What Is a Buccaneer? The Pirate Tampa Bay Named Itself After
This month the Tampa Bay Buccaneers take the field again, and for the rest of the year half the region will be wearing the word across its chest. It is a good word. It is also one most people use as a dressed-up synonym for pirate without ever asking where it came from or what it once meant. Since we sit right in the heart of buccaneer country, and since the whole story turns out to run on smoke, we figured we would sort it out.
First, what is a pirate?
A pirate is the old, simple one. Strip away the movies and a pirate is anyone who robs or attacks ships at sea for private gain, outside the law and under no flag but their own. The word runs all the way back to a Greek term for "one who attacks," and the job has not really changed in a couple thousand years. Pirates belong to no single ocean or century. Wherever there has been cargo worth taking and open water to take it on, there have been pirates. Broad, old, and everywhere. That is the whole category.
So what is a buccaneer?
A buccaneer is a pirate with an address and an origin story, and the origin story is the good part. The buccaneers were a specific crowd working the Caribbean in the 1600s, and they did not start out robbing anyone. They started out cooking.
On the wild edges of Hispaniola and the little island of Tortuga, French and English hunters killed the feral pigs and cattle that ran loose there and cured the meat by smoking it slow over a wooden frame the locals called a boucan. A man who worked a boucan was a boucanier. English sailors heard that word, wore it down, and turned it into buccaneer. So before it meant a sea-robber, the word meant a person standing over a low fire, curing meat in the smoke.
They sold that smoked meat to passing ships and did fine, right up until Spanish authorities decided to run them off their hunting grounds. Cornered and out of work, a good many of them looked at the fat Spanish treasure ships crossing the same water and made a career change. The men named for smoke became the men who raided the Spanish Main, and the name sailed off with them. Henry Morgan was the most famous of the bunch. By the 1680s, buccaneer meant pirate, and the boucan was all but forgotten.
Where the pirate ends and the buccaneer begins
So the two are not opposites. They are nested. Every buccaneer was a pirate, but not every pirate was a buccaneer. Pirate is the whole family tree, spread across every sea and every century. Buccaneer is one branch of it: the 1600s Caribbean crews who came up out of the smoke of Hispaniola and turned their guns on Spain. There is one more wrinkle worth knowing. A lot of buccaneers sailed with a thin coat of legal cover, carrying papers from a government that was glad to see Spanish ships robbed, which set them somewhere between outlaw and licensed raider. A pirate answered to nobody. A buccaneer often answered, at least on paper, to a crown that was happy to look the other way.
Tampa Bay's own buccaneer
Which brings us home. Ask anyone around here about pirates and sooner or later you will hear the name Gasparilla, or Jose Gaspar, the self-styled "last of the buccaneers," said to have terrorized Florida's Gulf coast around the turn of the 1800s. The catch is that he almost certainly never existed. Historians have gone looking and come up empty, and the legend traces back to a railroad and hotel brochure from around 1900. Tampa loved the story anyway, enough to build a whole citywide pirate festival around him, Gasparilla, running since 1904, mock invasion and stolen key to the city and all. The pirate himself is a myth. The town's love of pirates is not, and it eventually stitched the word buccaneer onto an NFL team that suits up this month.
So come be one
Which is a fitting place for us to come in. A buccaneer, remember, was a creature of the smoke long before he was anything else. We keep a whole room full of it on purpose. So while the town pulls the word back on for the season, come spend an evening being a buccaneer in the older sense of it. Find the dark end of the room, light something worth the hour, set something dark beside it, and let the smoke do what it has always done in these parts. The Spanish treasure ships are optional.