The Buccaneers of America

THE term Buccaneer, in French Boucanier, is usually applied to certain pirates who during the seventeenth century committed great ravages upon the Spanish settlements in the West Indies, the adjacent main land, and the coast of Chili and Peru, and whose exploits it will be our province to describe in the following pages. Such term was, however, more accurately applied to a body of cattle hunters of all nations, but mainly French, who pursued their avocations in the forests of the Western and North Western districts of the Island of Hispaniola - circumstances to be described hereafter caused these hunters to combine the trade in cattle with that of piracy, and the name, in consequence, lost its first significance of hunter and acquired its modern and better known one of pirate.