Brethren of the Coast

Definition

A loose self-designation of the seventeenth-century Caribbean buccaneers operating from Tortuga, Port Royal, and the western Hispaniolan coast against Spanish shipping and shore settlements. The Brethren had no formal constitution and operated more as an informal mutual-aid arrangement than as an organised polity: captains coordinated for specific operations, parted ways for others, and recognised one another’s right to use the shared shore bases. The term was used in contemporary sources from approximately the 1640s onward and went out of common use by the end of the buccaneering era around 1690.