The Pirates Laffite Read online

  If Jean Laffite was the commander of La Soeur Cherie, he might have been sailing out of San Domingue while Pierre lived there, or even have helped in the ferrying of refugees to New Orleans. If he was a privateer in 1804 or earlier, then he plied one of the growth industries of the Indies. Piracy had been a problem in the Caribbean and the Gulf for two centuries, and in antiquity to prehistoric times. Rather as beauty dwells in the eyes of the beholder, so piracy tended to lie in the point of view of the victim. Broadly defined, piracy was the unlawful taking of one privately owned vessel by another one. It was simple highway robbery on the seas. In time of war, however, the merchant trade of each combatant became the legitimate prey not only of its opponents' warships, but also of private armed vessels, or privateers. In order to help finance its war effort while damaging the economy of its enemies, a government issued letters of marque and reprisal to qualified private vessels. The owners—and often they were whole syndicates of investors—armed, equipped, and crewed their ships at their own expense, and posted a hefty cash bond as guarantee that they would observe the rules of warfare and respect civilian life. The vessels were supposed to be commissioned in a home port of the commission-granting country. Their crews were supposed to be made up of a majority of men native to that country. They were to bring their prizes into ports of the commissioning nation or a friendly nation, where a court of admiralty was to hear testimony and examine ship's papers and other evidence to decide whether the prize was eligible for capture and lawfully taken. If the court awarded possession of the prize to its captors, the prize ship and its cargo were sold and the proceeds shared between the crew, the investors, and the government whose flag the privateer flew.

  Piracy was largely on the wane in the Caribbean in 1800, but when war erupted in Europe as Napoleon set the continent on fire, ripples extended to the west. Colonial possessions far from the protection of the mother countries, and scattered and isolated amid tens of thousands of square miles of ocean, offered tempting targets for entrepreneurs. As late as early 1804 a pirate vessel called the Favorite fell to American naval arms off the Louisiana coast.8 However, after 1800 piracy was almost unnecessary, for any men so disposed could easily legitimize their calling and protect themselves from the hangman by taking letters of marque. Piracy did escalate modestly, chiefly out of Cuba, and continued for another two decades before its demise, but the overwhelming activity during this period would be by privateers. The English preyed on the French, the French upon the English, and everyone went after the Spaniards' vessels as Spain shifted from one side to the other and back in Europe's diplomatic waltz.

  Much as the United States tried to stay out of the European imbroglio, domestic affairs in America encouraged privateering. For one thing, America offered a market for privateers' goods. The acquisition of vast new territory in the Louisiana Purchase, the Industrial Revolution with its voracious appetite for textiles, and the invention of the cotton gin that quickly and economically readied raw cotton for the loom together created a huge demand for slave labor to till and harvest existing Southern fields and the ones to be carved from Louisiana. A ban on the importation of foreign slaves could not have come at a worse time for the Spanish slave ships plying a constant route from Africa to the colonies of New Spain, especially Mexico and the islands. The ships were easy targets, and it was no great challenge to smuggle the slaves into Louisiana for sale. Many an enterprising American captain also took commissions from foreign governments, and the uprising on San Domingue created an independent Haiti close to home.

  The revolution in San Domingue spawned the heyday of the privateer. Once the insurgents drove out the French, Napoleon's agents commissioned virtually all who applied out of the French colonies Guadaloupe and Martinique.9 Many of these privateers stopped American ships trading with the newly independent Haitians, and some became justly famed, none more so than Captain Dominique, or Frederick Youx. He began appearing in the West Indies prize courts in 1805 as captain of La Superbe, an armed privateer owned by Jacques Plaideau, when he took three American ships condemned in the prize court at Basseterre, Guadaloupe, and then sold them in Cuba. Dominique lost his ship in action in October 1806 and escaped to his home in Baracoa, where he would prove to be a hero of the defense of the port against British attack the following year.10 Also operating out of Guadaloupe was yet another Captain Lafitte, this one commanding a corsair called Le Regulateur, which captured the American vessel Maria Mischief late in 1805.11

  This Lafitte may or may not have been Governor Claiborne's nemesis of the year before, but he represented a cause for grave concern all the same. By taking an American merchantman, "Captain La fette" chose not to scruple overmuch on the nationality of his prizes when there was profit at the end of the day. After 1803 British and French privateers frequently took Yankee vessels, simply ignoring the rights of the weak, neutral United States. By 1805 British privateers cruised off the Balize waiting for any vessel, French or American, that offered a good target. Claiborne warned Secretary of State James Madison that if the war in Europe continued much longer, "I am fearful that the Gulph will be crowded with Privateers and that much Spoliation on our Commerce will be committed." 12

  Claiborne's words proved prophetic when a number of ships out of New Orleans were taken by Spanish and English privateers in late 1805 and early 1806, but the real explosion lay around the corner.13 Once again events in Europe would be the spark. In 1806 Napoleon issued the Berlin Decree forbidding neutral ships to enter or leave British ports, thus making them subject to his privateers. Britain responded with its Orders in Council, forbidding neutral ships from using ports that excluded British shipping unless they were carrying British goods from a British port. Between the English and French actions, America's merchant trade faced danger of extinction. Her vessels were at risk of seizure no matter with whom she traded, and Britain was soon boarding Yankee ships at will and impressing their crewmen into the Royal Navy. Jefferson responded that year with the Nonimportation Act, banning the import of a range of British goods, and thus creating shortages and demands that privateers and smugglers were all too ready to supply.

  Even before this the privateers and amenable city merchants explored ways of getting goods to an increasingly hungry market. A few less scrupulous New Orleans merchants such as Jean Blanque engaged sailors who plied both sides of the law.14 Indeed, Blanque was the supposed consignee of the cargo of "Captain La fette's" prize British merchantman Hector; revealed later to be an impostor smuggling goods under forged ship's papers. In 1806 Blanque would be taken to federal court for buying twenty-seven thousand pounds of coffee taken from an American vessel by a privateer. 15 The same Bartholomy Lafon who had been on San Domingue when Pierre Laffite was there was selling ships in New Orleans in 1803, and was mixing his surveying and mapmaking work with questionable commerce with Vera Cruz, Havana, and Charleston on his large copper-bottomed privateer the Bellona.16 Renato Beluche, yet another veteran of the San Domingue upheaval, ran his brig the Thomas to several Caribbean ports, generally to bring in merchandise that some regarded as suspicious.17 Even the more upright merchants such as Paul Lanusse traded in illegal slaves, in his case many more than he could have acquired domestically. As the privateering trade grew, these merchants needed a place to warehouse goods away from the eyes of customs and excise officials.18 Their Caribbean home bases were too far away, but by the time "Captain La fette" came to New Orleans, some thought a closer place looked promising.

  The spot lay fifty miles due south of the city in a wild and scarcely inhabited place called Barataria Bay. The name itself is redolent of mystery and romance. In Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, Sancho Panza received the gift of an island called Barataria. The Spaniards used words such as barato and baratura and baratillo to describe cheap goods and bargain sales, which would certainly apply to the contraband being sold there. Yet the name Barataria predates the establishment of smugglers on the bay. Perhaps it came from barratry, or even from the French word for d
eceit, bar at. A single pass, scarcely navigable except to those who knew it well, led between two low sandy barrier islands, Grand Terre and Grand Isle, into the bay itself. From there a series of bayous and lakes gave shallow-draft rowing pirogues access to several points just below New Orleans, to the Mississippi several miles upstream, or to Bayou Lafourche. This bayou, which did not have a protected harbor of its own at its mouth, could transport goods far into the interior. In 1804 Grand Isle had at least one resident, Jacques Reynard, a Revolutionary War veteran who called his sandy island "Grand Ille Des Baratariare." 19 Yet for twenty years or more Barataria had been known to the French and Spanish as something else, a sometime refuge for runaway slaves and what the Spaniards called famosos picarônes—notorious scoundrels—a place where fugitives could lose themselves for months.20 Smugglers and privateers could well make use of this bay as a base for the operation Governor Claiborne so feared.

  If Jean Laffite spent some of his lost years gaining experience in this murky privateering environment, his brother Pierre faced far more mundane challenges in Louisiana, though his introduction to slave dealing showed him that he did not have to live in penury. After his sudden flurry of slave sales, Pierre briefly disappeared again, though he was hardly inactive. He may have made another visit to Baton Rouge, where Elias Beauregard had engaged the engineer and fellow refugee Arsené Latour to survey town lots for sale.21 But by April he was back in New Orleans with a new horizon in mind, Pensacola.22

  Pierre spent almost three months intermittently making preparations, though whether he was taking trade goods to the West Florida capital or intending to buy them there to export back cannot be determined. Certainly he was not fleeing debt this time, for he had several thousand dollars in hand. Surely, too, he meant to take the pregnant Marie and his son with him, as he planned an extended residence in Pensacola.23 Amid the activity of readying his family for the trip, he found time for a few routine bits of business, including appearing before notary public Pierre Pedesclaux on April 21 to file a "to whom it may concern" affidavit that he had witnessed the murder of his acquaintance Gabauriau at Cap Français some years before.24 All too many refugees had to file such statements to establish deaths on San Domingue, and help to settle estates back in France.

  In May Pierre went to Pensacola, probably to arrange for lodgings for his family, and remained at least through the end of the month, but by early June he was back in New Orleans.25 In his absence he arranged to spend $700 to buy a twenty-six-year-old Congolese slave woman named Therese, probably to help Marie take care of the household.26 Then he called on the Chartres Street merchant William St. Marc and leased a slave man named Lubin to go to Pensacola as a cook.27

  It remained only to engage passage. There were two ways to get from New Orleans to Pensacola. One was much the faster, an inland waterway passage beginning outside the city at Lake Pontchartrain at the end of Bayou St. Jean, then traveling eastward to Lake Borgne through a channel known as the Rigolets, and on east into the Mississippi Sound and behind the protection of Cat, Ship, Horn, and Dauphin Islands, to Mobile Bay, and thence to Pensacola. In the small, broad, flat-bottomed vessels that plied the route, the trip was two to four days long and did not risk the Gulf hazards of storms and privateers, though going through the Rigolets required a good pilot, and sailing Lake Pontchartrain demanded skill at low water. The fare was usually five or six dollars per head, but passengers also had to pay for their food. The boats sometimes made stops at Dauphin Island or at Biloxi.28

  The alternative was to go via the mouth of the Mississippi and across the Gulf, which could take three weeks due to the vagaries of water levels and the difficulty of navigating the twists of the river with only wind power for headway and control. Loss of wind at the Balize could halt a vessel for days or even weeks. Yet for a merchant traveling with goods, or a household's furniture and family, the longer passage was the more practical.

  In any event, the only vessel scheduled for Pensacola the last half of June was the modest Louisa, owned and operated by Captain Jean LaCoste, who sometimes dealt in slaves at Pensacola.29 Pierre probably knew her captain and her quarters from his trip to Pensacola the month before. 30 The single-decked, two-masted schooner was cramped, just over forty-eight feet long and a mere fourteen feet wide on the deck with no gallery to separate passengers from crew.31 But the voyage would be brief, as she was small enough to take either route and the weather was good.32 By June 27 they were aboard, and once in open water, with the prevailing westerly winds, they could have put into the capital of Spanish West Florida as early as July 1.

  Pensacola in 1806 presented a dramatic contrast to the New Orleans they left behind them. Pensacola lay on a sandy plain stretching about a mile along the bay from which it took its name. Much of the plain was not built on, and the town had fewer than fifteen hundred inhabitants, many of them French and Canary Islanders, but mostly Spaniards who had left New Orleans a few years earlier when Spain turned Louisiana over to Napoleon.33 Pensacola had been in decline since the Spaniards took control from the British in 1784. It was a place of modest one-story Spanish and two-story English houses, spread intermittently along Spanish-named streets so randomly laid out that some were forty feet wide and others measured two hundred feet across, streets that were sandy in dry weather and absolute mires when it rained. Most of the houses seemed under constant threat of encroachment from the surrounding swamps. A visitor described even the governor's house as "wretched," and the rest of the town as decaying.34 The only brick structure in town was the mansion of merchant William Panton.35

  Pensacola afforded perhaps the best harbor on the Gulf. It lay only two days from New Orleans in the best of times, three days' sail from Havana, five or six from Vera Cruz, and a day or so more to Jamaica, with numerous ports even closer.36 Hence the surprise with which many travelers beheld its current torpid economic climate. The English had established trades, and harvested masts and timber and naval stores and furs from Indians as their main commerce. They had built numerous jetties, warehouses, and wharfs, but under the Spanish only the mast and stores trade continued. With no wharves, unloading ships' cargoes was difficult, "lighters" being required to convey cargo from ship to shore. 37 Moreover, Pensacola had no industry other than brickmaking and some lumbering, and there was scant trade and almost no local market. Inhabitants had no steady supply of foodstuffs except locally raised beef, seafood from the Gulf, and truck vegetables grown in private gardens. Even chickens and corn had to be imported from Mobile, while rice and flour and all European provisions and wine came from New Orleans. The cost of their transport doubled their price.38

  A few carpenters and artisans provided skilled work when they felt like it, but there were no printers or tailors, nor blacksmiths, and no makers of consumer products, and residents depended heavily on imports from Havana and New Orleans for any hard goods. Even that foreign trade found no official encouragement from local Spanish rulers. The port had been all but empty for several years, and Laffite would have found barely half a dozen ships in the harbor when he arrived. Four or five schooners of ten to twenty-five tons, such as the Louisa, brought passengers and freight from New Orleans, but that was about all.39 There was little or no hard currency in circulation, and what wealth existed lay almost exclusively in land.40

  Virtually all commerce revolved around the Panton, Leslie Company. The company exported cotton and yellow earth for stucco used in New Orleans, and enjoyed a monopoly on the fur trade in the region. It had offices in London and the Bahamas and its agents were Englishmen who traded with the local Indians for rum, muskets, powder, blankets, cloth, and more. Even after the Spanish takeover, Panton, Leslie kept its monopoly, so the benefit of local trade went to the English firms that sold goods to Panton, and the profits went to the company. The company also imported merchandise for the town's inhabitants, pretending it was trade goods, which were exempt from import duty, and thus Spain got nothing though there were customs inspectors at the port. Indeed, wi
th so little trade otherwise, the inspectors collected almost nothing. As a result, Panton had most of the hard cash in the colony in 1806. 41

  Pensacola's civil government was run by Vicente Folche, who doubled as mayor of the town after Pensacola became capital of West Florida in 1803 following the Louisiana Purchase. Spain maintained a garrison of about five hundred so/dados, but only two hundred were ready or fit for duty. Folche held a colonel's rank as their military commander, and was aided by several officers of staff rank. He also had the artisans, coopers, and carpenters needed to maintain the vessels of a naval fleet, but Folche's "fleet" was one small sloop.42 The governor at least made efforts to revitalize Pensacola after 1803 when it stood on its own. He legalized general commerce and abolished the import duty on goods from New Orleans, hoping to foster trade. Now in 1806 Folche opened Pensacola to trade with all neutral nations, and the Americans began to trickle in.43

  Most likely it was Folche's liberalization of trade restrictions that brought Pierre Laffite to Pensacola. Certainly it would not have been the social attractions. The gender imbalance was even greater here than in New Orleans, with a third of the population white males, more than four hundred of them unmarried.44 These male inhabitants, having few chances for feminine companionship, passed their time playing, gambling, drinking at the town's one small tavern, and engaging in endless conversation at the billiard room that became the social center of the place. Perhaps their boredom was the reason Pensacolans enjoyed a reputation for being very hospitable to visitors.45