FIRE, COOKING, AND VESSELS. 261 



scribes the ■wooden grating set up on four forked posts, " wliicli 

 in their language they call a houcan ;" on this they cooked 

 food with a slow fire underneath, and as they did not salt their 

 meat this process served them as a means of keeping their 

 game and fish.^ To the word houcan belongs the term huii- 

 canier, hucaneer, given to the French hunters of St. Domingo, 

 from their preparing the flesh of the wild oxen and boars in this 

 way, and applied less appropriately to the rovers of the Spanish 

 Main. The process has been found elsewhere in South Ame- 

 rica,^ and perhaps as far North as Florida,^ The Haitian name for 

 a framework of sticks set upon posts, harhacoa, was adopted 

 into Spanish and English; for instance, the Peruvian air- 

 bridges, made over difficult ground by setting up on piles a 

 wattled flooring covered with earth, are called harhacoas ;* and 

 Dampier speaks of having " a Barbacue of split Bambooes to 

 sleep on." 5 The American mode of roasting on such a frame- 

 work is the origin of our term to harhecue, though its meaning 

 has changed to that of roasting an animal whole. The art of 

 bucaning or barbecuing, as practised by the Americans, is 

 found in Africa, in Kamchatka, the Eastern Archipelago, and 

 the Pelew Islands f and it merges into the very common pro- 

 cess of smoking meat to make it keep. 



The mere inspection of these simple and wide- spread va- 

 rieties of cooking gives the ethnographer very little evidence 

 of the way in which they have been invented and spread over 

 the world. But from the more complex art of Boiling there is 

 something to be learnt. There are races of mankind, such as 

 the Australians, the Fuegians and some other South American 

 tribes, and the Bushmen, who do not seem to have known how 

 to boil food when they first came into the view of Europe, 



' Lery, Hist, d'un Voy., etc., 1600, p. 153. Southey, Brazil, vol. i. p. 216 ; 

 Tol. iii. pp. 337, 361. The word boucan seems couuected with that now com- 

 monly used in Brazil. " Mocaem, doude fisemos moquem, assar na labareda." 

 Dias, Die. da Lingua Tupy. 



- Wallace, p. 220. Humboldt and Bonpland, ^ol. ii. p. 556. Purchas, vol. v. 

 p. 899. 3 Hakluyt, vol. iii. p. 307. 



■• Tscliudi, 'Peru,' vol. ii. p. 202. '" Dampier, vol. ii. part i. p. 90. 



* Burton, 'Central Africa,' vol. ii. p. 282. Kracheninnikow, p. 46. Dampier, 

 Tol. iii. part ii. p. 24. Kcate, p. 203. See Earl, ' Papuans,' p. 165. 



