[2] In French West Africa, the term refers to handcrafted banana-shaped boats used by traditional fishermen.
There are two types of sails with differences in their shapes, the square one is used mainly for fishing near the coast and is only useful for tailwinds, while the triangular-shaped ones are used to transfer goods from one place to another by maintaining a bowline direction.
There are accounts of 17th and 18th century Caribbean pirates using pirogues to attack and take by force much larger vessels including sloops and even barca-longas.
A pirogue has "hard chines" which means that instead of a smooth curve from the gunwales to the keel, there is often a flat bottom which meets the plane of the side.
Doug Kershaw's 1961 hit "Louisiana Man" includes the line "he jumps in his pirogue headed down the bayou".