Term
Boucan
Etymology
From the Tup\xC3\xAD-Guaran\xC3\xAD mokaem, a wooden frame for smoking meat over a slow fire. The French boucan entered English from the early seventeenth-century French settlers of western Hispaniola.
Definition
The wooden frame on which the cattle-hunters of the western Hispaniola interior smoked beef and pork in the first half of the seventeenth century. The hunters themselves came to be called boucaniers — men of the boucan — and when Spanish pressure drove them out of the inland hunting camps and onto the sea as freelance raiders against Spanish shipping, they took the name with them. The term boucanier entered English as buccaneer by the 1660s.
