JEAN
LAFITTE maintained control of Galveston
Island in the years 1818-1821. Lafitte was
one of the most daring and colorful filibusters
of his time. He flew a solid, blood red
flag from his masts and from time to time
flew the Venezuelan yellow, blue and red
tri-color shown above. It is thought that
he displayed, as did Aury, the Venezuelan
colors with permission of the government
whose aim was to disrupt Spanish shipping
in the Gulf and Caribbean.
The pirate
Jean Lafitte arrived on the Island in 1817,
making it his base of operations and naming
it Campeche. The little village contained
huts for the pirates, a large slave market,
boarding houses for visiting buyers, a shipyard,
saloons, pool halls, gambling houses and
Lafitte’s own house, the “Maison
Rouge.” At one point, Campeche was
home to about 1,000 people.
he State
of Texas is ultra-protective of all artifacts,
treasure and other objects buried beneath
its domain. Before embarking on any serious
quest for buried gold, check into Texas
Law concerning its royalty and removal).
At fairly regular
intervals, groups of firm, serious men with
big money behind them seep into the Galveston
area with secret maps and sophisticated
equipment intent upon unearthing buried
treasure - the treasure of legendary and
real pirate chieftain Jean LaFitte (zhan
lafeet). For almost 5 years, from 1817 to
1821, LaFitte and his band of buccaneers
made their headquarters on Galveston Island,
raiding across the Gulf of Mexico and the
Caribbean and stockpiling booty. They left
in a hurry at the insistence of the U.S.
Navy and legend has it that most of the
store of looted treasure was left behind.
Location
where historical information suggests that
Maison Rouge,
Laffite's home on Galveston Island, was
sited.
Maison Rouge,
or Red House, to specifications he felt
would have pleased Beatrice Tolliver. Verified
maps place the location of the house between
the present 14th and 15th Streets, on Avenue
A (Water Street) in Galveston. LaFitte married
Madeline Rigaud, the widow of a French settler,
but she herself died in 1820. It was rumored
that she was buried beneath the Red House
with a great quantity of gold, and well
into the 20th Century the site of the house
was dug into time and again by treasure
seekers.
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In January
1821, the U.S.S. “Enterprise”
hove to off LaFitte’s stockade
and menacingly pointed a broadside
as a Lt. Kearney came ashore. He briskly
informed LaFitte that he had 60 days
to vacate the premises, or be blasted
off with Navy cannon. It was peace-time,
and the U.S. could no longer tolerate
LaFitte’s presence near it shores,
hero of the Battle of New Orleans
or not. LaFitte knew that to buck
the navy was hopeless, so he began
dismantling of his colony. A huge
stockpile of treasure was on hand,
but the evacuation would allow room
only for men and supplies. The treasure
had to be buried.
Day after day,
ships laden with gold ventured to
the far reaches of Galveston Bay and
West Bays, only to return empty. LaFitte
himself directed several ships to
the mouth of Clear Creek, from which
he would lead a small boat with treasure,
head up the creek, and return for
more. LaFitte did not adhere to the
standard pirate lexicon of “Dead
men tell no tales,” so certainly
a great many of his men knew the exact
whereabouts of the buried riches.
On March 3,
1821, only hours before the Navy’s
deadline, LaFitte set torch to the
Campeche stronghold and sailed away.
No further word was heard of him.
It is assumed
that LaFitte, only in his early 40s,
and his entire force perished off
Yucatan in a hurricane in 1826.
But the gold
is still buried; none of it has ever
been reported found. Certainly, shifting
sands and vanishing islands in Galveston
and West Bays have hidden a great
deal of it forever. But somewhere,
perhaps beneath a highway, under a
fire station, in a backyard, or only
inches beneath the salt grass, untold
riches await only the turn of a shovel.
Reprinted
from Jimmie Walker’s Edgewater
Echoes
Published for the enjoyment of our
customers and friends.
Volume 1, Issue 1, all 1973
Publisher: Mrs. Lorae Walker
Editor: P.L. Fears
Editorial Staff: Ken Caywood
Bob Schulz
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General James Long attempted
to recruit Lafitte to help make Texas independent
from Spain and Mexico, but Lafitte remained
neutral. In 1820, Mexico won independence
from Spain, but Lafitte stayed on the Island.
In May 1821, after Lafitte’s attack
on an American ship, he was forced to abandon
his operations in Galveston. Before leaving,
he hosted a huge party for his pirates with
wine and whiskey and burned his settlement.
It is believed that he had buried treasure
on the Island, but it has never been found.
In 1821, Jane Long, while
waiting in vain for the return of her husband
General James Long, who had been killed
in Mexico, became “The Mother of Texas”
giving birth to the first Anglo-Saxon native
Texan, Mary Jane Long on Bolivar Peninsula.
In 1836, four ships of
the Texas Navy made headquarters on the
Island and protected the Texas coast from
harassment by the Mexican Navy. These ships
prevented supplies and men from reaching
Santa Anna, ensuring a victory for Sam Houston’s
army at San Jacinto, 22 miles northwest
of Galveston.
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Jean
Lafitte
Newell Convers Wyeth c. 1910
Gift of John Morrell and Co.
This dramatic pencil drawing indicates
the romantic nature of pirate legend
as seen by the artist and illustrator
N. C. Wyeth, father of famous American
artist Andrew Wyeth.
lsm.crt.state.la.us/cabildo/cab5.htm |
Lafitte was a colorful
character who lived much of his life outside
the law, and a number of details about his
life are obscure. He was said to have been
born in France. Though well known in history
and folklore, both his origins and demise
are uncertain. The accuracy of some accounts
of his life are open to doubt, and an autobiographical
journal is suspected of being a forgery
by some historians. His father was said
to be French and his mother either a Spaniard,
or Sephardi. His mother's family allegedly
fled from Spain to France in 1765 after
his maternal grandfather was put to death
for Judaism. In his alleged journal, Lafitte
describes childhood in the home of his Jewish
grandmother, who was full of stories about
the family's escape from the Inquisition.
Raised in a kosher Jewish household, Lafitte
later married Christiana Levine, from a
Jewish family in Denmark.
Along with his 'crew of
a thousand men' (the number he commanded
was actually quite small, but, due to the
loose confederation which he and his brother
ran, the number of men engaged in their
affairs was substantial), Lafitte sometimes
receives credit for helping defend Louisiana
from the British in the War of 1812, with
his nautical raids along the Gulf of Mexico.
Jean and his older brother
Pierre Lafitte established their own "Kingdom
of Barataria" in the swamps and bayous
near New Orleans after the Louisiana Purchase
of 1803. He claimed to command more than
3,000 men and provided them as troops for
the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, greatly
assisting Andrew Jackson in repulsing the
British attack. The actual number he commanded
was more likely a few dozen, although since
they specialized in artillery their effect
was substantial. Lafitte reportedly conducted
his operations in the historic New Orleans
French Quarter. General Jackson was informed
of Lafitte's gallant exploits at the Battle
of New Orleans by Colonel Ellis P. Bean,
who then recruited Lafitte to support the
Mexican Republican movement.
Of the two brothers, Jean
was the most familiar with the naval aspects
of their enterprise, while Pierre was more
often involved with the commercial aspects.
Pierre lived in New Orleans or at least
maintained his household there (with his
mulato lover who bore him a very large family).
Jean spent the majority of his time in Barataria
managing the daily hands on business of
outfitting privateers and arranging the
smuggling of stolen goods. The most prized
"good" was invariably slaves,
especially after the outlawing of the slave
trade in the United States.
After being run out of
New Orleans around 1817, Lafitte relocated
to the island of Galveston, Texas establishing
another "kingdom" he named "Campeche".
In Galveston, Lafitte either purchased or
set his claim to a lavishly furnished mansion
used by French pirate Louis-Michel Aury,
which he named "Maison Rouge".
The building's upper level was converted
into a fortress where a cannon commanding
Galveston harbor were placed. Around 1820,
Lafitte reportedly married Madeline Regaud,
possibly the widow or daughter of a French
colonist who had died during an ill-fated
expedition to Galveston. In 1821, the schooner
USS Enterprise was sent to Galveston to
remove Lafitte's presence from the Gulf
after one of the pirate's captains attacked
an American merchant ship. Lafitte agreed
to leave the island without a fight, and
in 1821 or 1822 departed on his flagship,
the Pride, burning his fortress and settlements
and reportedly taking immense amounts of
treasure with him. All that remains of Maison
Rouge is the foundation, located at 1417
Avenue A near the Galveston wharf.
While the Lafitte brothers
were engaged in running the Galveston operation,
one client they worked with considerably
in the slave smuggling trade was James Bowie.
The Lafittes were selling slaves at a dollar
a pound, and Bowie would buy them at the
Lafitte's rate, then get around the American
laws against slave trading by reporting
his purchased slaves as having been found
in the possession of smugglers. The law
at the time allowed Bowie to collect a fee
on the "recovered" slaves, and
he would then re-buy the slaves (essentially
a "slave laundering" act) and
then resell them to prospective buyers.
The Lafittes were also
engaged in espionage, and were in effect,
double agents. The notion of their loyalty
to the United States, which, while much
evoked by their own publicity, was highly
dubious. The Lafitte's (Pierre, in particular)
spied for Spain through agents in Cuba and
in Louisiana. While often providing solid
material, the fact of the matter was that
the Lafittes played both sides, American
and Spanish, and always with an eye to securing
their own interests. No doubt the charm
of Pierre and his reputation as a man in
the know figured heavily in the weight he
was given by his immediate handlers, although
he was never trusted by the higher-up of
the Spanish interests. Of particular interest
it should be noted that while running the
island of Galveston for personal benefit,
Pierre Lafitte tried to induce Spain to
assault the island. This would have enhanced
his standing with Spain while causing minimal
real losses to the Lafitte operations.
ean Lafitte's death is
mysterious and unknown as his exact birth
and mother. After his departure from Galveston,
Jean Lafitte was for a brief time a true
pirate. Operating without any letter of
marque, which would have legalized his small
fleet as being in the employ of one of the
newly independent nations of central and
particularly South America, he broke what
had been a cardinal rule of his and attacked
American as well as Spanish shipping. An
American fleet nearly cornered him several
times near Cuba and Hispanola, but each
time, often with the assistance of local
authorities, he managed to escape.
Finally he made his way
to the newly independent republic of Venezuela
where he received a commission and letter
of marque to act as a privateer for the
new county. However, within a few months
a pair of sloops, most likely in Spanish
employ, lured his ship into an engagement
in which he was mortally wounded. He died
in his cabin off the shore of Panama.
Lafitte's
journal
The authenticity of the
Lafitte Journal is hotly debated among Lafitte
scholars, with some accepting the manuscript
and others denouncing it as a forgery. The
problem of authenticating the diary is confounded
by the scarcity of genuine documents in
Lafitte's handwriting for comparison. The
most reliable genuine Lafitte documents
are two short manuscripts from the library
collection of Republic of Texas president
Mirabeau B. Lamar, which are currently held
by the Texas State Archives. Paper tests
confirm that the Journal is written on paper
from the 19th century, though no consensus
exists about authenticity among the small
number of handwriting experts who have studied
the document. The original manuscript was
purchased by Texas Governor Price Daniel
in the 1970s and is on display at the Sam
Houston Regional Library and Research Center
in Liberty, Texas. Translated versions of
the journal have been in print since the
1950s.
Among other things, this
diary would demonstrate that Jean Lafitte
was Jewish, through descent from his maternal
grandmother Zora Nadrimal. Harold I. Sharfman
in Jews on the Frontier: An account of Jewish
Pioneers and Settlers in Early America,
accepted that Lafitte was of Jewish descent.
The family were Marranos who converted under
pressure to Roman Catholicism in the 14th
century, but continued to practice Judaism
secretly. In 1765, Jean's grandmother, Maria
Zola, fled with her mother from Spain to
France to escape the Spanish Inquisition.
Maria Zola's husband, Abhorad (Jean's grandfather),
was put to death by the Inquisition for
"judaizing." (Sharfman, Harold
I., Jews on the Frontier, Henry Regnery
Company, Chicago. 1977. pp. 132-145). Recent
scholars recognize Lafitte as a corsair
or buccaneer who operated with Letters of
Marque to legitimize his commerce raiding.
As such, technically, Jean Lafitte was not
a pirate in the true sense of the word.
PIRATE
GHOST SIGHTINGS
Many are the tales of close encounters with
what some believe to be the phantom fleet
of Jean Lafitte; some claim to have seen
the pirate himself standing at the helm
of the lead vessel.
Workers on the oil platforms
that dot the Gulf of Mexico claim to regularly
spot a billow of sails on the horizon just
before sunset, always heading east into
the gloom. Crews of offshore supply vessels
claim that in the middle watch they have
heard the flapping of sail riggings and
the cry of phantom voices, calling out in
the Creole patois once spoken in Barataria
commands to a ghostly crew. Small boats,
it is said, have been almost swamped by
the passage of the ghostly fleet that is
said to produce visible white foam where
the bows break the waves and a tremendous
wake in the dark waters.
The strangest story comes
from the three man crew of a charter fishing
boat who, anchored off Grand Isle in the
dead of night, all claim to have seen the
apparition of a tall, pale man, clad in
black and wearing a wide-brim hat such as
Lafitte was known to wear, standing on the
aft deck of their sport fisherman. It is
said the apparition looked at them forlornly
then turned his head in the direction of
Louisiana and disappeared before their very
eyes.
Significantly, the ghostly
fleet and the apparition believed to be
the Pirate Jean Lafitte were spotted just
before the disastrous Hurricane Katrina.
Many have come to believe that seeing Lafitte
or his ships is a warning that something
evil is about to befall his beloved Louisiana
coast.
But the ghost of Jean
Lafitte is not confined to the open Gulf
alone. Many legends exist concerning Lafitte’s
golden treasure and there are as many hiding
places as there are versions of the tale.
Most center around the old Barataria area,
Grand Terre and Grand Isle and Galveston
Island particularly, and it is said that
often the ghosts of pirate watchmen can
still be seen, sitting on the spot where
Lafitte’s gold is hidden, guarding
it forever into the afterlife. Archaeological
digs in the area have turned up little of
significance and no gold, but the legends
persist throughout south Louisiana and Texas.
Many believe that Lafitte is coming back
for his treasure one day.
Ghost
sightings from excerpts Haunted America
Tours
"The Ghost of Jean Lafitte and thePhantom
Pirates of Barataria" Story by A. Pustanio,
artwork by Ricardo Pustanio. Haunted New
Orleans Tours © 2006http://www.hauntedamericatours.com/ghoststories/WATERSMYGRAVE/LAFITTE/
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