The Pirates Laffite Read online

  The Pirates Laffite

  The Treacherous World of the Corsairs of the Gulf

  William C. Davis

  * * *

  HARCOURT, INC.

  Orlando Austin New York San Diego Toronto London

  * * *

  Copyright © 2005 by William C. Davis

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval

  system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be

  mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  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. Pirates—Louisiana—

  Biography. 4. Pirates—Mexico, Gulf of—Biography. 5. Privateering—

  Mexico, Gulf of—History—19th century. 6. New Orleans, Battle of,

  New Orleans, La., 1815. 7. Louisiana—History—1803–1865—Biography.

  8. Mexico, Gulf of—History—19th century. I. Title.

  F374.L2D385 2005

  976.3'05'0922—dc22 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!

  —OLD FRENCH CREOLE SONG, ANONYMOUS

  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.

  —JOHN LAMBERT, 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.

  —JOSEPH H. INGRAHAM, SEPTEMBER 1, 1852

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE • A Corsair's Name [>]

  ONE • Vintage Bordeaux 1770–1803 [>]

  TWO • New Men in a New World 1803–1806 [>]

  THREE • Brothers United 1806–1809 [>]

  FOUR • Brothers in Business 1809–1811 [>]

  FIVE • Dawn of the Corsairs 1810–1811 [>]

  SIX • Origins of the Laffite Fleet 1811–1813 [>]

  SEVEN • Lords of Barataria 1813–1814 [>]

  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 1814–1815 [>]

  TWELVE • Spies for Spain 1815–1816 [>]

  THIRTEEN • A Career of Betrayals 1815–1816 [>]

  FOURTEEN • Distant Horizons 1816 [>]

  FIFTEEN • The Birth of Galveston 1816–1817 [>]

  SIXTEEN • A Season of Treachery 1817 [>]

  SEVENTEEN • Deadly Friends 1817–1818 [>]

  EIGHTEEN • Winds of Change 1818 [>]

  NINETEEN • The Dying Dream 1819 [>]

  TWENTY • Farewell to Galveston 1820 [>]

  TWENTY-ONE • The Last Voyage 1820–1823 [>]

  TWENTY-TWO • The Legend of the Laffites [>]

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS [>]

  NOTES [>]

  BIBLIOGRAPHY [>]

  INDEX [>]

  * * *

  PREFACE

  A Corsair's Name

  He left a corsair's name to other times,

  Linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes.

  —LORD BYRON, "THE CORSAIR," 1816

  ON FEBRUARY 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.

  ONE

  Vintage Bordeaux 1770–1803

  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!

  PERHAPS 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 m
ost 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.

  The ancient village of Pauillac perched on the west bank of the Gironde estuary exactly midway between Bordeaux and the Bay of Biscay at Pointe de Grave some thirty miles distant.1 It was about as far up the estuary as the limited maneuverability of sail could bring oceangoing ships, making it a natural port for the merchants of Bordeaux and the surrounding region. Though small, it was already the informal capital of the Medoc, and just now starting to blossom thanks to the produce of its vineyards. One Laffite family, and apparently only one of that spelling, lived in the village.2 Jean Laffite and his wife, Anne Denis, saw their son Pierre marry Marie Lagrange in 1769, but the young woman died, perhaps giving birth to a son Pierre around 1770.3 In 1775 the father Pierre remarried, this time to Marguerite Desteil, who bore six children at their home in the little village of Bages just south of Pauillac. Three daughters lived to maturity, as did a son Jean, born around 1782 or later but not baptized until 1786.4

  Most of the Laffites living in the Bordeaux were solidly middle-class merchants and traders, and the elder Pierre Laffite appears to have been in trade himself.5 Certainly he was able to give his two sons at least rudimentary schooling, though their written grammar, spelling, and syntax would never be better than mediocre.6 Whoever taught them to write—parent, priest, or schoolmaster—could not keep a natural independence out of their developing handwriting, for neither boy learned very good penmanship, but their teacher left some artifacts of his rote with them. All their lives, the half brothers signed their surname in identical fashion, lifting the pen from the paper midway and leaving a barely perceptible space before finishing, to produce "Laffite."

  What they might have made of themselves in France would never be known, for they were born into a changing and uncertain world. The Bourbon kings of France, living in increasing isolation among an in-bred and calcified aristocracy, had long since lost touch with the people and the times. The emergent middle class, especially merchants like the Laffites of the Bordeaux, felt crushed under the weight of taxation and church levies imposed to provide for the outrageous extravagance of the aristocracy and clergy. The Gironde became a seedbed of antipathy, and the Laffites would not have been men of their class if they did not share the general outrage.

  It all came to an explosion in the summer of 1789, and by the fall of 1795 the people of the Bordeaux, like all Frenchmen, felt nervous exhaustion after six years of constant turmoil. By the time elections were held in October for delegates to a new Convention to rule in Paris until a regular government should take over under a new constitution, Pierre Laffite may well have been financially ruined as were so many other merchants. Even as an ardent young captain named Napoleon Bonaparte saved both the Convention and the new constitution by turning away an uprising that sought to disrupt the elections, Laffite's sons Pierre and Jean could only look on what must have seemed a blighted future landscape.7

  The son Pierre, his schooling long over, lived and probably worked with his father at Number 49 Rue de la Deliverance in Bordeaux, trying to keep their business alive. Jean, perhaps aged about fourteen, likely saw his education disrupted by the turmoil that he had lived with for fully half his life. Just what each of them felt about it all he never said, but like many others of their class they imbibed a general—if not passionate—belief in local autonomy as preferable to central rule from afar, and from the turmoil and dissolution in their immediate region they learned the lesson that in troublous times, on the frontiers of civil authority, the wise man took care of himself first.

  They may even have seen object lessons in how a man could profit during times of political and social upheaval if he was smart, daring, and none too scrupulous. A later acquaintance of the Laffites' recalled being told that the brothers had been contraband smugglers on the Spanish border during the times of scarcity, which would have been one way to combat severe price controls. 8 And they were anyhow close enough to the Pyrenees to fall under the age-old lure of smuggling as a remedy from the greedy excise man.

  Whatever the Laffites learned of making their way in the world, by the end of the decade it was evident to them that they would not make it in their native country. Economic recovery would take years, and even with a new constitution and with the Terror at an end, civil affairs remained shaky or dependent on a military that was now embroiled in contests of arms all across Europe, and with England as well. Then in December 1796 their father Pierre died. Thousands of Frenchmen from their region had emigrated, reestablishing themselves in the colonies in the New World far from the reach of the Jacobins and the guillotine. Many a royalist had gone to Spanish Louisiana, and other colonies thrived on the islands of San Domingue, Martinique, and Guadaloupe in the Caribbean. It was a natural direction to turn their eyes.

  And so sometime in the last of that decade they began disappearing, and completely. For years barely a trace of them survives. A third brother, name unknown, may have left France first, or Jean may have gone about the turn of the century. Then on May 24, 1802, Pierre obtained a passport, saying he was "going to Louisiana to join one of his brothers."9 Perhaps he was the same Pierre Laffite from Pauillac, and his 1802 departure from Bourdeaux was only the return from a visit home from the colony. Two-thirds of French commercial trade was with the island which was half French and half Spanish until 1795 when France got it all. French merchant ships called first at Cap Français, and some then went on to New Orleans despite an official edict from Madrid prohibiting trade with the colonies of other powers as well as restrictions imposed by Paris. If Pierre Laffite was involved in trade at Port-au-Prince, then he might have had cause to know of and perhaps even to visit New Orleans. Nevertheless, he found that he could not escape the Revolution. Once again, inept and corrupt rule from a great distance created unrest, here compounded by a large and resentful black population. San Domingue had only 20,000 white inhabitants, while more than 100,000 free blacks and mulattoes owned one-third of the land and a fourth of the half million slaves in the colony, creating a hierarchy in which whites looked down on free blacks and mulattoes, who in turn looked down on slaves. 10

  A series of slave rebellions beginning in 1790 sent waves of white planters fleeing the island. Whenever he first arrived in San Domingue, Pierre Laffite spent at least some time in Le Cap, as Cap Français was called. He may have been there to witness the fighting on June 20, 1793, when about two thousand mariners and political prisoners on ships in the harbor rose and landed under arms to attack the government buildings. French commander Leger Felicité Sonthonax won a temporary victory, but by the summer of 1794 the British, now at war with France, held Port-au-Prince, and the Pierre Laffite living there left for Savannah, Georgia, with the flood of émigrés.11 But then, lured by Sonthonax's declaration of emancipation, former slave Toussaint Louverture, now commanding most of the free black and slave forces, joined forces with the French to eject the British. By this time the Spanish were also involved, and in time both Britain and Spain would entrench themselves trying to keep what they could of San Domingue.

  Meanwhile the Pierre Laffite who left Port-au-Prince in 1794 returned once the British were contained. He may have been back in Le Cap in May 1800 when black workers rebelled in the north and thousands marched on Le Cap to take it back from the Spanish. Or he may have been there later in October 1801 when farm workers rose up and killed thr
ee hundred white colonists. 12 But most likely he was there in 1802 after sailing under his passport and making a stop on his way to Louisiana. In January 1802 Napoleon, now risen to emperor in France, sent an army under General Charles Leclerc to reestablish control. Instead the French met disaster. Leclerc was soon all but besieged in Cap Français, and that summer he burned most of the town. In November he died of yellow fever and his successor, General Donathien Rochambeau, resorted to wholesale extermination of blacks and mulattoes. Napoleon could not help him as he had gone to war with Britain again in May, and in March 1803 the black population of San Domingue rose again in revolt. Rochambeau holed up in Le Cap after losing control of the countryside, and was besieged, while British ships returned to establish a blockade of the harbor.

  By that time Pierre Laffite was most certainly gone for good. What role he took, if any, in the upheavals on the island is unknown. On May 10, 1802, as Pierre prepared to leave Bordeaux, an Antoine Lafitte was waylaid at Port-Républicain and marched off with a number of other white citizens and was murdered.13 He may even have been the brother Pierre was going to visit. When Pierre arrived, he was himself caught in the street fighting in Cap Français. One day on the Place St. Pierre, Laffite and his friend Bernard Narieu and others found themselves in the middle of the deadly swirl. Laffite and Narieu escaped to safety, but not before they saw one of their acquaintances, a Mr. Gabauriau whom Pierre may have known back in France,14 fall victim to the mob. It was a good time for Laffite to be leaving, and where else to go but a place so many he knew had gone before him, a place with which he may well have had some acquaintance already, New Orleans.15

  That spring and summer of 1803 French privateers began ferrying refugees to Cuba and New Orleans, getting out as many of the white French as possible before Rochambeau surrendered on November 29, 1803. Among the exiles was Jean Joseph Amable Humbert, a somewhat unstable visionary who went back to France, though his life would intertwine with the Laffites in years to come. 16 Also fleeing San Domingue were a promising young architect named Arsené Latour, only recently arrived to take a position as engineer on Rochambeau's staff, and Barthelemey Lafon, a gifted surveyor who mixed privateering with mapmaking. Lafon escaped to Havana in 1802, and Latour got out sometime before November 1803, and perhaps escaped on a privateer, first to Cuba, then to New Orleans. Like Humbert and many another refugees from San Domingue, they would reappear in the Laffite story, though nothing suggests that Pierre was acquainted with them in Cap Français.17