BUC'CANEER' (Fr. bout-al:ler, from bourna, smoke-house, or place for curing meat; See be low). A title applied to the adventurers who were known to the French as •libuslicrs, to the Spanish as 'demons of the sea,' and among themselves as 'brethren of the coast.' These pirates infested the Caribbean Sea and harried the Spanish Main and the coasts of North Amer iee in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries. The ruthless religious wars of the Sixteenth Century in Europe produced a body of daring fighters and seamen, like Drake, Hawkins, and Davis, who obtained large wealth in privateer ing operations against Spain, which were little better than legalized piracy according to the standards of a more humane age, although justified by the ideas and methods of their own time. Naturally enough, when in 10S0-85 the English Government undertook the suppression of freebooting and the semi-legal way was closed, open piracy was resorted to by the wild and reckless spirits whom the region and the age produced in such numbers. 'Buccaneers' is the name especially applied to the pirates of the Seventeenth Century; those of the Eighteenth were known as 'marooners; The buccaneers at first had their headquarters on the little island of Tortuga del Mar, off the northwest coast of San Domingo, in the Bahama Channel,which was the main line of Caribbean commerce. They raided San Domingo, and, taking the cattle from the Spanish plantations, dried the meat in build ings known in French as bouean, and sold it to passing vessels which put in for provisions. Later they made these very ships a prey, and took to the sea themselves. From the Elizabethan sea men, who made war according to the ways of their age upon Spain, through the earlier buc caneers like Sir Henry Morgan, who confined his attacks to Spanish towns and vessels, and was given a kind of left-handed recognition by Spain's enemies, and Captain Kyd, who repre sents the transition to the out-and-out pirate, the line of development continues straight to the notorious marooners like Blackbeard, Roberts, and Avery. The name `marooners' came
from the practice of the later pirates of maroon ing, or putting their victims whom they did not otherwise dispose of ashore on desert islands or other inhospitable coasts.
The story of the buccaneers, as it has been told, is much encumbered with fable. Its prin cipal sources are the narrative of the Dutch man Esquemeling, who served with Morgan. and seems to have told a fairly correct story. This narrative was translated from the Dutch into French and English. Capt. Charles Johnson edited, in the early part of the Eighteenth Cen tury, numerous chap-book histories of pirates, and highwaymen. His first edition was entitled General History of the Pyrates of New Prori denee (1724-27), and the second, The History of Highwaymen and Pirates (1734-42). Con sult, also, History of the Buccaneers of America (London, 1816; reprinted 1891) ; Archenholz• The History of the Pirates, Freebooters, or Bur ea»rers of America, translated front the Gerinab (London, 1807) ; Pyle, editor, The Buccaneers and Ilarooners of America (London, 1891), \Odell contains the narrative of Esquemeling; and Stockton, Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts (New York, 189S).