were originally synonyms for buccaneer, not for pirate, that eventually came to be used interchangeably with both those terms: ‘freebooter’ and ‘filibuster’. And when they ran out of Spanish targets, well, the buccaneers got less choosy.Įventually, even the groups that had approved of the buccaneer’s actions when they were primarily anti-Spanish had to admit they had a pirate problem on their hands. The buccaneers grew powerful, raiding inland and sacking even large cities on the Spanish mainland, which is the term for the part of South America’s northern coast and nearby waters that were under Spanish control. And since the Spanish were rich and the buccaneers were poor, it started to seem like a good idea to the buccaneers to prey upon the Spaniard shipping and their coastal settlements. They were often aided by indigenous groups who had their own very good reasons for disliking the Spanish presence in the Americas. So, the buccaneers hated the Spanish, and the Spanish hated the buccaneers for economical, national, and often religious reasons. The Arawak Indians, and increasingly, the buccaneers thought the Spanish were the ones who shouldn’t be there. Spain demanded a virtual trade monopoly in the Americas. The buccaneer groups were living on Spanish islands illegally, at least as far as the Spanish Colonizers were concerned. So, in the late 17th century English language context, buccaneer is a Caribbean pirate who maintains a land base somewhere he is probably an expert in local waterways, harbors, and inlets, or has a pilot who is and he sometimes but not always acts semi-legally, as long as you’re not looking at it from the Spanish point of view. Uncooked meat would go bad pretty quickly, and so they adopted the practice, perfected by indigenous people, of cutting the meat, then sun drying it, and then scorching it or smoking it on a wooden frame. These folks lived in a Caribbean climate with no refrigerators. They survived by hunting and preserving the flesh of wild cows and sometimes pigs, which they could then eat and sell. The buccaneers were escaped servants, former soldiers, and other men of French, Dutch and English extraction who lived in rough-hewn, largely single-sex communities on the islands of Hispaniola, Tortuga, and Jamaica. ![]() The word comes indirectly from the Arawak, native Americans of the Lesser Antilles in South America, whose word buccan referred to an apparatus used for smoking meat. Since the 19th century, people have often used buccaneer as though it means the same thing as a regular pirate, but when the term originated in the 17th century Caribbean, it was more specific than that. Now there are a lot of synonyms for pirate, but they’re not entirely interchangeable. The Buccaneersīuccaneers were escaped servants, former soldiers, and other men of French, Dutch and English extraction. This article comes directly from content in the video series The Real History of Pirates. Piracy came to be used broadly enough that it could refer to any crimes at sea. Over time, however, it often came to represent a guy who did something bad on a boat. In ancient Greek usage, pirate ( peirato) meant something more along the lines of a member of an independent seafaring community than a seafaring outlaw. Pirate hasn’t always been such a negative term. True pirates are not authorized by or affiliated with any government. While defining pirates as people who rob at sea, we might add a caveat about nation: A pirate is someone who robs people at sea or from the sea and who does so without regard to nation. It doesn’t really get at the legal or historical roots of piracy.īoth culturally and legally, defining piracy in the real world is not a simple matter at all. But this group of images is a result of the literary and cultural heritage we are raised with. Maybe a black flag, a skull and crossbones, a cutlass, a parrot, maybe some treasure, almost certainly a sailing ship. Mention the word pirate to almost anyone, and an image will probably pop into their head with a number of well-known features. ![]() (Image: imagefactory studio/Shutterstock) Defining Piracy Culturally and Legally When thinking about pirates, an image of a skull and crossbones flag generally comes to mind. ![]()
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