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Updated: June 24, 2025
The fire underneath the grille was kept low, and fed with green sticks, and with the offal, hide, and bones of the slaughtered animal. This process was called boucanning, from an Indian word "boucan," which seems to have signified "dried meat" and "camp-fire." Buccaneer, in its original sense, meant one who practised the boucan. Meat thus cured kept good for several months.
The word 'buccaneer' itself comes from the French: boucan means the wood-fire at which the pirates dried and smoked their meat, and these fires, blazing on deserted islands, must often have warned merchant vessels to avoid an ever-present danger.
They planted tobacco and sugar, followed the boucan, and lived as they had lived in the past at Hispaniola. Whenever England was at war with Spain the Governor of the island gave them commissions to go privateering against the Spanish. A percentage of the spoil was always paid to the Governor, while the constant raiding on the Main prevented the Spaniards from attacking the new colony in force.
The place where the flesh was smoked was called by the Indians a "boucan," and the same term, from the poverty of an undeveloped language, was applied to the frame or grating on which the flesh was dried. In course of time the dried meat became known as "viande boucannée," and the hunters themselves as "boucaniers" or "buccaneers."
It was at this crisis in their history that they began to be known as buccaneers, or people who practise the boucan, the native way of curing meat. It is now time to explain the meaning of the word and to give some account of the modes of life of the folk who brought it to our language.
We made a slaughter o' them and smoke-cured the flesh for the harnish casks the Frenchmen are the clever ones at that work 'boucan, they would be saying; and, man, it aye minded me o' a bochan wi' the smoke and that"; and I was thinking while Angus McKinnon was speaking of the wee black huts that our folk will be calling bochans to this day, and wondering if the French had put that name on them, for smoky they are indeed.
On the second morning Craddock went ashore in search of some proof whether Sharkey and his men were still upon the island. What he found reassured him greatly. Close to the shore was a boucan of green wood, such as was used for preserving the meat, and a great store of barbecued strips of ox-flesh was hung upon lines all round it.
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