Very weird, it turns out that there is a common language link between sea-pirates and garden-cookery.

The native tribes of the Caribbean developed a wooden frame for smoking meat, which they called “buccan”. This method of cooking became popular among that particular subset of Europeans who spent much of their time in ships, stopping on small, sparsely populated islands. In other words, it became popular with pirates.

Now, the French sailors pronounced the native word the way the natives did, and so buccan entered French as “boucane” and the people who ate it became boucaniere, which entered Anglicised to buccaneer.

On the other hand, the Spanish duidn’t try and match the native pronunciation and simply called it barbacoa, which then entered English as barbecue.

Fantastic, eh? Two unrelated words, with two unconnected meanings — barbecue and buccaneer — actually have the same parent: a wooden frame used by Caribbean natives to cook meat.