Falgoux - Rise of the Cajun mariners: the race for big oil

Copyright 2017 by Woody Falgoux

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Rain Saukas

Cover photo credit: iStock

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-1844-9

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-1846-3

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction

Back in 2001, I underestimated this story. I knew that its colorful, real-life characters took extreme risks to build their industry, but I didnt anticipate how much their oral histories would entertain me. These oilfield boat business pioneers told tales that made me gape, laugh, cringe, and almost cry. Their rise and race to the top of their profession formed a book first published in April 2007 and reprinted multiple times thereafter. Now, almost ten years after the first printing, it is time to update their story. For this new edition, I revisited with the featured families and have written a new Afterword.

Its difficult for me to believe its been fifteen years since my first interview. On that day, November 27, 2001, I drove down a flat, winding road along Bayou Lafourche to Golden Meadow, a tiny Louisiana town about seventy-five miles southwest of New Orleans. Staring through the willow trees at the docked shrimp boats and oilfield tugs, I tried to recall if Id ever heard of my first interviewee, Bobby Orgeron. Id grown up less than an hour up the bayou from Bobbys hometown of Golden Meadow. While I knew many of Bobbys contemporaries in the oilfield, Bobbys name didnt ring a bell. I had no idea what to expect of him.

Bobbys son Lee Orgeron wanted an author to write about the early days of the marine oilfield, a story that up until that point had been almost completely undocumented. I knew that although the oil and gas industry is the planets largest business, much of its inner workings remained a mystery to most people. There had been very few popular books and films on the subject.

The lack of media attention has been particularly true in regard to the offshore oilfield, which only seems to earn significant coverage in the wake of an epic disaster like the BP Oil Spill of 2010. For instance, in Daniel Yergins 1991 Pulitizer-winning book, The Prize , the definitive work on the history of oil and gas, Yergin makes only one reference to the Gulf of Mexico, the birthplace of offshore oil.

Yet, make no mistake, the global economy is dependent on production from offshore rigs. In the United States, offshore mineral revenues account for the largest source of federal income outside of the treasury department. In many third-world countries, offshore petroleum provides the majority of the nations income.

I also knew that this lucrative industry cannot exist without workboats. These vessels can be as small as the 20-foot crew boats that transport workers to the rigs on shallow inland bays, or as large as a 360-foot supply boat, which hauls equipment and provisions to oceanic rigs operating in ten thousand feet of water depth. These capable vessels, which now sail the seven seas, began as something simple, a Louisiana shrimp boat, oyster lugger or fishing skiff, a wooden hull with a low-power engine. The small vessel and its Cajun captain were the geneses of what became an enormous business.

Given the industrys wide scope but almost unknown history, Lee Orgerons project intrigued me. Workboats had piqued my interest ever since my boyhood. All my life, Id admired the regal vessels as they glided down our waterways like marine chariots. When Id pass by the boatmens mansions along Bayou Lafourche, Id hear bits of their improbable stories and wonder just how they had achieved their success.

But writing an honest account about the boat business worried me, too, and I expressed my reservations right away to Lee. Growing up on the bayou, I knew how corrupt the oilfield used to be; I didnt want to write the book unless I could also be fair to the reader and depict the industrys dark side, too. When I brought up this issue to Lee, he shrugged. He didnt see any reason why the boat barons couldnt tell the whole story.

And to the boatmens credit, most of them did. After interviewing many of the industrys pioneers, I settled on four of them, all of whom were native French speakers and who had risen out of a poor, unlettered culture. They lived along lower Bayou Lafourche in and around tiny Golden Meadow. From the bayou, they blazed the worlds seas. In so doing, they walked a line that constantly teetered between fortune and financial ruin. Their stories exemplify how the Cajuns established their place in oilfield history, right alongside the Texans and the Russians, the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, and the Shahs and the Shieks.

Who are the Cajuns? Today, we are a people from a mix of ethnicities with mostly French surnames who inhabit a triangle of rural land bordered by southeast Texas on the west, the suburbs of New Orleans on the east and the center of Louisiana on the north. Either we speak French or our parents or grandparents did. The term Cajuns derives from the Acadians, the people whom the British forced out of Acadia, what is now Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1755 and dispersed all over the world. This expulsion, Le Grande Derangement , is the tragic and inspiring heart of our culture.

In truth, the only way to know the people who developed the offshore oilfield is to understand the Acadian story, which began in the mid-1600s when thousands of mainland French immigrated to eastern Canada to escape France for reasons that ranged from violent clashes with the Protestants to starvation to witch hunts. The settlers initially found peace in Acadia. Politically, the Acadians did their best to stay away from the ever-present French and English conflict as Acadia changed hands between the two crowns nine times during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although the Acadians were French at heart, they were neutral in fact.

In the 1750s, during and after the French and Indian War when Acadia was in English hands, the British governor of Acadia decided he could no longer tolerate the Acadians neutrality. The governor demanded the Acadians sign an unconditional oath of allegiance to the British crown. By signing the oath, the Acadians would have essentially agreed to, if commanded, take up arms against their mother country and against their friends the Indians and also to possibly give up their Catholic religion. The Acadians refused the oath and soon felt the consequences.