"Buccaneer of the Caribbean" from Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates.
Buccaneers were a kind of privateer or free sailors[further explanation needed] particular to the Caribbean Sea during the 17th and 18th centuries. First established on northern Hispaniola as early as 1625, their heyday was from the Restoration in 1660 until about 1688, during a time when governments in the Caribbean area were not strong enough to suppress them.[2]
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 boucans to make viande boucanée – jerked meat or jerky – which they sold to the corsairs who preyed on the (largely Spanish) shipping and settlements of the Caribbean. Eventually the term was applied to the corsairs and (later) privateers themselves, also known as the Brethren of the Coast. Although corsairs, also known as filibusters or freebooters, were largely lawless, privateers were nominally licensed by the authorities – first the French, later the English and Dutch – to prey on the Spanish, until their depredations became so severe they were suppressed.[3]
Etymology
The term buccaneer derives from the Caribbean Arawak word buccan, which refers to a wooden frame on which Tainos and Caribs slowly roasted or smoked meat, commonly manatee. The word was adopted into French as boucan, hence the name boucanier for French hunters who used such frames to smoke meat from feralcattle and pigs on Hispaniola. English colonists anglicisedboucanier to buccaneer.[4]
About 1630, French interlopers were driven away from the island of Hispaniola and fled to nearby Tortuga. French buccaneers were established on northern Hispaniola as early as 1625,[5] but lived at first mostly as hunters rather than robbers; their transition to full-time piracy was gradual and motivated in part by Spanish efforts to wipe out both the buccaneers and the prey animals on which they depended. The buccaneers' migration from Hispaniola's mainland to the more defensible offshore island of Tortuga limited their resources and accelerated their piratical raids. According to Alexandre Exquemelin, the Tortuga buccaneer Pierre Le Grand pioneered the settlers' attacks on galleons making the return voyage to Spain. The Spaniards also tried to drive them out of Tortuga, but the buccaneers were joined by many more French, Dutch, and English adventurers who turned to piracy.[6] They set their eyes on Spanish shipping, generally using small craft to attack galleons in the vicinity of the Windward Passage. With the support and encouragement of rival European powers, they became strong enough to sail for the mainland of Spanish America, known as the Spanish Main, and sacked cities.
Perhaps what distinguished the buccaneers from earlier Caribbean sailors was their use of permanent bases in the West Indies. During the mid 17th century, the Bahama Islands attracted many lawless people who had taken over New Providence. Encouraged by its large harbour, they were joined by several pirates who made their living by raiding the Spanish on the coast of Cuba. They called this activity buccaneering.[7] Their principal station was Tortuga, but from time to time they seized other strongholds, like Providence, and they were welcomed with their booty in ports like Port Royal in Jamaica. At first they were international. In 1663 it was estimated that there were fifteen of their ships with nearly a thousand men, English, French, and Dutch, belonging to Jamaica and Tortuga. As time went on and the European governments asserted their authority, the buccaneers first became separated by nationalities and then in time were suppressed altogether, leaving behind only dispersed bands of pirates.[2]
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.
Viewed from London, buccaneering was a budget way to wage war on England's rival, Spain. The English crown licensed buccaneers with letters of marque, legalising their operations in return for a share of their profits. The buccaneers were invited by Jamaica's Governor Thomas Modyford to base ships at Port Royal. The buccaneers robbed Spanish shipping and colonies, and returned to Port Royal with their plunder, making the city the most prosperous in the Caribbean. There were even Royal Navy officers sent to lead the buccaneers, such as Christopher Myngs. Their activities went on irrespective of whether England happened to be at war with Spain or France.
Among the leaders of the buccaneers were two Frenchmen, Jean-David Nau, better known as François l'Ollonais, and Daniel Montbars, who destroyed so many Spanish ships and killed so many Spaniards that he was called "the Exterminator".
While the buccaneers were powerful it was not only hostility to Spain, but also lack of authority, that prevented the other states from ending the old state of affairs in which, even when they were at peace with Spain and Portugal in Europe, there was 'no peace beyond the Line'. The West Indies were beyond the range of the European international system. Sometimes this was for their advantage but on the whole, with the intermingled possessions, trade rivalries, and disputes about territorial rights, the local conditions led to conflicts. The West Indies continued to be one of the centres of international strife throughout the eighteenth century although by that time it was regulated in the same way as in Europe, and had become inseparable from the European wars.[2]
During the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1665, de Ruyter attacked Barbados with a strong squadron, and the English had no choice but to base their defence on the buccaneers whom the governor of Jamaica had previously been trying to suppress. They were unmanageable and destroyed where they conquered, but they mastered the Dutch colonies of St. Eustatius and Tobago. In 1666, however, when the French joined the Dutch in the war, the weakness of this policy was proved. The English hoped to capture the French plantations of St. Kitts, where there were new settlers of both nations, and so they declined to make a new agreement for neutrality. They made what was intended to be a surprise attack, but was an ignominious failure, and the English settlers in the island had to surrender unconditionally. More than 8,000 of them were shipped away, and their property was seized by the French. Lord Willoughby, the able governor of Barbados, got together an expedition for a counter-stroke, but his fleet was broken up by a hurricane in which he perished. The French captured one island after another. In 1667 naval ships from England regained the command of the sea and made various conquests, but the Peace of Breda re-established the status quo in March of that year.
Henry Morgan was knighted in 1674 and became lieutenant-governor of Jamaica. In the late 1670s there was a succession of raids on Spanish ports. In 1680 a party made its way across the Isthmus of Panama and, sailing in captured Spanish ships, pillaged the coasts and commerce of the Pacific. They had not been long on their journey when the Anglo-Spanish treaty of 1680 was signed, which at last stipulated for a real peace beyond the Line and indirectly recognised the right of the English to trade in West Indian waters. When the buccaneers returned by way of Cape Horn in 1682, the survivors found themselves treated as pirates. The French, within a very few years, also controlled their buccaneers, and in the Nine Years' War (1688-1697) they were no longer an important factor. Until about 1688 the governments were not strong enough, and did not consistently attempt, to suppress the buccaneers.[2]
In January 1684, Havana responded to the attacks by the buccaneers of the Bahamas in the event known as the Raid on Charles Town.[citation needed]
In the 1690s, the old buccaneering ways began to die out, as European governments began to discard the policy of "no peace beyond the Line".[citation needed] Buccaneers were hard to control; some even embroiled their colonies in unwanted wars. Notably, at the 1697 joint French-buccaneer siege of Cartagena, led by Bernard Desjean, Baron de Pointis, the buccaneers and the French regulars parted on extremely bitter terms.[citation needed] Less tolerated by local Caribbean officials, buccaneers increasingly turned to legal work or else joined regular pirate crews who sought plunder in the Indian Ocean, the east coast of North America, or West Africa as well as in the Caribbean.
Legal status
Howard Pyle – Buccaneers attacking a much larger Spanish galleon
Sometimes the buccaneers held more or less regular commissions as privateers, and they always preyed upon the Spaniards; but often they became mere pirates and plundered any nation.[2] As a rule, the buccaneers called themselves privateers, and many sailed under the protection of a letter of marque granted by British, French or Dutch authorities.[citation needed] For example, Henry Morgan had some form of legal cover for all of his attacks, and expressed great indignation at being called a "corsair" by the governor of Panama.[8] Nevertheless, these rough men had little concern for legal niceties, and 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.[9] Furthermore, even those buccaneers who had valid letters of marque often failed to observe their terms. The legal status of buccaneers was still further obscured by the practice of 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]
Simultaneously, French and English governors tended to turn a blind eye to the buccaneers' depredations against the Spanish, even when unlicensed.[citation needed] But as Spanish power waned toward the end of the 17th century, the buccaneers' attacks began to disrupt France and England's merchant traffic with Spanish America, such that merchants who had previously regarded the buccaneers as a defence against Spain now saw them as a threat to commerce, and colonial authorities grew hostile.[citation needed] This change in political atmosphere, more than anything else, put an end to buccaneering.[citation needed]
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.[10]
Crews generally had no regular wages, being paid only from their shares of the plunder, a system called "no purchase, no pay" by Modyford or "no prey, no pay" by Enqueueing. 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.[11]
Howard Pyle – Buccaneers extorting tribute from the citizens of a captured city.
Naval
Buccaneers initially used small boats to attack Spanish galleons surreptitiously, often at night, and climb aboard before the alarm could be raised. Buccaneers were expert marksmen and would quickly kill the helmsman and any officers aboard. Buccaneers' reputation as cruel pirates grew to the point that, eventually, most victims would surrender, hoping they would not be killed.[12][bettersourceneeded]
Land
When buccaneers raided towns, they did not sail into port and bombard the defences, as naval forces typically did. Instead, they secretly beached their ships out of sight of their target, marched overland, and attacked the towns from the landward side, which was usually less fortified. Their raids relied mainly on surprise and speed.[12][bettersourceneeded] The sack of Campeche was considered the first such raid and many others that followed replicated the same techniques including the attack on Veracruz in 1683 and the raid on Cartagena later that same year.[citation needed]
Spanish authorities always viewed buccaneers as trespassers and a threat to their hegemony in the Caribbean basin, and over the second half of the 17th century, other European powers learned to perceive them in the same way. These new powers had appropriated and secured territories in the area and needed to protect them. Buccaneers who did not settle down on agriculture or some other acceptable business after the so-called Golden Age of Piracy proved a nuisance to them, too. Spanish anti-pirate practices became thus a model for all recently arrived colonial governments. Some expanded them.
When caught by anti-pirate English authorities, 17th and 18th century buccaneers received justice in a summary fashion, and many ended their lives by "dancing the hempen jig", a euphemism for hanging. Public executions were a form of entertainment, and people came out to watch them as they would for a sporting event today. Newspapers reported details such as condemned men's last words, the prayers said by the priests, and descriptions of their final moments in the gallows. In England, most executions took place at Execution Dock on the River Thames in London.
In the cases of more famous prisoners, usually captains, their punishments extended beyond death. Their bodies were enclosed in iron cages (for which they were measured before their execution) and left to swing in the air until the flesh rotted off them—a process that could take as long as two years. The bodies of captains such as William "Captain" Kidd, Charles Vane, William Fly, and Jack Rackham ("Calico Jack") were all treated this way.
It is doubtful many buccaneers got off with just a time in the pillory. However, a pirate who was flogged could very well spend some time in the pillory after being beaten. "The most common shaming punishment was confinement in the pillory often with symbols of their crimes."[13]
In literature
After the threat began to abate, literature brought buccaneers to glory as example of virility and self-reliance. Daniel Defoe’s works like Robinson Crusoe (1719), Captain Singleton (1720), and A General History of the Pyrates (1724) (purportedly written by Defoe) set the tone for the glamorous ways in which later generations would perceive them.[14][pageneeded]
Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence by ship or boat-borne attackers upon another ship or a coastal area, typically with the goal of stealing cargo and other valuable goods. Those who conduct acts of piracy are called pirates, and vessels used for piracy are called pirate ships. The earliest documented instances of piracy were in the 14th century BC, when the Sea Peoples, a group of ocean raiders, attacked the ships of the Aegean and Mediterranean civilisations. Narrow channels which funnel shipping into predictable routes have long created opportunities for piracy, as well as for privateering and commerce raiding.
A privateer is a private person or vessel which engages in maritime warfare under a commission of war. Since robbery under arms was a common aspect of seaborne trade, until the early 19th century all merchant ships carried arms. A sovereign or delegated authority issued commissions, also referred to as letters of marque, during wartime. The commission empowered the holder to carry on all forms of hostility permissible at sea by the usages of war. This included attacking foreign vessels and taking them as prizes and taking crews prisoner for exchange. Captured ships were subject to condemnation and sale under prize law, with the proceeds divided by percentage between the privateer's sponsors, shipowners, captains and crew. A percentage share usually went to the issuer of the commission.
Sir Henry Morgan was a Welsh privateer, plantation owner, and, later, Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica. From his base in Port Royal, Jamaica, he and those under his command raided settlements and shipping ports on the Spanish Main, becoming wealthy as they did so. With the prize money and loot from the raids, Morgan purchased three large sugar plantations on Jamaica.
The era of piracy in the Caribbean began in the 1500s and phased out in the 1830s after the navies of the nations of Western Europe and North America with colonies in the Caribbean began hunting and prosecuting pirates. The period during which pirates were most successful was from the 1650s to the 1730s. Piracy flourished in the Caribbean because of the existence of pirate seaports such as Port Royal in Jamaica, Tortuga in Haiti, and Nassau in the Bahamas. Piracy in the Caribbean was part of a larger historical phenomenon of piracy, as it existed close to major trade and exploration routes in almost all the five oceans.
Port Royal is a town located at the end of the Palisadoes, at the mouth of Kingston Harbour, in southeastern Jamaica. Founded in 1494 by the Spanish, it was once the largest and most prosperous city in the Caribbean, functioning as the centre of shipping and commerce in the Caribbean Sea by the latter half of the 17th century. It was destroyed by an earthquake on 7 June 1692 and its accompanying tsunami, leading to the establishment of Kingston, which is now the largest city in Jamaica. Severe hurricanes have regularly damaged the area. Another severe earthquake occurred in 1907.
Corsairs were privateers, authorised to conduct raids on shipping of a foreign state at war with France, on behalf of the French crown. Seized vessels and cargo were sold at auction, with the corsair captain entitled to a portion of the proceeds. Although not French Navy personnel, corsairs were considered legitimate combatants in France, provided the commanding officer of the vessel was in possession of a valid letter of marque, and the officers and crew conducted themselves according to contemporary admiralty law. By acting on behalf of the French Crown, if captured by the enemy, they could in principle claim treatment as prisoners of war, instead of being considered pirates.
Tortuga Island is a Caribbean island that forms part of Haiti, off the northwest coast of Hispaniola. It constitutes the commune of Île de la Tortue in the Port-de-Paix arrondissement of the Nord-Ouest department of Haiti.
This timeline of the history of piracy in the 1680s is a chronological list of key events involving pirates between 1680 and 1689.
The Golden Age of Piracy is a common designation for the period between the 1650s and the 1730s, when maritime piracy was a significant factor in the histories of the North Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
Roche Braziliano was a Dutch pirate from in the town of Groningen. His piratical career lasted from 1654 until his disappearance c. 1671. He was first made famous in Alexandre Exquemelin's 1678 book The Buccaneers of America; Exquemelin did not know Braziliano's real name, but historians have argued his probable real name was Gerrit Gerritszoon and that he and his parents had moved to Dutch Brazil. He is known as "Roche Braziliano", which in English translates to "Rock the Brazilian", due to his long exile in Brazil.
David Marteen was a Dutch privateer and pirate best known for joining Henry Morgan’s raids against Spanish strongholds in present-day Mexico and Nicaragua. He is also the subject of a popular buried treasure legend.
The Brethren or Brethren of the Coast were a loose coalition of pirates and buccaneers that were active in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, and Gulf of Mexico. They mostly operated in two locations, the island of Tortuga off the coast of Haiti and in the city of Port Royal on the island of Jamaica.
This timeline of the history of piracy in the 1640s is a chronological list of key events involving pirates between 1640 and 1649.
This timeline of the history of piracy in the 1650s is a chronological list of key events involving pirates between 1650 and 1659.
Captain John Coxon, sometimes referred to as John Coxen, was a late-seventeenth-century buccaneer who terrorized the Spanish Main. Coxon was one of the most famous of the Brethren of the Coast, a loose consortium of pirates and privateers. Coxon lived during the Buccaneering Age of Piracy.
Edward Mansvelt or Mansfield was a 17th-century Dutch corsair and buccaneer who, at one time, was acknowledged as an informal chieftain of the "Brethren of the Coast". He was the first to organise large scale raids against Spanish settlements, tactics which would be utilised to attack Spanish strongholds by later buccaneers in future years, and held considerable influence in Tortuga and Port Royal. He was widely considered one of the finest buccaneers of his day and, following his death, his position was assumed by his protégé and vice-admiral, Henry Morgan.
Pierre le Picard (1624–1690?) was a 17th-century French buccaneer. He was both an officer to l'Olonnais as well as Sir Henry Morgan, most notably taking part in his raids at Maracaibo and Panama, and may have been one of the first buccaneers to raid shipping on both the Caribbean and Pacific coasts.
The Capture of Fort Rocher took place on 9 February 1654, during the Franco-Spanish War (1635–1659). Equipped with one siege battery, a Spanish expedition of 700 troops attacked the buccaneer stronghold of Tortuga, capturing the Fort de Rocher and 500 prisoners including 330 buccaneers and goods valued at approximately 160,000 pieces-of-eight. The Spanish burned the colony to the ground and slaughtered its inhabitants, leaving behind a fort manned by 150 soldiers. They possessed the island for about eighteen months, but on the approach of the expedition under Penn and Venables were ordered by the Conde de Peñalva, Governor of Santo Domingo, to demolish the fortifications, bury the artillery and other arms, and retire to his aid in Hispaniola.
Francis Witherborn was an English buccaneer, privateer, and pirate active in the Caribbean. He is best known for his brief association with Henry Morgan.
Henry Morgan's raid on Lake Maracaibo, also known as the Sack of Maracaibo and the Battle of Lake Maracaibo, was a military event that took place between 16 March and 21 May 1669 during the latter stage of the Anglo-Spanish War. English privateers commanded by notable Buccaneer Henry Morgan launched an attack with the purpose of raiding Spanish towns along the coastline inside of Lake Maracaibo in the Spanish Province of Venezuela.
↑ Kemp, P. K.; Lloyd, Christopher (1965), The Buccaneers, Tower Publications, Inc., pp. 5–7. First published in the United States by St. Martin's Press, New York [1960] as Brethren of the Coast: Buccaneers of the South Seas. Includes a critical list of sources.
↑ Corrodingly, D, D. (2006). Under the Black Flag. Random House. p.97.
↑ Thomas Salmon (1746), Modern history, or the Present State of All nations, University of Lausanne p. 243
1 2 Vallar, Cindy (1 November 2002). "The Buccaneers"(self-published work). Pirates and Privateers: The History of Maritime Piracy. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 9 January 2017– via cindyvallar.com.
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