Taino Barabicu

The above engraving is by De Bry (printed 1590) based on a watercolor by White.
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

You may have celebrated this past Labor Day holiday with a BBQ, but did you know where the name BBQ came from? And, since this is a blog about piratical food, what does it have to do with pirates?

On December 6, 1492 Christopher Columbus arrived in Hispaniola. The island, called La Espanola in Spanish, was far from a deserted wilderness. It was inhabited by seagoing Native Americans called Taino Indians who are believed to be relatives of the Arawak people of South America. Scholars disagree on the exact numbers, but the population could have been as few as 100,000 or as many as 400,000. Today the island Hispaniola is known as Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Many of the islands in the Caribbean were stocked with cattle and hogs by the Spanish on their routes to Central and South America in case they needed to resupply their ships with food en route. The resident Taino figured out how to dry and smoke the meat on a rack over a smoldering fire. According to H.L. Mencken in “The American Language” from 1919 the word barbeque comes from the Spanish word barbacoa which comes from the Taino words “Ba” from baba (father); “ra” from Yara (fire); “bi” from Bibi (beginning) and “cu” from Guacu (the sacred fire). So, “Taino Barabicu” means sacred fire pit. I know some of you probably consider your state of the art grill the sacred fire pit, but read on…

The Arawak word buccan refers to a wooden frame for smoking meat. Enter the French who also inhabited the island and the word for the wooden frame became boucane. So, the French hunter who smoked feral cow and pig meat on a boucan became a boucanier, perhaps an early term for the grill master. You see where this is going? English colonists further changed the word boucanier to buccaneer. And here the grill master allusion departs and visions of pirates come into view. The first usage of the word buccaneer is recorded in 1661 (with its original meaning). English settlers in Jamaica began to use the term buccaneer as synonymous with pirate, especially after Alexandre Exquemelin’s book The Buccaneers of America was published in English in 1684. This French writer knew his subject through his employment with the French West India Company, and as a confidante of and possibly barber-surgeon for Captain Henry Morgan. Put all that in your grill and smoke it.