Marooners were another special kind of pirate troubling the Spanish ships. The term derives by the Spanish word “cimarrona” that means “deserter” or runaway.
They were sailors escaped from the Spanish navy that was more cruel than the English one.
A second group of marooners were the Cimmaron Negroes. These were slaves brought to the Americas by Spain
Then the term identified those pirates left on deserted isles as punishment. The most famous of these Marooned men was the privateer Alexsander Selkirk, the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.
The Picaroon was a term coined in 1830’s to define a pirate and slaver (=schiavista). In fact in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the slave trade was a lucrative business, some pirates became slavers, others sold slaves captured from the merchant ships to the American colonies.
John Hawkins (1532-95) was the first English privateer to start this business. In 1562 he made the first of three voyages as a slaver. He sailed from England to West Africa, loaded 3000 slaves and sold them on the island of Hispaniola Caribbean welcomed fugitive slaves, that preferred joining a pirate ship than living on the plantations as a slave.