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So Many Rogues!
Buccaneers, Privateers, and Corsairs
Shortly after Christopher Columbus's first voyage of discovery to the New World, Spain turned its attention to settlement. By the first quarter of the sixteenth century, Spanish farms and ranches dotted the countryside of Hispaniola, the Greater Antillean island that today comprises Haiti (to the west) and the Dominican Republic (to the east). Attempts to colonize the New World were successful, and the center for Spanish Empire in the Americas was firmly rooted in Santo Domino, on the island's southern coast.
With the discovery of gold an silver in South America and Mexico, many of Hispaniola's agrarian settlers headed for the mainland to make their fortunes, leaving crops and livestock behind to fend for themselves. Within a short time, these unattended animals wandered into the hillocks and savannas of the island's interior, where they quickly became feral populations. In fact, during the first half of the seventeenth century, wild pigs and cattle outnumbered the human population on Hispaniola.
The seventeenth century was aptly known as the "Leather Age." Because of its properties of strength, flexibility, and durability, leather was a much desired component for anything involved in transportation, including sailing ships, saddlery, and carriages. The high demand created a tremendous market for cattle hides and pigskins, and the early seventeenth century witnessed the emergence of a specialized hunter, one who roamed the savannas of Hispaniola in search of these "wild" animals. The men who hunted these formerly domesticated livestock were mostly marooners, shipwreck survivors, and escaped slaves. They tended to travel in loosely-organized groups of six to eight and roamed the savannas for months at a time, subsisting on meat seasoned with lemon and water. The hides they obtained from the animals they killed were dried in "boucans" (a Taino word, from the natives that inhabited Hispaniola when the Europeans arrived), small huts built from green sticks gathered on the plains. It was from these "smoke houses" or "boucans" that these men became known as "boucaniers," or, as we refer to them in English, "buccaneers".
The hides, once cured, would be sold or traded for goods delivered by European merchant ships that put into clandestine ports along the island's northern coast. This upset the Spanish government in Santo Domingo because they could not tax this illicit commerce. So, when numerous attempts to disband the buccaneers failed miserably, the government decided to undermine the financial prospects of these "wild and savage" men who roamed Hispaniola's northern plains. Spanish soldiers systematically slaughtered all of the feral pigs and cattle on the island. Almost overnight, the boucanier became men without an enterprise.
These highly specialized hunters were now out of work. And who was responsible for their unemployment? The Spanish government! In retaliation for their plight, the boucaniers set out to destroy the economic prospects of Spain. The Spanish Empire in the New World relied heavily on shipments of supplies from Europe. In return, they sent natural resources (gold, silver, and precious stones, among other things) back to Spain in heavily laden ships. Their predictable shipment schedules allowed the recently "displaced" boucanier to earn a new and reasonable living while simultaneously inflicting substantial economic damage on the Spaniards. By plundering Spanish wealth on the high seas, the infamous pirates of the Caribbean were born!
Like pirates, privateers engaged in robbery, pillaging, and plundering at sea. They,however, were authorized to do so by an official decree from the government, and carried what is known as a "letter of marque," a document that said as much.
Corsairs -- from the Italian corso ("chase"), thus literally "one who gives chase" -- also operated with a commission from a government. The term, however, has come to be associated with privateers who sailed in the Mediterranean Sea off the Northern coast of Africa, out of Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers, Sale, and ports in Morocco. These were the infamous Barbary Pirates, or Barbary Corsairs. |