It did not help that Pierre lost his pocketbook in May, and with it several promissory notes on which they had yet to collect,28 including a large one for $500. In April Pierre put $146.30 on account with merchant Antoine Lanaux to buy twenty-three barrels of ship's biscuit, no doubt for Jean to take to Barataria, yet five months later he had not paid the debt and Lanaux filed suit for collection.29 In October shortly after Lanaux filed his suit, Pierre sold a slave cook he had owned for six years to raise $500, then borrowed $217.50 from his old partner Robin, and in November borrowed $500 more from another acquaintance, pledging two slaves as surety. In five months' time he had not paid this debt either. When Robin went looking for Pierre at Bernard Tremoulet's Exchange Coffee House at the corner of Chartres and St. Louis and other haunts, no one knew his whereabouts. Indeed, no one admitted even to knowing him, or offered to settle the debt on his behalf.30 Meanwhile Pierre's ill-advised sale of that leased slave in 1806 caught up with him yet again. Already in March of this year William St. Marc had sued him and Pierre was forced to post a bond for $2,000 to guarantee his appearance in court. Pierre lost the suit and the judge levied a settlement of $1,133.39 against him. By December Laffite had paid barely more than $500 of the debt, and so the original owner of the slave filed another suit against Pierre for $611.68, which forced Pierre to post another $1,000 with the court even though he denied the debt. 31 If the courts wanted money from the Laffites, they would have to stand in line, but before long the courts would be interested in the Laffites for reasons other than debt, for Pierre's absence from New Orleans that fall involved much more than evading his creditors.
Part of the problem, of course, was the outbreak of war with Britain on June 18, 1812. General James Wilkinson arrived to take command of the defenses of New Orleans and that region of the Gulf coast on July 9, 1812, but found it ill-prepared. Immediately he began strengthening existing fortifications, including works at English Turn, and trying to inspire the local American and Creole population to volunteer, with discouraging results. With all this on his hands, his dispatches to the war department in Washington made virtually no mention of smugglers.32
Mounting debt may have forced them to it, but most likely the Laffite brothers could not resist the opportunity they saw. Never before had the same individuals controlled the acquisition of prize goods through piracy or privateering, their delivery to the market vicinity, subsequent smuggling or transport of the goods to the waiting market, and then their wholesale and retail sale. The potential for profit in controlling every phase of the operation beckoned, and now the brothers resolved to do just that, taking advantage of the shortages caused by the war and the British blockade, and the distraction of the authorities thanks to the war.
The endeavor required only the organization and imagination of sophisticated entrepreneurial minds, and the Laffites had those to be sure. Around October the brothers purchased a prize schooner brought into Barataria by a corsair, very possibly Captain Aury, for now the Laffites engaged Aury's old hand, the forty-year-old Italian Jean Jannet, to go to New Orleans to enlist a crew. The schooner was a workhorse privateer vessel, simple and efficient to operate with its two masts, and infinitely adaptable into variations such as the topsail schooner, the foretopsail schooner, and the hermaphrodite brig. 33 The brothers had to arm the vessel, which was easy enough with a schooner. Privateer schooners and feluccas—small, wide, three-masted boats that were light drafted and fast, yet held a lot of cargo—usually carried only muskets rather than cannon, few being large enough to mount any artillery other than an eighteen-pounder, a gun tube nine feet long and thirty-nine hundred pounds, with a five-inch bore. Some carried long cannon called "long Toms" regardless of their weight or bore, often on swivels. Larger vessels might have two or more carronades, which fired through ports on the gunwales.34
Meanwhile Jannet hired a man named Antonio to scour the town for likely hands, then bring them to a house on the outskirts where Jannet signed them on and paid each an advance of $10 against future shares of prize spoils. This outlay alone probably explained some of the money Pierre was borrowing that fall. When Jannet had about forty men engaged, he sent them to Grand Isle by way of Donaldsonville and Bayou Lafourche to avoid attracting the attention of the port authorities or customs and naval officers downriver. Jannet took another route to Barataria, and was there to meet the crew when they arrived. Also waiting was the schooner, now fitted out at Laffite expense with two small cannon mounted on deck. What she did not have, apparently, was a commission.35
Before the ship could sail early in November, both Laffite brothers arrived to see Captain Jannet take her out on her—and their—maiden corsairing voyage. That done, the brothers had other things to do. Another privateer had dropped anchor and unloaded twenty-six bales of cinnamon, fifty-four linen shirts, three pieces of Russian sheeting for making bed linen, seven pieces of canvas, one bundle of twine, and one handkerchief, goods worth an estimated $4,004.89. 36 Five pirogues and twenty-two men waiting nearby took on the cargo—an ordinary transaction, only Pierre would be with Jean for the return to New Orleans. It was probably his first smuggling run, and one that both brothers expected to be routine.37
The boats loaded, the Laffites raised sails and started northward up the bay, picking their way through innumerable small islets and into Little Lake Barataria. By nightfall on November 16 they were still under sail approaching the northern end of the lake, where they would pass a spot known locally as the Temple and enter Bayou Rigolett, which they would follow, relying on their oars, on their way to Bayou Barataria and the rest of the way to the back door to New Orleans. Suddenly in the bright moonlight the Laffites made out the dim shapes of boats ahead of them, sailing without identifying flags. At once the brothers decided to flee, but the wind was against them. They ordered their crews to drop sails and pull at their oars as they turned to run for the distant shore. The other boats gained on them in the time this took, and the chase continued for only a few minutes before the lead boat behind them came within eighty yards, close enough to hail.
One of the Laffites called out, demanding to know who followed them, and out of the darkness came the reply "United States Troops." One of the Laffites yelled back to the pursuers that if they came any closer he would "fire into them & kill them every one." Meanwhile the smugglers continued pulling feverishly, while others began throwing their incriminating cargo overboard, one man carelessly tossing away his gun in the confusion. Finally they reached the shore and fled the boat, only to see that some of their pursuers were about to run ashore a short distance away. In the moonlight the smugglers could see that many of the men wore the regulation army summer uniform of white roundabouts and pantaloons, with black bayonet scabbards and cartridge boxes attached to black leather belts, and some wore dragoon helmets with plumes. A few even wore dragoon uniforms of blue trimmed with white, while others wore the winter uniform of blue with red facings. It was impossible to mistake them for anything other than the military. 38
When the soldiers started to get out of their boats, some of the smugglers yelled at them not to set foot on land or they would "put every man to instant death."39 Then the Laffites saw another boat loaded with fifteen armed men approaching their beached pirogues, and the trap became evident. Their pursuers had split up, and now had the Laffites between two fires if they started shooting. Seeing this, some of the smugglers ran into the woods, while others headed back to their pirogues. It was quickly apparent that a water escape attempt would be futile, but a few smugglers tried to jump into a pirogue and row away in the darkness. Their captors fired a volley into the boat, killing one man and persuading the rest to give up. Almost beyond question, it was the first time that Jean and Pierre Laffite suffered or witnessed a fatality in their business.40
The Laffites discovered that they had fallen prisoner to Lieutenant Andrew Hunter Holmes, onetime Natchez lawyer and Mississippi militia commander who now in the war with Britain took a commission in the 24th United States
Infantry. He was the very man they had embarrassed a few weeks earlier. Following that debacle, his superiors had ordered him to take a detachment of thirty or forty men to assist revenue officers in suppressing smuggling via Little Lake Barataria. Holmes was aided now by a report received just days earlier from John Ballinger, whom Wilkinson had ordered out the month before to perform a thorough investigation of the passes and rumored defenses at Barataria and the mouth of the Lafourche. Ballinger had discovered that at Barataria vessels drawing less than three feet of water could approach within two leagues—about six miles—of New Orleans, though sometimes the vessels would have to pole because the bayou was too narrow for rowing and too swampy to cordelle by towing from the banks. In high water vessels could come all the way to the Mississippi.
With an eye toward the possibility of British invasion, Ballinger concluded that it would be practicable for troops to advance on New Orleans by this route, and to guard against that he suggested that a post be built at the Temple, a mound of shells and Indian bones on the shore of Lake Salvadore that sat five feet above the highest tide and had a bluff with a command of any approach for three-fourths of a mile. "No other place can come in competition with it," he believed. All water routes to New Orleans by Barataria Bay came together below the Temple, so a battery there would oversee everything. Still, the land was low and subject to flooding at every uncommon tide and was commanded by higher ground on the same island. Meanwhile Ballinger found that the Lafourche had two mouths, a narrow one on the east called the Little Bayou one league west of the west pass of Grand Isle, and a bigger one called the Grand Bayou that opened three leagues farther west. A battery of three cannon at the fork of the Lafourche would command the latter, he thought. He suggested that local Creole volunteers would be best suited to garrison such a battery, "as I consider it a very unhealthy situation."41
Holmes had come twenty-five miles through the bayous from New Orleans without sighting anything suspicious, but he now knew the best spots to catch smugglers in action. The night before encountering the Laffites, he had spotted a single pirogue that refused to stop when hailed. A shot persuaded the occupants to come ashore and surrender, and Holmes confiscated a small amount of contraband but let the crew go because of their cooperativeness after capture—meaning they probably told him he could expect to find much larger spoils if he kept moving down Bayou Barataria.42
Holmes's men rowed their own and the smugglers' boats back across the lake to a temporary camp, and there they searched their captures carefully, finding among other things the cinnamon, two finely sharpened swords, three loaded muskets with their hammers cocked ready to fire, and a variety of dirks and daggers. Holmes asked each of the captives to identify himself, and probably for the first time learned that Pierre and Jean Laffite were present. When he spoke with Jean Laffite, who was clearly in command, he asked him where the contraband came from, and Laffite frankly admitted that it came in aboard a very powerful privateer currently near Grand Isle.43
Holmes took the captured boats, cargo, and prisoners back to New Orleans, losing a smuggler who escaped along the way, and turned them over to the district court. Despite the protests of the Spanish owners who appeared to identify their property, Judge Hall's court ordered the goods sold and the proceeds distributed among the captors and the government.44 Still, consul Diego Morphy considered the outcome of the expedition encouraging enough that he advised Spain's governor-general in Havana of the affair, and asked him to publicize there and in Vera Cruz the capture of the smugglers and their goods as inducement to merchants to continue shipping merchandise. He did not mention the Laffites by name, however.45 The Laffites and their companions escaped immediate charges and were apparently released pending introduction of any formal charges, free to go about town unmolested. Jean, at least, hurried back to Grand Isle, and soon after his return he saw something to make the loss of the cinnamon a pittance.
His enterprise was growing. In January Jannet brought the brothers' corsair schooner into Barataria with a Spanish prize taken several miles from Campeche on the Yucatán peninsula. The vessel had been outbound from Campeche for Havana with a cargo of slaves, logwood, indigo, and cochineal. Jannet put her crew ashore at Sisal, near Campeche, then sailed her back to Barataria. 46 She was named the Dorada—the Golden One—a so-called hermaphrodite brig owned by Francisco Ajuria. No one much liked the traditional brig, but the Spaniards sometimes sailed polacres that could be altered into hermaphrodite brigs, with square sails on the foremast and the mainmast rigged with triangular sails like a schooner. This was a very effective adaptation for the wind and waters of the Gulf and the coastal trade. A big hermaphrodite brig might displace 150 tons and measure 80 feet at the keel.47
Laffite sold the seventy-seven slaves aboard the Dorada on the spot to Sauvinet, who paid $170 a head. That alone brought in just over $13,000, probably more than enough to pay for the corsair and its first voyage and to give the brothers a taste of what they could expect. The cargo was worth another $5,000.48 Almost at once Pierre and Jean began buying the goods and arms necessary to convert their new prize into a second privateer. She had a single deck, measured sixty-two and one-half feet in length, just over eighteen feet in the beam, and displaced sixty-nine tons. There were no frills, no galleries or figurehead, but she was fast and strong enough to mount eight guns.49 Before long the Dorada was ready, and the Laffites sent her out with Jannet in command. Neither Jean nor Pierre went along. Their proper place was ashore overseeing the entire operation, not off on the Gulf hunting prizes. They had engaged Jannet, a professional, to do that for them, and he did it well.
Not many days out the Dorada took a Spanish schooner and by late February Jannet had her back at Barataria, where the Laffites found aboard her $8,460 in silver coin, forty-nine gold doubloons worth $784, a jewel box valued at $150, and two boxes of wine worth $24. All told, their second haul made them $9,418. The captured schooner was of no use to them, but rather than burn her, they turned her over to her captain and crew and let them sail away, having shown considerable courtesy to the Spaniards temporarily in their custody. It was a course they would follow frequently hereafter. Everyone shared in the prize, including a new arrival, Vincent Gambi, who would become a frequent denizen of Grand Isle and an associate, if not a close friend, of the Laffites. 50 Not ones to waste time or opportunity, the Laffites sent the Dorada out again before the end of the month, this time with Pierre Cadet in command. The Laffites had something else in mind for Jannet. They were going to build a fleet.
Late in March 1812 the French privateer La Diligent had arrived at the Balize and tried to come up the river under the familiar plea of distress.51 Denied, she attempted to land several trunks of foreign goods clearly intended for smugglers, but customs men caught her in the act. Fraser took possession of the contraband, then searched the vessel and found more, plus ten slaves from Africa. He put an officer aboard and had her taken first to Fort St. Phillip upstream, and later to New Orleans. She had been built in Bermuda in 1808, and was recently out of Charleston, South Carolina, under command of Captain John Anthony Gariscan, and one thing not found aboard her was a commission or other papers to establish her as a lawful privateer. Gariscan, who had been a corsair based in Guadaloupe until 1810, and in Cuba before that, claimed that he had his letter of marque from the French consul in Charleston, and had sent his commission and ship's papers to New Orleans ahead of the vessel.52 Fraser knew enough to be suspicious of Gariscan, inasmuch as he believed the fellow had landed some ninety illegal blacks on Breton Island the year before.53
Even if the court was inclined to favor the privateers, men such as Gariscan made it hard. No sooner was La Diligent in port under Fraser's care than Gariscan began enlisting as crewmen some of the men recently discharged from the privateer Marengo after Jones brought her into port, making La Diligent liable for seizure for being outfitted within the United States. Gariscan even openly engaged locals to act as guides, which he hardly needed if he intended to
put back to sea on legitimate business. Grymes was convinced that if La Diligent were allowed to leave port with her cargo of goods and Africans intact, the cargo would be landed on the coast and smuggled back into New Orleans within days. Still, Gariscan's commission from the French consul in Charleston appeared to be in order, and Grymes had to let La Diligent go. But he communicated his suspicions to Jones of the navy and Fraser of the revenue service, and Fraser vowed to watch the ship all the way down the Mississippi until she sailed out of sight on the Gulf.54
Beyond question, Gariscan brought his ship into Barataria as soon as he was beyond Fraser's grip. There he unloaded his cargo and became well acquainted with the Laffites if he had not already made a deal with Pierre in New Orleans. By the end of the year Gariscan had sold or traded La Diligent to Jean and Pierre Laffite.55
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