boucanier

The Tupi people of Brazil used a wooden frame called a mocaém or boucan to smoke-dry meat over a slow fire. French settlers in the Caribbean adopted both the technique and the word, calling the smoking rack a boucan. Men who used this method to prepare meat—often hunters living wild on Hispaniola—were called boucaniers.

These boucaniers were rough, independent men who hunted feral cattle and pigs on the island, smoking the meat to sell to passing ships. They lived outside colonial law, answering to no government. When Spanish authorities tried to drive them off Hispaniola by killing the feral herds, the boucaniers turned to piracy instead.

The transition from meat-smoker to pirate happened in the 1630s-1650s. Boucaniers joined with other outlaws on the island of Tortuga and began raiding Spanish ships. English borrowed the word as buccaneer by the 1660s. Within a generation, the barbecue origin was forgotten—buccaneer meant pirate, nothing more.

The golden age of buccaneering lasted barely fifty years, but the word outlived the profession by centuries. Today, buccaneer carries a romantic swashbuckling aura that the original meat-smokers would find bewildering. They were subsistence hunters turned desperate criminals, not the dashing adventurers of Hollywood imagination.