The Pirates Laffite

by William C. Davis

  After leaving the Sampson, Laffite continued to haunt the Cuban shipping lanes, and by November 26 was about fifty miles south of Grand Cayman and due west of Jamaica, having taken two Spanish ships and sent one back to Cartagena as his commission required. Now he encountered the American schooner the Columbus Ross out of Jamaica and bound for New Orleans. He showed a remarkably different disposition toward her than he had to the Sampson, if indeed it was Laffite who robbed the latter. "Captain Laffite treated us with the greatest politeness," the Columbia Ross's captain reported, and finding her in a lane frequented by pirates, escorted her some distance west until she was through the Yucatán Straits where he himself had preyed on shipping. On parting, Laffite gave the Columbus Ross some balls for her four-pounder cannon, and spare provisions as well. 59 His act of kindness found its way into the American press, mitigating a little the chagrin evidenced in the New Orleans journals that month when they learned that "the famous LAFITTE of piratical memory" had been captured the previous year, then escaped. "We cannot too deeply regret, that the monster who had shed so much innocent blood, should have, perhaps for the hunderth [sic] time, escaped the sword of justice which has been so long hanging on his guilty head," lamented the editor of the Courier.60

  With the pirates on the run throughout the Caribbean, the merchants whose trade the corsairs preyed on maintained the pressure on Washington to suppress the criminals. Several New Orleans merchants wrote to Senator Johnston on November 26, 1822, that they wanted the government to make the seas safe "if it should require the whole navy of the U. States to effect it—we require it and think we have a right to expect it."61 As if to punctuate their urgency, something happened a few days prior that made the navy's campaign against the pirates take on a personal tone. The captain of the Alligator; ashore chasing pirates on Cuba, was shot and killed in a skirmish. It sparked a storm of protest in Congress.62 Exaggerated complaints of four thousand pirates operating in the Caribbean led to calls for stern means of putting them down, even if the United States had to occupy by force the places where they were based.63 On December 31 Captain David Porter offered to resign his position as a naval commissioner to go to the Gulf to root out the problem. Soon the word went out that early in 1823 Captain Porter would take command of a fleet of eight warships mounting 178 cannon and numbering 1,330 seamen. They would overwhelm the pirates by main force if necessary.64 Sensitive to the potential violation of their sovereignty if they did not make a better effort themselves, Spanish authorities on Cuba started to mount greater patrols against the buccaneers, occasionally taking a corsair. In November the Marte cooperated with the Alligator in its search for the murderers of the American captain.65

  They would not take Jean Laffite now that he was at last, and probably for the first time in his career, an unquestionably legitimate privateer. The years of specious commissions were over, and so were the awkward months of barely disguised piracy. Ironically, Laffite attained his legitimate commission just as the author of so many of his bogus letters of marque came to a transition. On January 2, 1823, General Humbert was found dead in his room in New Orleans, probably killed by alcoholism. Some eulogized what he had been, but none could fail to see what he had become: a sad, foolish parody of what he and the other filibusters had been in their dreams. "His life, public and private, was and has been the most indecorous and vagrant, forever in the taverns, surrounded by a rabble and attending them in their crimes," Spanish consul Garcia had written Apodaca. "Because of him much innocent blood has been shed."66

  Unfortunately, Jean Laffite's days of legitimate privateering would last scarcely five months. On February 4, 1823, his General Santander was cruising in the Gulf of Honduras. He was off the coast about forty miles west of La Cieba, opposite a point of land called Triunfo de la Cruz—Triumph of the Cross—when the first glimmers of light at 5 A.M. revealed a schooner and a brigantine. When he saw the vessels turn to run, he assumed they were Spanish merchantmen and set his sails for a chase. He dogged them for almost seventeen hours until he caught up to the brig well after dark and for an hour traded shots with her. She appeared to be on the verge of striking her colors when instead her captain raised signal lanterns in his rigging calling the faster schooner back to his assistance. It began to be become apparent that Laffite had been decoyed.

  When the schooner opened fire, Laffite and those aboard his ship realized that they were outgunned. Counting the muzzle flashes, men on the General Santander made out a dozen cannon on the brig, and another six on the schooner, including a powerful swivel gun whose sound or shot hitting the General Santander told them it was a fat sixteen-pounder. Laffite had unwittingly taken on either Spanish privateers or warships, or perhaps elements of a British squadron patrolling for pirates. They might even have been pirates themselves, though, if so, they were unusually well armed.

  In one of the exchanges, a direct hit from grapeshot or a splinter of wood from the General Santander struck Jean Laffite a desperate wound. He may not have known the extent of his injury, but he turned command over to his chief lieutenant, though he was conscious enough to shout encouragement to his crewmen. Soon the executive officer fell with a mortal wound, and petty officer Francisco Similien took over. The flashing of the guns in the darkness continued until one o'clock in the morning before Similien broke off the action. He ordered the General Santanders course changed to an easterly bearing to start for Cartagena, while their antagonists sailed off to the north.

  During the night the men on the General Santander stopped her leaks and tended to their wounded. It is unlikely that a ship's surgeon was aboard, but any man experienced at naval action could have seen that Laffite's wound was mortal. He probably knew so, too, though he had experienced no more than one or two combats. Sometime after dawn on February 5, 1823, he died, aged forty-one.67 A few weeks later, on March 10, the General Santander limped into Portobello, Panama, on her way back to Cartagena. A body could not be saved for that long aboard ship, and on the day he died, his crew had buried Captain Jean Laffite at sea. Somewhere in the Gulf of Honduras, probably not far from the Islas de la Bahía, his grave was as lost to time as Pierre's four hundred miles to the north. Perhaps it was fitting for a man who never owned a home or had a country that he died fighting for a people not his own, and that his only epitaph appeared in Cartagena, whose legitimate commissions he never carried, and in Colombia, a place he never lived. "The loss of this brave naval official is moving," said the Gaceta de Cartajena when it learned the news. "The boldness with which he confronted the superior forces which hit him manifests well that, as an enthusiast of honor, he wished to follow it down the road to death rather than abandon it in flight." In a final grim irony, the epitaph appeared only in Spanish, the language of his enemies.68

  The death of Jean Laffite punctuated the demise of privateering in the Caribbean. By the end of 1822 the United States Navy had taken at least thirty-four pirate vessels, and it continued the captures during the next year or so, taking the war against the corsairs to their land bases on Cuba and elsewhere. Five days before Laffite's death Porter was assigned a command in the Caribbean to suppress piracy and protect American shipping, much of which was afraid to sail except when convoyed. He was also to suppress the illegal slave trade. If he took his men ashore in pursuit of pirates, he would so do on his own responsibility, though he was to give any pirates he captured to local Spanish authorities.69 Porter cut corners, and even interfered with the legitimate privateers in the Colombian service, but Porter was not to be deterred by diplomatic niceties.70

  The war against the corsairs came at a price, as when pirates took the Alert of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and killed her captain, or when Porter lost a lieutenant on the Fox to a cannon shot off Puerto Rico. "The work of piracy and murder still goes on," complained the press, but Porter did not relent.71 The Alligator revenged herself in May by taking one pirate schooner and burning another, and the British were as ruthless.72 Reports that winter said thirty-nine pirate vessels oper
ated off the coast of Cuba. By March 1823 the British took half of them, killed twenty pirates, and captured forty more. Meanwhile the Spaniards, too, were taking vessels and killing corsairs. Someone among these various forces had killed Jean Laffite.73

  Porter made his first captures in April, and within forty-three days he had broken up piracy in the Caribbean and forced most of the freebooters to flee inland on Cuba where they would have to face local authorities. By May he sent word home that he had "nearly destroyed all the pirates in the West Indian seas."74 A month later, its privateering days at an end with the close of hostilities against Spain, Laffite's General Santander performed one last official mission. On June 1 she dropped anchor in New York harbor to deliver Leandro Palaceos, Colombia's new consul general, to the United States.75 The brothers Laffite had died at precisely the right moments. With Mexico independent and virtually all of the republican movements in Central and South American successful, a Spanish Main at peace was a world they would not have known.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The Legend of the Laffites

  For him they raise not the recording stone—

  His death yet dubious, deeds too widely known;

  He left a Corsair's name to other times,

  Link'd with one virtue, and a thousand crimes.

  PIRACY DID ENJOY a brief resurgence after Jean's death. In April 1824 even Colombian naval privateers, especially Beluche and his General Bolivar, were aiding in the suppression of Cuban pirates.1 By the summer the corsairs were attacking everything that passed. Those claiming to be privateers took Spanish ships; those who were outright pirates robbed everyone, and it became all but impossible to tell the difference. Reports from Cuba in July said that scarcely a vessel came into Havana without being stopped and plundered by one or the other.2 By October the reassertion of the pirates was such that Secretary of State Adams received a caution that "the temporary cessation of piracies some time before, caused by the presence of a large force on the coast, seems to have induced a delusive and fatal opinion, that the evil was extinguished."3

  It was a bubble, however, for by 1825 piracy was all but finished, especially since Spanish merchantmen were now arming heavily. The few remaining privateers in the now-independent Latin American republics were decommissioned, and the governments stopped issuing letters of marque. With the new nations at peace with the rest of the world, Spanish commerce was no longer a legitimate target by any definition and there was no remaining pretext for privateering against anyone else. The pressure against outright piracy soon ended it altogether.

  Thus the Laffites' trade survived them by barely two years. Had they outlived their occupation, there is little to suggest they could have adapted to another one. Smuggling died out on the United States Gulf coast thanks to falling tariff rates, and when rates went up again dramatically in 1828, smuggling did not return. Pierre had been a merchant many years before, of course, and perhaps the brothers could have gone completely legitimate, but the rise in tariff rates would have hurt them. Filibustering was dead, and though Americans were starting to pour into Texas as sanctioned settlers, neither Laffite had ever owned a piece of ground to plant. Slave smuggling still had some life in Louisiana and Texas, though Mexican authorities would try several expedients to keep slavery in Texas to a minimum, and in any case, no more Spanish slave ships could be taken legitimately. In short, the brothers would have been frozen out on almost every front. The world they had known and in which they could hope to flourish had left them behind, and the new world of the Gulf simply had no room for their kind.

  The obscurity in which the Laffites died naturally gave rise to uncertainty. Stories of Pierre's demise got back to Texas in the 1830s and continued to appear thereafter, but since the popular imagination never seized upon him as it did his brother, less time was spent imagining his death. One story did surface that he was privateering with José Gaspar in the spring of 1822, some months after his actual death, and had been caught in a British trap that resulted in Gaspar's suicide and the sinking of Pierre's vessel.4 Yet in the main, it was his brother about whom everyone wanted to know. Only the dimmest echoes of Jean's death reached the United States, however, and no American journal picked up his obituary from the Bogotá Gaceta. Speculation and eventually fantasy filled the void. Eyebrows in South Carolina rose briefly when a "Captain Lafitte" stepped off the brig Mary from Havana in 1827, though he was too young to have been either of the corsairs. By 1840, as Laffite stories began to be told in growing volume in taverns and on decks along the Gulf coast, some doubted that he was dead.5 In Galveston that year some men who claimed to have known him said they believed he still lived.6 Other stories emerged that the absence of definitive word of Jean's death was proof that, ashamed of his past crimes, he had changed his name and profession after leaving Galveston and begun a new life.7 As if to prove this, in 1842 a Texan traveling in upstate New York met a man who told him that Jean had been a native of Orange County and returned there after leaving Galveston to live incognito as a farmer.8

  Most assumed Jean was dead, though. In 1843 Texan founding father Mirabeau B. Lamar began looking into the Laffite stories and concluded that there were no authentic records of the pirate's death but that he could be assumed to be no longer living. The British visitor William Bollaert, who spent some time at Galveston in the early 1840s, also concluded that Jean was almost surely dead "not many years since, in poor circumstances."9 This still left room for imagination in accounting for his last years. One rumor held that Laffite was killed by his own men after they left Galveston.10 Others knew with certainty that Jean Laffite had succeeded in rescuing Napoleon from St. Helena, and the two of them lived and died in Louisiana, being buried at the Temple. Laffite and Napoleon were cousins, and Jean's uncle John Paul Jones was also buried with them. Laffite, in fact, had fought with Jones on the Bonhomme Richard when she defeated the British Serapis in 1778, about three years before Jean was born.11 Laffite's death in 1823 would have surprised the distinguished Shakespearean actor Junius Brutus Booth, father of Edwin and John Wilkes Booth. Playing Hamlet in Natchez, Mississippi, he went to the seamier part of town by the riverside and there met a dark stranger who robbed him. It was Jean Laffite. Twenty years later Booth was in New Orleans, where he received a summons from Jean, who was then in jail awaiting hanging. Remorseful over robbing the actor so long before, and aware that his days were at an end, Laffite told Booth that he wanted Booth to have his skull after his death. For the rest of his career, whenever Booth played the troubled prince of Denmark and raised from the grave the skull of "poor Yorick," it was the corsair's skull in his hand. 12

  The Laffites' old friends and associates escaped the mythmaking that dogged the brothers, but in other regards time was little better to them. Of most of their men, Bollaert found in 1840 that "they could not very well go back into the world again, but they will all soon be dead."13 Laurent Maire, who gave up privateering before the fall of Galveston, never achieved much wealth as a city merchant, though he could afford a few slaves for himself and his wife, Adeline Godon.14 He lived in a rented house on Peace Street in the Faubourg Marigny, hardly a fashionable address for a white merchant, and when he died in 1827, leaving three minor children, all his worldly possessions came to $2,475, the bulk of it five slaves valued at $2,150. One of them had run away, and another would escape before the estate auction. His household goods—some old clothes, a canopy bed, six chairs, two tables, a mirror, and an armoire—together were worth $40.15 His widow would survive him by seventy years, and live to be 103, later telling stories of her late husband, the "wealthy planter."

  Dominique, who never learned to read or write or sign his name, gave up the sea and privateering entirely by 1823, and took a modest home in the Faubourg Marigny.16 In his last years he became something of a local character. When he died on the morning of November 15, he was destitute and had to be buried on the charity of the city. People remembered "Captain Dominique" as a man "to whom fortune had never been very favo
rable." 17 Pierre's sometime partner in slave sales Antoine Abat lived only two years beyond Dominique. Only Beluche prospered to some extent. He owned several properties in New Orleans, but he left the city to serve under Bolivar and never came back. His wife would die days before the state legislature granted her a divorce on grounds of abandonment, while he lived in South America until his death in 1860. He, at least, ended his days an honored man of influence.18

  Time erased most physical signs of the Laffites' passing. Nothing remained of the warehouses at Barataria even in their lifetime. By 1835 a traveler passing through the hamlet of Deweyville, Texas, saw only an old ruined shed when locals pointed out the remains of "one of Lafitte's old stations" where slaves were kept on the west bank of the Sabine.19 Four years later on Galveston only a few little hillocks revealed where the brothers' community had stood. The bleached ribs of an old hull on the beach were commonly mistaken for the remains of one of their vessels, though more likely it was the Constitution, that last prize brought in by the Minerva. Now seacoasters living nearby dismantled what was left for firewood.20 The curious who visited Galveston in the 1830s and 1840s were directed to old characters such as James Campbell, John Lambert, Stephen Churchill, Ben Dolivar, and others who claimed to have served under the brothers.21 When the USS Jackall made a stop on Mugeres in 1824 seeking pirates, she found none, and no sign of them having been there. Local Indians said none had called since early 1822.22

  As for the remains of the Laffites, Jean's became a part of the Caribbean, and as early as 1840 no one could or would point out Pierre's grave at Dzilam de Bravo. An old woman said to have been Lucia Allen's servant supposedly knew the place, but she was habitually too drunk to show anyone.23 More than a century later, visitors to Dzilam de Bravo heard the story of Pierre's burial and began searching for a marker in the cemetery. Finding nothing, someone in 1948 erected a wooden cross where lore said an earlier marker had been placed. On the marker the letters tte had been legible before a hurricane washed over the cemetery and obliterated the site of the tomb. Of course if there had been such a vestige on a marker, it misspelled the brothers' name. Now, in the eternal conflation of the brothers, those setting the wooden cross carved Jean's name into it rather than Pierre's. By 1960, when locals decided to erect a marble monument to Dzilam de Bravo's most famous recumbent resident, it was commonly assumed to be Jean who lay there somewhere.24