Buccaneer

Definition

An anti-Spanish raider of the seventeenth-century Caribbean, originally a cattle-hunter on the western Hispaniolan coast and later a freelance mariner operating against Spanish shipping and shore towns. Buccaneers held commissions, formal or informal, from English, French, or Dutch colonial governors and operated more as irregular naval auxiliaries than as outright pirates. The era ended in the 1690s with the Treaty of Ryswick (1697) and the subsequent suppression of buccaneer commissions by the colonial governments.