Buccaneering Era

The buccaneering era is the long mid-period of Caribbean piracy, running from roughly the 1650s to the late 1690s. It takes its name from the French boucanier — originally a hunter who smoked beef and pork on the wooden frame called a boucan on the unsettled west of Hispaniola, before being driven onto the sea by Spanish pressure on the inland hunting camps. The buccaneers were not freebooters in the later sense; they operated under formal commissions issued by the English, French, and Dutch colonial governments, against a Spanish empire that recognised no European sovereignty in the Indies west of the papal Line of Demarcation.

The era’s decisive theatre was the Spanish silver economy. Caribbean shipping converged twice a year on the flotas at Portobelo and Veracruz, where the bullion of Peru and New Spain was loaded for the Atlantic crossing; raids on the harbour towns and on the inland approaches to those ports were the buccaneers’ principal economic activity. The leading commanders — Henry Morgan above all — led mixed land-and-sea expeditions of fleet strength, with several hundred to over a thousand men. The era ended when the second Treaty of Madrid (1670) and its successors required the colonial governments to suppress privateering against Spain, and the trade migrated either into the legal fringe or out into the Atlantic for the Golden Age that followed.