Istwa Nou

The French and English driven out of Saint Kitts settled on Tortuga, taking it off the small Spanish garrison holding it. A contemporary called them smoked out hornets, which is close to accurate. What they built had no chief and no formal articles beyond the agreements men made with one another case by case, and an early writer described them as amphibious, since they lived half on land and half at sea. They hunted the wild cattle of northern Hispaniola and cured the meat on wooden frames over slow fires, a method taken from the indigenous people of the islands. The French word for the frame produced boucanier, which English turned into buccaneer, and the same practice gave every language the word barbecue. They called themselves the Brethren of the Coast. By 1667 their way of life had been written down by the first historians of the Antilles, so a stateless community of hunters and sea raiders was described in print while it was still going.