Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/272

262 a similar practice is still sometimes found in the island of Sardinia, while among the Beduins, and in places in North and South America, the process comes even closer to that used in the South Seas. It is this wide diffusion of the art which makes it somewhat doubtful whether Klemm is right in considering its occurrence in Australia as one of the results of intercourse with more civilized islands. The natives cook in underground ovens on very distant parts of the coast; sometimes hot stones are used, and sometimes not.

When meat or vegetables are kept for many hours on a grating above a slow fire, the combination of roasting and smoking brings the food into a state in which it will keep for a long while, even in the tropics. Jean de Lery, in the account of his adventures among the Indians of Brazil, about 1557, describes the wooden grating set up on four forked posts, "which in their language they call a boucan;" 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 boucan belongs the term boucanier, bucaneer, 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 America, and perhaps as far North as Florida. The Haitian name for a framework of sticks set upon posts, barbacoa, 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 barbacoas; and Dampier