William C. Davis - The Pirates Laffite: The Treacherous World of the Corsairs of the Gulf

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Copyright 2005 by William C. Davis

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Davis, William C., 1946
The pirates Laffite: the treacherous world of the corsairs
of the Gulf/William C. Davis.1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Laffite, Jean. 2. Laffite, Pierre, d. 1826? 3. PiratesLouisiana
Biography. 4. PiratesMexico, Gulf ofBiography. 5. Privateering
Mexico, Gulf ofHistory19th century. 6. New Orleans, Battle of,
New Orleans, La., 1815. 7. LouisianaHistory18031865Biography.
8. Mexico, Gulf ofHistory19th century. I. Title.
F374.L2D385 2005
976.3'05'0922dc22 2004029150
ISBN -13: 978-0-15-100403-4
ISBN -10: 0-15-100403-x

Text set in Adobe Caslon
Designed by Linda Lockowitz

Printed in the United States of America
First edition

A C E G I K J H F D B

For Bird, again

In the days of d'Arraguette,
He Ho He Ho!
It was the good old times.
You ruled the world with a switch
He Ho He Ho!

O LD F RENCH C REOLE SONG, A NONYMOUS

Why, sir, it will be very difficult to get at particulars,
some of them being of a strange character!
But there are some still living who had a hand in those matters.

J OHN L AMBERT, CIRCA 1840

I found in my researches, twenty years ago, romantic
legends so interwoven with facts that it was extremely difficult
to separate the historical truth from the traditional.
I am sure that the same cause will make it impossible
to arrive at the truth of his life.
His only biographer at last must be the romancer.

J OSEPH H. I NGRAHAM, S EPTEMBER 1, 1852

PREFACE A Corsair's Name

ONE Vintage Bordeaux 17701803

TWO New Men in a New World 18031806

THREE Brothers United 18061809

FOUR Brothers in Business 18091811

FIVE Dawn of the Corsairs 18101811

SIX Origins of the Laffite Fleet 18111813

SEVEN Lords of Barataria 18131814

EIGHT The Rise of the Filibusters 1814

NINE Patriots for a Price 1814

TEN The End of Barataria 1814

ELEVEN The Fight for New Orleans 18141815

TWELVE Spies for Spain 18151816

THIRTEEN A Career of Betrayals 18151816

FOURTEEN Distant Horizons 1816

FIFTEEN The Birth of Galveston 18161817

SIXTEEN A Season of Treachery 1817

SEVENTEEN Deadly Friends 18171818

EIGHTEEN Winds of Change 1818

NINETEEN The Dying Dream 1819

TWENTY Farewell to Galveston 1820

TWENTY-ONE The Last Voyage 18201823

TWENTY-TWO The Legend of the Laffites

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

He left a corsair's name to other times,
Linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes.

L ORD B YRON, "T HE C ORSAIR, " 1816

O N F EBRUARY 1, 1814, his publisher issued ten thousand copies of the great English poet Lord Byron's newest creation, "The Corsair," three cantos of brilliant imagination that quickly sold out and went into a second printing. In an age that thrilled at the idea of bold buccaneers defying authority and convention, the poet's tale of the gallant Captain Conrad, a pirate risking even his beloved shipMedorafor the love of a slave girl forced into apasha's,harem, fed the appetite of a generation hungry for romance and adventure. How much more appealing was it when Conrad, having the cruel pasha at his mercy, refused to take his life even to save his own. It was his one "virtue," amid the life of crime.

It is poetically typical of the lives of the brothers Pierre and Jean Laffite, smugglers, merchants of contraband, revolutionaries, spies, privateers, and pirates as well, that so little in their memory fits their lives, and nothing less so than their persistent association with Byron's poetic epic. When he wrote it, the Laffites were nothing more than minor figures on the crowded criminal landscape of early Louisiana. The poet likely never heard of either, and certainly his corsair was not patterned after Jean Laffite. Conrad's single virtue was a romantic device, and had nothing to do with the Laffites' celebrated and much exaggerated act of patriotism in aiding American forces in repelling the British at the Battle of New Orleans, which took place three weeks short of a year after publication of "The Corsair." And yet, romance and legend will not yield to break the bond between poem and pirate.

Throughout history, circumstances having nothing to do with poetry and romance occasionally conspire to produce an environment perfect for the explosion and spread of privateering and piracy, conditions that can vanish just as quickly as they appear. Never in the history of the United States were the times so right for it as in the years of young nationhood, when an adolescent America was beginning its spread across the continent amid the clash of immigrant colonial cultures, and a European war of gigantic proportions whose tremors upset the New World as well. In unsettled times, enterprising men found opportunity to build their own fortunes and wrest new nations away from old. Many tried. Few succeeded. Some became legends. The privateer-smugglers from Bordeaux and their ilk could not have flourished at their craft anywhere other than there and then, any more than the experience of the corsairs of the Gulf would have been the same without the brothers Laffite. In the virtues and crimes of them all lay not just the stuff of romance, but zephyrs to fill the sails of the nascent American character.

O'er the glad waters of the dark blue sea,
Our thoughts as boundless, and our soul's as free
Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam,
Survey our empire, and behold our home!

P ERHAPS IT IS FITTING for men whose lives so lent themselves to adventure and melodrama that their name traced its origins to a word meaning something like "the song." For centuries men named Lafitte inhabited the fertile reaches between the river Garonne and the Pyrenees Mountains that separated France from Spain. Proximity to the often lawless Pyrenees, and life in the part of France most remote from the center of politics and culture in Paris, encouraged a spirit of independence in the region's inhabitants, and a tendency to look as much to the world as to their country for opportunity. Among those named for "the song," that independence appeared in their stubborn refusal of a uniform spelling of their name. Lafitte, Lafit, Laffitt, Laffite, and more, all emerged between the river and the mountains, and for many the song in their name was a Siren's call to the broader world. Immediate access to the sea on the Bay of Biscay tied many of them to trade and seafaring. The lush vineyards on either side of the Garonne, and the Gironde estuary formed at its confluence with the Dordogne River, turned more of them into vintners.