buccaneers

buccaneers. Known among themselves by the romantic title of ‘brethren of the coast’, they were also called freebooters. They were seamen of several European nationalities who, from the 1620s onwards, cruised on their own account on the Spanish Main, raiding and plundering Spanish settlements, and sometimes ships, from their bases on some of the smaller West Indian islands and particularly from Hispaniola. They adopted a code of laws, known as Jamaica discipline, and styled themselves privateers, but since they seldom carried letters of marque, their actions differed from acts of piracy only by virtue of the fact that they did not prey on ships belonging to their own nations. Called zee-rovers by the Dutch, corsarios by the Spanish, and flibustiers by the French, they were inspired by the tradition of the Elizabethan privateers. They became prominent for their marauding activities in the Caribbean after the capture of Jamaica in 1655, and later in the Pacific. One of the most bloodthirsty was a Frenchman, François l'Ollonois (d. 1668), so called because he was born at Les Sables d'Olonne. He joined the buccaneers at Hispaniola in about 1665 and was credited with tearing out and eating the hearts of his captives. He was eventually caught and lynched by local inhabitants on his way to the sack of Cartagena.

Early bands were composed of adventurers of all sorts. Perhaps one of the most successful was Sir Henry Morgan, who led the first attack on Panama in 1671. Another band, led by Bartholomew Sharp, included two English surgeons, Basil Ringrose (d. 1686), who was eventually killed in an attack on Santiago, Mexico, and Lionel Wafer (c.1660–1705). Wafer wrote a book based on his experiences of crossing the Isthmus of Panama, Description of the Isthmus of America (1699). Because of it he was made an adviser to the disastrous Darien Scheme in which 2,500 Scotsmen were induced to form a colony in the Isthmus before they were virtually exterminated by the Spaniards.

Some buccaneers, like Alexander Selkirk, were remarkable characters; others, like Dampier, were outstanding seamen. However, the outbreak of the European war in 1689 brought buccaneering to an end, and the buccaneers became legitimate privateers. Some of the last to operate were a band led by John Cook who, in 1683, captured a Danish ship of 40 guns off the coast of Guinea, and renamed it Batchelor's Delight. The ship was given this odd name presumably because the buccaneers had, near Freetown, exchanged their original ship for sixty young females with whom they set sail for the Pacific, eventually discovering, so it is believed, Easter Island.

The word buccaneer is derived from the French boucan, or grill. On these the buccaneers cooked the dried strips of meat that came from the wild herds of cattle they hunted on Hispaniola. The word did not come into use until after the publication in 1678 of a book called The Bucaniers of America by a French surgeon, John Esquemeling (c.1660–1700), who apparently served with the buccaneers from 1666 to 1674. It was translated into English in 1684 and proved a useful, if not always accurate, source of information about buccaneers for later writers of marine literature such as Daniel Defoe and John Masefield.