TWENTY

Farewell to Galveston 1820

I had no death to fear; nor wealth to boast
Beyond the wandering freedom which I lost;
At length a fishers humble boat by night
Afforded hope, and offer d chance of flight.

THE LAFFITES HAD played a bold game for more than four years, but by the end of 1819 it was clear that their options were dwindling. With the Adams-Onis Treaty not yet ratified, the American claim to Galveston was not officially extinguished. Even if Spain did ratify, the agreement obligated Washington to prevent American citizens and expeditions backed by Americans from making incursions into Spanish territory. From President Monroe on down, the government was at last seriously cracking down on piracy. In the world at large the story was the same. The Buenos Aires insurgency had repudiated unlawful commissions in its name the year before, and nations such as Britain and Russia were raising a considerable furor about the conditions on the seas of the Gulf and Caribbean. Piracy drove maritime insurance rates up 100 percent in this period, though there were likely never more than two thousand men engaged in it in any one year. Spain alone had lost more than three million dollars in merchant goods in the past few years.¹ Stripped of every vestige of legitimacy, and seeing the course of the Le Brave trial, the Laffites could expect that each new prize brought in by their corsairs might be the one that put them in Judge Hall's court, charged with being accessories to piracy. They were still trying to make a bargain with Spain, but Spain showed no inclination to indulge them.

If they needed another signal that their time on this coast had passed, it came in December. With the taking of Brown's men and the capture of Le Brave, Patterson had begun to believe that he was about to rid the western Gulf of privateers at last. Then one of his vessels took yet another privateer schooner commanded by "a man named Gambier, who has been for several years engaged in piracy and smuggling." Of course this was Vincent Gambi, who had been arrested and charged so many times before only to escape the law each time. But he was not able to escape a more direct kind of justice now. Shortly before his ship was captured, his crew discovered that he was holding out on their share of several thousand dollars just taken from a victim. One evening as he slept on deck, his head resting on a spar, one of his man decapitated him "by the very bloody axe which he so often used," according to reports.² He was not the last of the Laffite associates to meet a violent end.

That month Pierre Laffite began raising money in New Orleans and making arrangements to relocate the brothers, even while trying to work a last-minute deal with Spain. As he wrote his proposal for a new scheme to betray Long on December 11, Pierre was selling two slaves to raise about $1,600.³ Sometime late in December or early in January 1820, Jean, too, came to New Orleans. It was only the second time in the previous three years that neither brother was at Galveston to keep charge, a tacit admission that the island establishment was all but a dead issue to them. People in New Orleans saw both brothers on the streets as they set about their business. Pierre stood erect, his hat pulled over one eye to shut out the sun, and the eye partially closed, a vestige of the stroke of years before. ⁴ He did much of his business at Maspero's Exchange Commercial Coffee House, which visitors that month found to provide excellent dining.⁵

By this time, however, few seemed to believe Pierre's habitual rants against the Spanish or his protests that the brothers were not pirates. The leaks about the brothers' Spanish spying compromised them too widely. The debts they ran up cost them too much credibility. In the city the Laffites no longer enjoyed the goodwill of any but their fellow smugglers. "They live obscurely and without acquaintance among the men of position," observed Manuel Garcia, soon to replace Fatio. They had made a lot of money over the years, but they had wasted a great deal of it, and much of the rest went to their attorneys Grymes and Livingston. Word had gotten around that they were almost broke. No one believed that they were repentant or reformed. "Meanwhile they make use of one thing and another," said Garcia, "and so they go, biding their time until proper and suitable occasion may present itself, so that, without consideration for others concerned or keeping faith with them, they may seize upon whatever suits them and advances their interests."⁶

The brothers put out feelers about finding a new—and most unlikely—patron, the United States. On January 3, 1820, Pierre sent a letter to Patterson's headquarters, a communication typical of the Laffites' approaches to potential masters—hyperbolic, boastful, self-righteous, and dissembling. "Too long since the names of the Lafittes have been the object of general execration, as well here as abroad," he began. They had been attacked in the press, and unjustly accused by association with "the criminal undertakings of a gang of Pirates of all countries." Just to make certain Patterson knew how the brothers felt about their own associates, Pierre condemned those corsairs, "the audacity of which encreases by impunity, and who have lately committed depredations and atrocities of all kind on the Sea coast, and even within the jurisdiction of this State." He could prove that those criminals were never hired, protected, or paid by the Laffites, he said, and reminded Patterson that the hanging of Brown should be ample evidence of their own intolerance toward pirates.

In their old gambit, the Laffites offered to make a bargain by doing something they were going to do anyhow:

To shew to the whole world that I never contributed to the violation of the sacred rights of nations, or would offer resistance or offense to the Government of the United States; and in the view of restoring all confidence to the foreign trade directing itself towards this place; and to destroy all fears which the Establishment of Galveztown might occasion; I now offer myself to you, Sir, willingly, and at my own risk and expense, to Clear Galveztown, and disband all those which are to be found there; taking the engagement for myself and my Brother, that it shall never serve as a place of Rendez-vous for any undertakings with our consent, or under our authorization.

All Pierre and Jean asked was a permit of safe conduct so that they could remove their vessels and their people and reestablish themselves unmolested somewhere outside American jurisdiction. The Laffites were presenting their evacuation as a patriotic act and a repudiation of their own trade, while also buying themselves a little time.

Pierre asked to meet personally with Patterson to discuss his offer, though the commodore maintained his distance and restricted their contact to written communications.⁷ Perhaps he saw that Pierre promised less than met the eye, since Pierre did not actually say the Laffites would leave, but only that they would prevent any further privateering under their authorization.

Pierre's offer was a welcome one, however, and timely. Patterson's squadron was still weak and inadequately supplied and the Laffite offer seemed a long step in accomplishing his duty to suppress piracy and privateers violating the neutrality laws. He took Laffite's letter to Judge Hall, collector Chew, and Governor Jacques Villere to hear their views. Patterson was not fooled by Pierre's protestations of lofty motivations, but Hall and the others agreed that Patterson should accept the Laffite offer to give up Galveston, and that safe conduct was a small price to pay in return for the opportunity to disrupt the illicit slave trade and remove "men of infamous character" from their environs. ⁸ Certainly it would be less costly than evicting them at gunpoint, and any move to use force at Galveston risked compromising the still pending treaty ratification in Madrid.

Patterson spent three weeks making certain that he would have the strength at hand to compel the Laffites to leave if it came to that. Finally on January 24, Patterson sent a response to Pierre. Whenever Pierre or Jean was ready to return to Galveston, Patterson would send along a letter of safe conduct that would be respected by his vessels and the United States Navy. Nevertheless, Patterson informed Pierre that he would be sending one of his warships before long to make certain of the "faithful and prompt fulfilling of your proposals."⁹ He was not going to trust the Laffites without keeping an eye on them.

Patterson was still holding the safe conduct pass when his father-in-law George Pollock, a prominent merchant and officer of the New Orleans branch of the Bank of the United States who had close contacts with the Spaniards in New Orleans, told him that he had been approached by Pierre Laffite. Pierre wanted to meet with the commodore, but if that was not possible, he had some documents he thought might interest Patterson. Pierre sent a packet of papers to Pollock to be shared with his son-in-law. They dealt with something that the Laffites thought might help them with the United States, almost certainly Pierre's December 11 proposal to Cagigal for a Spanish armed expedition to seize Galveston and Long's men. If Cagigal went for it, then Spain would be attacking a position that as of January 1820 still lay within the unsettled territorial claim of the United States. Thus the Laffites could turn Spain's failure to ratify the recent treaty to their advantage.

Patterson saw enough in the documents that he sent Pollock on January 30 to ask Pierre to hand over a complete dossier of the documents he had in the matter in order that Patterson might inform Washington. Pierre replied cagily that he had already destroyed the rest of the documents because "I did not attach any importance to this affair other than what I told you." However, as soon as he returned to Galveston and surveyed the situation—and heard more from Fatio and Apodaca—he would return to New Orleans and inform Patterson of all the particulars in the matter, which of course he already knew.

Informed that Pierre anticipated leaving for Galveston early in February "to fill my pocket," as he put it, Patterson sent the safe conduct on the third, granting permission to "John Laffite and others now occupants of the post and fort of Galveston" to leave with their vessels and goods and any other belongings, without interference or molestation, and to go where they chose so long as it was outside the jurisdiction of the United States. As long as they committed no acts of violence, they were to be allowed to go their way. Patterson made it clear that Pierre and Jean had promised that "the residences, buildings &c. there erected, shall be razed to the ground, that every means shall be removed from thence which has hitherto rendered it the retreat and security of Aury and others who have from thence preyed upon the commerce of the Gulf of Mexico." Pierre got the note the same day he told Patterson that he had no more documents to reveal to him in the other matter, and replied to the commodore with typically obsequious thanks, saying that he felt so anxious to prove his gratitude that he wished someone could witness how grateful he felt.¹⁰

The hint was that Pierre's gratitude would be expressed in information that Patterson might find useful, but Patterson had already lost interest. There was little the Laffites could tell him of Long that he did not know, and as for the Spaniards threatening to take Galveston, he knew as well as anyone how weak Spain's fleet in the Gulf was at the moment. Indeed, he decided that Pierre's information was of so little consequence that he did not mention it to Washington. The Laffites were so compromised as double agents by now that no one could trust them, and their reputation as merchants in old and useless intelligence would have made the commodore even more skeptical. He just wanted them gone from his coast. Deceptive to the end, sometime during the course of the communications, Pierre gave Patterson to understand that he and Jean had decided to go to Venezuela "where they intend selling their vessels and abandoning the nefarious life they have led for so many years."¹¹ As if to punctuate the close of the Laffites' brief career as spies, the day that Pierre got his safe conduct, Felipe Fatio lay dying in New Orleans. He passed away the next day, making way for Garcia to substitute his utter disdain for the Laffites for Fatio's sympathy.

Despite what he told Patterson, Pierre did not leave New Orleans, but remained while Jean returned to Galveston, and for Jean it was a final parting. Whatever the nature of his relationship with Catherine Villard and their four-year-old son Jean Pierre, it ended now, for he would never set foot in New Orleans again. Once on the island, he honored the brothers' pledge. He burned the frame house and most of the other structures in the community, leaving standing only enough to provide shelter to the men before they left. What defensive earthworks stood to command the pass into the bay he had dismantled. The Laffites' sailors set to work preparing to evacuate aboard a small squadron of the brig the New Enterprise, now renamed the General Victoria, and two small schooners, the Minerva and the Blanque, the latter no doubt named for Jean's sometime associate. ¹² In the process, Jean found that he needed a number of items from New Orleans, so on February 19 he sent the small schooner the Pegasus, commanded by the ubiquitous William Mitchell, with a list. It included cooking ware, anchors, and the like, but also materials, such as cannon cleaning tools and grappling hooks, that were clearly designed for fitting out a vessel for privateering. The Laffites were close to violating their pledge to Patterson. As soon as the Pegasus returned with the merchandise and with Pierre, Jean intended to leave Galveston and put to sea.¹³

On her way up the Mississippi to New Orleans, the Pegasus may have passed the brig the Enterprise coming from the Balize on a mission from Patterson. Lieutenant Lawrence Kearny had commanded the Enterprise since 1815. He had left New York late in December 1819, but only after demanding precise instructions on how he was to determine who were pirates and who were not.¹⁴ When Kearny arrived at the New Orleans station in February, Jean had recently left for Galveston, and Patterson almost immediately ordered the Enterprise to proceed to the island to see if the Laffites and their associates were carrying out their promise.¹⁵ On February 27 Jean Laffite saw the Enterprise bearing down on the island.

Kearny anchored outside the bar and rowed over to the General Victoria to meet Laffite, who showed his usual hospitality and unctuous manners, and over refreshments detailed his preparations. He then took Kearny ashore and showed him the work done thus far. All about lay the signs of dismantling, with piles of nautical supplies and equipment strewn on the sand for loading.¹⁶ Now, he said, he awaited only the return of the Pegasus and the right weather to take his squadron out the pass and over the bar and "cruise no more the Bay of Mexico." He told Kearny that before he left he would set fire to the remaining houses on the island, as well as burning a small felucca being used as a lighter to transfer supplies to the brig. Their discussion left Kearny convinced that the Laffites were acting in good faith. ¹⁷ Laffite then gave Kearny and his officers a dinner aboard his brig, and regaled them with his well-worn cover story of hatred for Spain and Spaniards. The Americans also met, however briefly, the mulatto woman often seen with Laffite on Galveston.

Pierre's continued presence in the city was believed by some to have more than a little to do with the Le Brave crewmen awaiting their sentences. On February 16 Governor Villere received an anonymous warning that elements then in town intended to set fires throughout the city in order to distract authorities while friends of Desfarges and the rest robbed banks and freed the pirates from their prison. Acknowledging that the warning might be a hoax, the governor doubled the civil patrols at night just the same.¹⁸ The additional guards at the jail prevented any effort to break out the condemned, but soon enough a mysterious fire erupted, the first of a series, mostly at private homes, over the next several weeks. As the date set for the execution of the pirates grew closer, the number of fires increased, and with it the fear and outrage in the city. Every day, complained one editor with exaggeration indicative of the fear, one could see in the city streets "wretches covered with the blood of the unfortunate whom they have murdered at Barataria or Galveston and on the ocean." Some feared that if the rabble did not succeed in freeing their friends, they would destroy the city.¹⁹ This sentiment was one good reason for Jean not to return, and for Pierre to maintain a low profile.²⁰

Still, Pierre did not completely evade the authorities' gaze. The Pegasus, bearing Jean's list of necessities, reached New Orleans in a few days, and quickly chandler Guillaume Malus provided the items requested.²¹ Being a fast sailor, in fact, the Pegasus was back at Galveston by the beginning of March with Pierre aboard. Once more Mitchell took her back to New Orleans, arriving March 7, this time with several of the brothers' sailors, among them Antonin Ballarda and the Canadian George Bankhead Schumph. ²² The port inspector had given her the customary inspection at English Turn on March 4 and found nothing suspicious about her other than several Spanish swords that the passengers claimed as their own. He did learn that "one Lafitte" was among the passengers, which should have raised an eyebrow.²³ The ship showed no signs of preparations to fit her out for unlawful service. Her rigging and sails seemed in poor condition, and in the opinion of the officer she was good for little but coastal freighting, better for carrying firewood than mounting guns. Yet anyone who knew that Mitchell commanded and that Pierre Laffite was aboard had cause to suspect that all was not as it seemed. And one man recalled that the Pegasus had once been a United States gunboat, with a flat bottom for shallow water, and a deck better calculated to carry artillery than those of ordinary schooners of her size.²⁴

Within days of the Pegasus tying up at the wharf, a man named Nickerson and another named John Wood began to approach sailors in the city asking if they would like to "go a privateering." They were told to meet at Harvey Norton's Jackson Inn on Tchopitoulas Street in the lower Faubourg St. Mary, a spot very close to the river on the outskirts of the city. There on March 15 some 102 men signed on, at least one of them a sailor serving on a United States revenue cutter. They learned that their captain was to be the same Ballarda who came with Pierre, and that they were to rendezvous at Galveston to crew Laffite's twenty-gun brig for a four-month cruise under the defunct red, white, and blue "patriot" flag of Humbert and the Mexican insurgency. Nickerson and a "tall portly & stout man" who was probably Pierre Laffite did not tell them what country's ships they were to capture, but gave each man a $30 enlistment bounty and promised him a share of the prize proceeds amounting to $1,000 before the cruise was done. ²⁵

Other men gathered by night at Pierre's lodgings on Bourbon, unaware that Garcia knew they were there and suspected they were being recruited to reinforce Long for an attack on Texas.²⁶ On the morning of March 17 the men began to appear at the wharf beside the Pegasus. Some went aboard while others stood about onshore, an assorted group including Americans, Spaniards, and Frenchmen. There they learned that Captain Ballarda would not sail with them but would follow on another vessel. When they boarded they soon saw the evidence of stealthy preparations for privateering.

A revenue inspector boarded her and found the deserter from the revenue cutter, along with others repeating a cover story about being passengers for St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. The large number of new water casks, far too many for a boat of the Pegasus's size on such a voyage, raised his suspicion. On further inspection he found a cargo manifest listing grappling hooks, bilge pumps too large for the Pegasus, more musket and cannon tools, and three hundred shot "for Great Guns." The men told him that the cannonballs were for ballast, but he could see well enough that they were not stored in the ship's bottom as they should be for that purpose but instead stuffed in cabin lockers, in the wings under the deck beams, on top of the water and provision casks, and elsewhere.

Not surprisingly, the United States Marshal John Nicholson seized the Pegasus on March 18 and John Dick presented a libel against her in Judge Hall's court charging her with illegally attempting to fit out for privateering against Spain. Though Pierre engaged Grymes right away to represent Mitchell's claim for her return, the court would not release her for three months.²⁷ Meanwhile, on March 29, a consular official showed Pierre a letter from Cagigal that made it all too clear that Spain was cutting the Laffites loose. In response Pierre confirmed that he and Jean were abandoning Galveston and suggested that the brothers would move wherever Cagigal wanted them to go, a transparent appeal for Spain to allow them to make a base in her colonial dominion. ²⁸ Indeed, Garcia even knew that Pierre had proposed the move to Patterson, though perhaps not that the old schemer had tried to make some capital of his offer by suggesting that the Laffites might provide information to the United States. "I do not know what he will do," Garcia said of Pierre on April 9, "but I do know that Laffite and his brother have played their game well with the Spanish government."²⁹

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 northward 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.

Pierre had to wait a few days for Jean to reach the island, and then they determined on a plan. Pierre would return to New Orleans to bring their affairs in the city to a close, and then meet Jean at Old Providence or the vicinity. Neither Laffite could hope any longer to accomplish anything in secret in the Louisiana metropolis, but in Charleston Pierre was less likely to be recognized. There he could contact agents of the insurgencies, and perhaps raise a new crew to replace the defectors and also obtain a ship for fitting out to continue their trade under whatever colors they could acquire. Jean, meanwhile, would venture back onto the Gulf, taking prizes when it was safe to do so and bringing the goods to Galveston if possible. He would also sound out Aury at Old Providence about securing letters of marque. It would be a dangerous game, for in the interim they would irrefutably be pirates. A Humbert commission had not saved Desfarges from the noose, and it would not save a Laffite. By August 31 Pierre was back in New Orleans, and his brother was on the main.⁶³

Even if he could no longer stay at Galveston, Jean could risk making landing for a few days at a time, either to take on provisions from New Orleans or to unload cargo to be sold by the old channels. Spanish officials in Texas kept a wary eye on Galveston and believed that Laffite was making at least periodic appearances. As early as June, Martinez received reports of mysterious ships on the coast near Matagorda. "I infer it may be people from the Pirate Lafitte," he reported to Apodaca. In September a Spanish investigation reported that "La Fitte, the notorious pirate, has returned, it is said, under the colors of South America, and was bearer of commissions for Long and the officers of his party." This was probably a delayed echo of the brothers' rendezvous in August. ⁶⁴ By the end of the year the Spaniards heard reports that Laffite had gone to South America, exaggerated with rumors that after leaving Galveston he had attacked an American ship and killed all its crew except two men who escaped.⁶⁵ From now on, the farther the brothers Laffite ventured from New Orleans and Galveston, the more rumor and misinformation would warp their story. Neither could know it, but even while living, they were starting a voyage into legend.

At some time that fall Jean and his tiny squadron passed Mugeres again, perhaps stopping to leave men and materials to start erecting a modest base. Then he turned south around Cabo Catoche and sailed southward across the western Caribbean to Old Providence. Aury had established himself there on July 4, 1818.⁶⁶ The island sat just over 450 miles northwest of Cartagena and 150 miles east of the Colombian mainland. It had an excellent harbor, and lay very close to the Spanish trade routes to and from Panama and Cuba. Over the next two years Aury and his corsairs variously flew the flags of the juntas of Mexico, Venezuela, Buenos Aires, and Bolivar's New Granada. He did well for some months and tried to secure legitimate commissions, but none of the revolutionary governments would officially countenance him. Even now Aury's haughty manner and his record made revolutionary leaders suspicious of him. By the time Jean Laffite hove in sight of Old Providence, Aury was a pirate in everything but name, sailing under dubious letters of marque from José Cortes de Madariaga of the combined insurgencies of Buenos Aires and Chile. Any meeting between Laffite and Aury, when or if it came, could have been chilly in light of events at Galveston, but Laffite believed Aury would grant him commissions all the same. Laffite deposited on the island some prisoners he held from his recent prizes, and perhaps did get commissions from Aury for his two vessels. ⁶⁷ Nevertheless, he still had his eye on Mugeres, as did Pierre. Aury had a history of rising and falling, and it would not be wise to tie themselves too closely to him. Indeed, the brothers may still have had hopes of spying on Aury for Spain.

Whatever business Pierre had to conduct before he could rejoin his brother, there were personal matters to attend to as well, and it is clear he understood that he was leaving Louisiana for good. His feelings about putting his family behind him permanently, for that is apparently what he intended, remain a mystery. On July 27, a week before he took the Two Friends to meet Jean, he sold Marie's Bourbon and St. Philip house to his friend Abat for $10,000.⁶⁸ On August 2 Marie borrowed another $600 from Abat, pledging a slave as security.⁶⁹ Pierre probably used most of the proceeds to finance the supplies he took to his brother. If he left anything for Marie and Catherine and their children, it was not enough for them to live on as they had for the last few years.

Though Bourbon and St. Philip was hardly a fashionable address, now the families moved a few blocks northeast in a shift that symbolized far more than the distance implies. Pierre reestablished them on Esplanade Street in an area known as the Faubourg Marigny,⁷⁰ a large and relatively poor suburb inhabited by Spaniards, Portuguese, and Mexicans, the artifacts of former European masters and the refugees from San Domingue and other upheavals. It was an area messy and neglected, and lagging behind the rest of the city, though still proud and resentful of the Americans.⁷¹ Most of all, it was the home of the bulk of the free colored population of New Orleans. Pierre was turning Marie and their children back to her own people, and there was no indication now or later that he or Jean intended their families to join them once they were established elsewhere.⁷² Pierre's family with Marie included the living children: Rosa, Catherine Coralie, Martin Firmin, Adele, born in 1819, and probably a daughter. The son Pierre and the possibly imaginary Eugene were old enough to be out on their own, perhaps even with their uncle Jean. It was another summer of yellow fever, and though the epidemic was not as bad as that of the year before, it hit the Faubourg Marigny hard. Pierre could hardly expect that he would see all of his children again, even if he so desired.

Behind him Pierre also left many old associates. Beluche now owned a home in the city, thanks to help from Sauvinet. Maire had married and given up seafaring with the Laffites, and was on his way to becoming a modestly successful merchant.⁷³ Even Dominique was back on the coast that summer, having abandoned serving under Aury. Before long he would be a fixed resident and a privateer no more.⁷⁴ Others were gone or going. Fatio was dead, and Judge Hall would die in December, to be replaced on the bench by John Dick. Sauvinet and Sedella, Livingston and Grymes, and many more the Laffites would never see again. And there was one very close to Pierre whom he would never get to see, for—though he might not have known it—early in August, just before he took the Two Friends to resupply Jean, Marie conceived their last child.⁷⁵

In early October the schooner the Hiram, commanded by a Captain Lambert, embarked from Dutch-held Curaçao on its way to a stop in Honduras and points beyond. Its course took the vessel past Old Providence, and there it took on a cargo of gum copal, logwood, sarsaparilla, tallow, leather, and more, mostly the produce of Yucatán brought in by a privateer, possibly Jean Laffite. Along with the cargo, the Hiram took on a passenger, Pierre Laffite, who had come from New Orleans sometime in September to meet his brother. When the Hiram tied up at the wharf in Charleston, South Carolina, several weeks later on November 15, Pierre Laffite stepped off her deck. In keeping with his years as a number, he now took another alias, introducing himself as "Mr. Francisco." ⁷⁶ When Lambert took the Hiram out again for the Gulf of Honduras on Christmas Eve, Pierre remained behind, ready to launch the next phase of the Laffite brothers' quest for place and fortune. It would be their last.⁷⁷