The Pirates Laffite

by William C. Davis

  By May the preparations on Galveston were as complete as they were likely to be, and Jean had to know that he had pushed Patterson's goodwill in remaining on the island more than two months since the Enterprises visit. It was time to leave. He had his three ships ready, the General Victoria, the Minerva, and the Blanque. The detaining of Pierre and the Pegasus left him with less armament than he had anticipated, but he knew from experience that he could find what he needed elsewhere. Indeed, when Pierre contacted him after the arrest of the Pegasus, the brothers agreed that Pierre would remain in New Orleans and make another attempt to get men and matériel out of the city and to a convenient spot on the coast where Jean might take them aboard. Either Pierre would get word to him of the rendezvous, or else Jean would hover off the coast at a safe remove, looking for a sign that it was time to come in.

  A taunting last echo of the failed attempts to profit by the filibusters and the revolutionaries arrived as Laffite was on the eve of departing. James Long appeared at Bolivar Point on April 6 to join his small coterie of followers there, this time bringing his wife, Jane Wilkinson Long.30 Learning of their arrival, Laffite invited them to join him for dinner a few weeks later aboard the General Victoria before he left. Seventeen years later Jane Long recalled that evening, unwittingly providing not only the last eye-witness description of Jean Laffite, but also testimony of what was apparently one of his final days on the continent. 31 "He was, in every particular the very reverse of what her imagination had pictured him," a friend remembered her saying in 1837:

  He was of middle stature—perhaps a little above it—graceful ... dark hair, brown complexion and a pair of eyes as vivid as the lightning and as black as ebony—In conversation he was mild, placable and polite; but altogether unjocular and free from levity. There was something noble and attractive in his aspect in spite of its occasional severity; and between the fierceness of his glance, and the softness of his speech, the disparity was striking.... The only complaint which his fair guest could urge against him, was one which it was natural for her sex to make—his want of communicativeness.... The dinner was sumptuous; & many entertaining as well as thrilling adventures were related by several of the party; but all attempts of Mrs. Long to obtain any important information from the host, respecting himself were adroitly and politely parried; and she was compelled to return with as little knowledge as she came, concerning his future operations.32

  He hauled out the old stories of persecutions by Spain and his unyielding hatred of the dons, of how he had been a prosperous sugar planter in the West Indies until forced into a life of privateering. He may even have told them that Laffite was not his real name. After all, what was a name to a man who had spent years as numbers, first 13 and then 19? Deception was a game to the Laffites, and he may well have practiced it for his own amusement by now, in the process self-consciously shaping his own legend.33

  If Mrs. Long saw much of the remnant of the Galveston commune, what she saw was desolation—the burned buildings, the destroyed storehouses, the remains of other vessels stripped and grounded. Warren Hall, who was still with the Longs, recalled that Laffite's men were demoralized after the losses from the hurricane and Patterson's inroads on their takings. Many felt unsure about leaving Galveston for unknown shores, and even Laffite's store of charm had lost its luster. Laffite kept to himself, more aloof than usual. 34

  When the day came to set sail on May 7, Laffite left a few of the huts and some lumber for Hall and Long to use in building Mrs. Long decent quarters on Bolivar Point. That done, Jean set fire to the rest. Some refused to leave with him, such as James Sherwood and James Campbell and his wife.35 Some may have had to resist heavy-handed persuasion in order to stay behind. But in the end Laffite seems to have let each man make his own decision, though he persuaded a few of Long's men to come with him, without making it clear that he did not have valid letters of marque.36 One man who chose to go with Jean was George Schumph, who had failed to reach him on the Pegasus?37 Jean may also have received reinforcements brought in a few days earlier by Pierre, who was reported seen on Bayou Lafourche with five boats loaded with men on their way to Galveston. Jean's mulatto mistress apparently went, too, and a few of Laffite's men who stayed behind recalled twenty years later that when she and Jean left, an infant son went with them.38 When the little squadron of three vessels lifted anchor and sailed through the pass out into the Gulf, the spires of smoke fading in the distance behind them testified not only to the ashes of Galveston, but to the ruination of all that Jean and Pierre Laffite had tried to achieve for a decade. They were cast out to sea by a failed past and about to face an uncertain future.

  Back in New Orleans, there was no future for some of the Laffites' former associates. Pierre was in the city to witness the denouement of the Le Brave case, and the potential fate awaiting all who "go a privateering."39 In March President Monroe faced dealing with convictions in piracy cases at Baltimore, Charleston, Richmond, Savannah, and the eighteen men under sentence at New Orleans. In an attempt to mix charity with a necessary example, he decided that two of the condemned would be executed at each city, and the rest reprieved for sixty days, except for one man to be pardoned in New Orleans. 40 On April 17 he sent an executive order that Desfarges and his lieutenant Robert Johnson were to forfeit their lives in Louisiana.41 Livingston moved for a suspension of the sentence on May 16, perhaps still at the instigation of Pierre Laffite, and Judge Hall heard arguments a week later. On May 24, however, he affirmed the sentence to be carried out the next day.42

  Meanwhile the outbursts of unrest had continued, and by the date of execution there was a common expectation that the condemned would be sprung. Every night through late April to May 24 an armed cadre of two hundred citizens patrolled the streets, in addition to the established city guard, all with orders to shoot if anyone ran from them. The jumpy guards did shoot one man and stabbed another late in April, and soon they were augmented by three companies of United States troops. Then on the morning of April 23 a woman brought a loaf of bread for the condemned, but suspicious jailors broke it apart and found inside a letter telling the prisoners not to despair as their friends were going to set twenty fires in the city and free them within the week. Mysterious fires began to appear almost nightly, all of them some distance away from the jail, in order to draw the guards away. One evening two flares arched over the city. Citizens thought they might have been a signal for an assault on the jail, but apparently its guard refused to be decoyed. On April 25 several officers observed a house where reports said pirates were gathering to plot a jailbreak, only to be discovered and fired on themselves. The same night three fires erupted, but were extinguished before they could do much harm. On May 13 a building on Conti Street erupted in flame, soon spreading to destroy several buildings on either side, including the Conti Ballroom, which backed on the United States Navy arsenal, whose own roof took flame. Soon several grenades exploded, which could be heard throughout the city, leading some to think that the jailbreak had commenced. But no attempt was made after all, and the only result was a somewhat embarrassed Patterson, who was accused of negligence for storing explosives in the city. 43

  An execution was high entertainment for the rougher element in the city. The year before thousands had crowded around the gallows where a Spaniard hanged for murder still dangled, and then the free blacks hurled themselves into Congo dances that a visitor found "shocking to virtue modesty and decency."44 There were no dancers on May 24 when at noon the marshal brought the two condemned to the riverfront. A rumor held that a family had been abducted out in the bayous to be ransomed for the lives of the condemned, but the ceremony went ahead. The doomed men stepped aboard a navy barge, and a substantial crowd, including the biggest military assembly since the war and perhaps Pierre Laffite, looked on as a distraught Desfarges first asked a marshal for a pistol to shoot himself. Then, though bound, he jumped overboard, perhaps hoping to drown rather than hang. Sailors fished him out of the water and he and Johnson
met their ends without further incident.45

  In time most of the others would be hanged as well. Meanwhile, ten days earlier Congress approved a new act reinforcing the death penalty both for piracy and violation of the slave trade prohibition, and decreeing that any American citizen serving on a foreign ship in the slave trade or crewing any vessel wholly or partly owned by United States citizens engaged in that trade should also suffer death.46 After the executions in New Orleans and elsewhere, John Quincy Adams declared his hope that others tempted into questionable privateering "might be made to know the difference between South American patriotism and piracy." 47 Clearly there would be no more leniency with pirates.

  By the time Desfarges and Johnson stopped swinging, Jean Laffite's small squadron was well on its way southward. As so often before, he said many things to many people as to his intentions on leaving Galveston. He told some who remained behind on the island that he had a commission in the infant navy of the Colombian insurgency, which he indeed may have hoped to secure.48 What he told his own men mirrored what Pierre said to Patterson, that the squadron would sail under the flag of Venezuela or Buenos Aires, or perhaps for Bolivar. Men aboard the General Victoria believed they were on their way to Old Providence to corsair with Aury, and Laffite told the same thing to Warren Hall and others.49 At this moment at least one of Aury's privateers was briefly active on the Louisiana coast. The availability of Aury commissions as close as Bayou St. John could not have avoided the Laffites' attention.

  What Jean probably did not tell anyone was that he had no commissions from any of these places as yet.50 Laffite probably intended to take a few Spaniards if possible on his way to seeing whether the situation in Mexico allowed for a secure port. If he had a goal beyond that, it was to go to the Isla de Mugeres off Yucatán to see about creating a new base, and then to Old Providence.51

  Otherwise he could make no definite plans, for he did not know the situation he would find anywhere. Ten days out, on May 22, he came upon the Spanish felucca the Constitution out of Vera Cruz, sailing up the coast to Tampico with a cargo of whisky, oil, quicksilver, indigo, iron, and other goods worth about $10,000. He sent his schooner the Minerva to take her and dispatched both vessels to Galveston, expecting that Long's followers or the remnants of his own people would be able to smuggle her cargo into Louisiana. 52 With Pierre still in New Orleans, Jean probably planned for his brother to dispose of this cargo, and maybe others, to add to their coffers and finance their next establishment.

  The Minerva escorted the Constitution to Soto la Marina, where they landed all of the Spaniard's crew except a slave boy, Juan Morales, whom they kept to sell. They continued to Galveston, where early in June they ran her aground on a sandbar inside the bay and stripped her of her cargo. They loaded a portion aboard the Minerva, and buried the rest in the sand on the shore, though some perishable items would quickly rot in the heat and damp. They also left Morales behind, presumably intending to come back for him and the rest of the cargo after disposing of what they had put on the Minerva. But on June 19 Lieutenant Madison anchored the Lynx offshore and sent an officer to examine the Constitutions wreck. After four days spent pumping out her hold and refloating her, Madison towed her to deep water at high tide. That done, his men explored the beach and found the buried cargo, some of which had been uncovered by wind and surf and plundered by passing Indians. They found dry goods, coffee, liquor, cocoa, and, wandering alone, the slave Morales.53 They also found five men from the Minerva's crew who had, once aware of the bogus nature of the Humbert commission, denounced the taking of the Constitution to their fellow crewmen and then attempted to escape ashore. Madison put them in irons aboard the Constitution and escorted her and the remnant of her cargo to New Orleans.54

  The men went before Judge Hall's bench, where they were indicted on July 19, and soon convicted of piracy. However, their pleas of innocence eventually reached Washington, and on November 21 President Monroe granted them a pardon because of their alleged ignorance of the piratical intent of the Minerva's owners when they sailed. Of more immediate importance, however, their testimony made it generally known by July 1820 that "John Lafitte's squadron" was taking prizes in the Gulf, and that they were doing so as pirates. 55

  Meanwhile Jean Laffite continued along the Mexican coastline, cruising off Campeche and taking a few prizes, most of which he gave back to their captains after seizing any valuable cargo. On at least one occasion he took a Spanish merchantman while himself flying Spanish colors, a sure route to the gallows if caught, but then he ran into bigger problems.56 The General Victoria was his biggest ship, a brig with seven-gun broadsides port and starboard, and more swivel guns mounted on her deck. She had been the Spanish hermaphrodite the Intrépido when taken as a prize two years before, then she was run into Galveston to fit out as a corsair, and for a time she sailed as the New Enterprise before being renamed.57 Now off Sisal on the northwestern corner of Yucatán she took a slave ship, but instead of continuing around to the eastern corner of the Yucatán peninsula to Mugeres, Laffite set their course northeast for Cape Antonio, the westernmost tip of Cuba.

  By late July his two ships, rejoined by the Minerva, sighted a small fleet of Spanish merchantmen escorted by a single armed frigate. He signaled for his captains to come alongside for a consultation, and then moved from boat to boat asking the crews if they were willing to fight for the prizes, something privateers rarely did. He left the men to discuss the question among themselves and inform him of their decision. Soon James Rollins came forward as spokesman and told Laffite that, inasmuch as they had taken nothing more than the Constitution and the slaver in two months at sea, they were ready to fight. Only now, as the men had the smell of profit in their nostrils, did Laffite tell them what the five deserters from the Minerva had discovered, that they sailed under worthless commissions. If they attacked the Spaniards, they would do so as pirates.58

  The men had not bargained for this, and another parlay revealed that thirty-nine were not willing to take the risk. More than that, they wanted to leave the squadron. For once, Jean had misjudged his men. Significantly, not one of the mutineers was French, Spanish, or Italian. Every one of them bore an Anglo-Irish surname, and every one was an American. To stay with Laffite would likely make them near-permanent exiles in some Spanish-speaking tropical wilderness. They wanted to go home. Backed by the strength of their numbers, they demanded one of his ships to take them back to New Orleans.

  It was a virtual mutiny by nearly half of his command, and Laffite could do little or nothing without risking a battle that would damage him sorely even if he won. He was left in a quandary. Neither of the schooners would be big enough to hold the deserting men. At the same time, the remaining men might be too few to man both the larger brig and a schooner. The best solution was to give the mutineers the General Victoria. Besides, brigs had always been a little too large and cumbersome for corsairing in the shallow coastal waters. Having made the decision, he agreed, then sailed all three vessels to Mugeres where he transferred the guns from the brig to the shore and his schooners. That done, the mutineers set sail northward on a port wind for Louisiana. However, Jean Laffite was not done with them yet. By bringing them back to Mugeres on the pretext of off-loading the General Victorias guns, he took them far from their destination, and now they were at sea unarmed. That night he set sail in one of the faster and well-armed schooners, and by next day's light the mutineers found Laffite bearing down on them from the northwest with the wind at his back. They had no choice but to come to when he shouted the order, and then he demanded that Rollins and a mulatto named Long whom he thought to be a ringleader be sent aboard his ship. Rollins was sent back with orders to cripple the brig's rigging and throw most of her masts and spars overboard. Laffite did not send Long back, however, announcing that he intended to send the man to Africa as punishment. Laffite sailed away from the crippled brig and left the men to get to Louisiana the best they could.

  The General Victoria limped n
orthward for more than two weeks before she sighted the Balize on August n. The men were all but starving by the time Rollins, nominally in command, turned her over to customs officer G. B. Duplessis and told him the story of the mutiny. Duplessis viewed their story with skepticism, but stocked the brig with enough food to sustain the men for several days, then sent her and her crew upriver to New Orleans to the marshal, with the word already going out that she belonged to Laffite.59 Soon thereafter District Attorney Dick presented the case against her to Judge Hall. The General Victoria was a vessel from which "sundry piratical aggressions ... restraints, depredations & seizures have been first attempted and made upon the high seas at divers times within the last two years by a notorious Pirate called John Lafitte," he said. He successfully applied to have her forfeited to the court and sold.60 Meanwhile the crew tried to salvage something from their misadventure. They engaged attorney Isaac Preston and through him protested to the court that they had "at considerable risk of their lives induced the said Lafitte to give her up to them." They had not been a party to the original taking of the Intrepido, but they felt entitled to shares from her sale under the 1818 legislation covering rewards for those exposing or turning in unlawful privateers.61 In the end the court awarded prize shares to Rollins, James McHenry, and the rest, and Jean Laffite joined the small fraternity of corsairs who learned the hard way the truth of the prediction that the 1818 legislation would turn one pirate against another.

  It would be some time before Jean Laffite learned the fate of the General Victoria, if he ever did. After parting with her, he returned to cruise off Vera Cruz and on August 12, the day after Rollins turned the brig over to Duplessis, Laffite took the merchant frigate the Castor Limena. His luck continued to run against him, however, for an armed vessel put out after him and retook the prize, though Laffite managed to escape.62 He had a rendezvous to make, and so passed up the coast to Galveston once more, to find the Two Friends, which Pierre had taken out of New Orleans on August 5 with a cargo of provisions on a supposed merchant voyage to Cuba.