Lusty-buccaneers [extra Quality] -

How? He paid a "fiddler" to follow him around playing music. He bought twenty hogsheads of ale. He hired sex workers by the dozen. There are records of buccaneers betting entire ingots of gold on which cockroach could cross a tavern floor faster. They would buy silk shirts, wear them until they rotted, and then steal new ones.

The term "lusty" in the 17th century did not merely refer to carnal desire (though that was certainly part of it). In the Elizabethan and Stuart eras, "lusty" meant full of health, vigor, and powerful animal spirits. To be a Lusty-Buccaneer was to be a force of nature: a man who thrived on the razor’s edge between starvation and sudden, explosive wealth. This is the story of those men—the drunkards, the mutineers, and the hedonists who turned the Caribbean into the world’s first outlaw state. To understand the Lusty-Buccaneers, we must first throw away the term "pirate." Pirates were usually opportunistic criminals. Buccaneers, specifically, were a guild of hunters. Lusty-Buccaneers

Originally, the word boucanier referred to French outcasts living on Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti/Dominican Republic) who smoked meat on a wooden frame called a boucan . These men were a motley crew of runaway indentured servants, escaped convicts, and deserters. They lived off wild cattle and hogs, wearing raw leather from head to toe. He hired sex workers by the dozen

This is why they remained "lusty." They did not hoard wealth. Hoarding implies a future. The buccaneer lived only in the present moment—the squeeze of the trigger, the burn of the rum, the warmth of a partner’s skin. No discussion of Lusty-Buccaneers is complete without addressing the women who defied the era. While most crews were male, history records several "lusty" women who took up the cutlass. The term "lusty" in the 17th century did