The passage from the book is actually a footnote:
"The word 'buccaneer' originated in a native people's term for smokehouse, which the French pronounced 'boucan'. The original boucaniers didn't board ships and steal treasure; they were the jerky kings of the Western hemisphere."
Just curious if this is also the etymology of the word "bacon", and whether the " jerky" alluded to in the footnote was in any way like the bacon (whether streaky or not) we have now.
Bacon etymology thanks to the Oxford English Dictionary:
Etymology: < Old French bacon, -un (= Provençal bacon , medieval Latin bacōn-em ), < Old High German, bahho , bacho , Middle High German bache , backe , buttock, ham, side of bacon < Germanic bakon- , cognate with bako-z , back n.1; compare Old Dutch baken bacon.
- The back and sides of the pig, ‘cured’ by salting, drying, etc. Formerly also the fresh flesh now called pork.
c1330 - Poem temp. Edw. II 388 in Pol. Songs 341* - For beof ne for bakoun..Unnethe wolde eny do a char.
1377 - Langland Piers Plowman B. v. 194 - As a bondman of his bacoun his berde was bidraueled.
c1386 - Chaucer Wife of Bath's Prol. 217 - The bacoun was nought fet for hem..That som men fecche in Essex at Donmowe.
c1460 - J. Fortescue Governance of Eng. (1714) 73 - In Fraunce, the People salten but litill meate, except their Bacon.
?1523 - J. Fitzherbert Bk. Husbandry §121 - Her [a sow's] body..wyll be as good baken as a hogge.
1620 - T. Venner Via Recta iii. 53 - Bacon is not good for them that haue weake stomacks.
...
And so on. This is not the etymology of the word Bacon, as the OED demonstrates, the word goes back 300 years before the Buccaneers. I will ask experts I know/read and see what the smoked meat the buccaneers was like.