Who were the real buccaneers?
For centuries, pirates posed a real threat along Florida’s coasts. Scattered records indicate that Diego “El Mulato” Martin, a pirate of African-Spanish descent who hailed from Cuba, may have plundered Caribbean islands and the Gulf Coast in the 1600s, and English buccaneer Robert Seales launched a famous raid on St. Augustine, a settlement on Florida’s Atlantic coast, in 1668.
Scholars typically use the term “buccaneer” to refer to pirates who operated in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico during the so-called Golden Age of Piracy, roughly 1650 to 1726, says Jamie Goodall. A staff historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military History, Goodall studies pirates of the Caribbean and Atlantic worlds with a focus on their economic lives.
Life as a buccaneer was very difficult, she notes. Crews often made their living by attacking cargo ships, which meant that to turn any sort of profit, the buccaneers would have to travel to a nearby island and fence their loot for cash—a drawn-out, difficult process with no guarantee of reward. Exhausted by lack of food, disease and the otherwise grueling pace of survival on a ship, buccaneers often served just one or two “ventures” before retiring.
And despite their reputation as total outlaws, buccaneers often operated as “an extension of colonial authority,” Goodall notes. As the English crown found itself overtaxed with maintaining control of its many colonies, privateers would patrol the seas on behalf of the colonial state in exchange for money. Even the term “buccaneer” is a vestige of colonialism: the term comes from the Arawak word boucan, a wooden framework that Indigenous Caribbean populations like the Taínos and Caribs would use to suspend and smoke meats over an open fire and dry them. French colonists adopted the term as boucanier, referring to the landless hunters who survived off game in Hispañola and Tortuga and attacked Spanish ships, and English colonists later Anglicized the word to describe the pirates aiding and attacking trade ships around the colonies.
Buccaneers were also complicit in the exploitation and enslavement of local Indigenous populations and people of African descent, Goodall says. During the earliest period of European colonialism in Florida, Indigenous groups such as the Tocabaga, the Mocoço, the Pohoy, and the Uçita—to name just a few communities that lived in the immediate Tampa region—were ravaged by Spanish pirates who came up from Cuba, for instance.
Goodall takes exception to the notion, popularized by some historians, of pirates as democratic outlaws who provided a sort of equal-opportunity lifestyle for women and oppressed racial groups on the high seas. While the historical record shows that some freed, formerly enslaved Africans and Indigenous people worked on buccaneer ships, the pirates also benefitted from and engaged in the trade in enslaved people.