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Buccaneers are a kind of privateer or free sailor particular to the Caribbean Sea that were most popular during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Originally the name applied to the landless hunters of wild boars and cattle in the largely uninhabited areas of Tortuga and Hispaniola. The meat they caught was smoked over a slow fire in little huts the French called boucanes to make viande boucanée – jerked meat or jerky – which they sold to the pirates that preyed on the (largely Spanish) shipping and settlements of the Caribbean. Eventually the term was applied to the pirates and (later) privateers themselves, also known as the Brethren of the Coast. Buccaneers were nationally diverse and were a general nuisance in the Caribbean but most commonly targeted the Spanish. Though pirates, also known as freebooters, were largely lawless, privateers were nominally licensed by the authorities – first the French, later the English and Dutch – to prey on other countries, particularly the Spanish, until their depredations became so severe they were suppressed.

Etymology

The term buccaneer derives from the Caribbean Arawak word buccan, a wooden frame on which Tainos and Caribs slowly roasted or smoked meat, commonly manatee. From it derived the French word boucane and hence the name boucanier for French hunters who used such frames to smoke meat from feral cattle and pigs on Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). English colonists anglicised the word boucanier to buccaneer.

English settlers occupying Jamaica began to spread the name buccaneers with the meaning of pirates. The name became universally adopted later in 1684 when the first English translation of Alexandre Exquemelin's book The Buccaneers of America was published.

Lifestyle

A hundred years before the French Revolution, the buccaneer companies were run on lines in which liberty, equality and fraternity were the rule. In a buccaneer camp, the captain was elected and could be deposed by the votes of the crew. The crew, and not the captain, decided whether to attack a particular ship, or a fleet of ships. Spoils were evenly divided into shares; the captain received an agreed amount for the ship, plus a portion of the share of the prize money, usually five or six shares.

Crews had no regular wages, being paid only from their shares of the prize, a system called "no purchase, no pay" by Modyford or "no prey, no pay" by Exquemelin. There was a strong esprit among buccaneers. This, combined with overwhelming numbers, allowed them to win battles and raids. There was also, for some time, a social insurance system guaranteeing compensation for battle wounds at a worked-out scale.

Buccaneers were both pirates and privateers.[citation needed] As a rule, the buccaneers that called themselves privateers sailed under the protection of a letter of marque granted by British, French or Dutch authorities.[citation needed] Nevertheless, buccaneers exploited every opportunity to pillage Spanish targets, whether or not a letter of marque was available. Many of the letters of marque used by buccaneers were legally invalid, and any form of legal paper in that illiterate age might be passed off as a letter of marque. Furthermore, even those buccaneers who had valid letters of marque often failed to observe their terms; the legal status of the buccaneers who were privateers did not absolve them of punishment from the Spanish authorities, who regarded them as heretics and interlopers, and thus hanged or garroted captured buccaneers entirely without regard to whether their attacks were licensed by French or English monarchs.[citation needed]