Today, Lafitte is remembered romantically in Galveston, where costumed “Lafittes” stroll The Strand during Mardi Gras. Historians differ on the cause of his death: Theories include fatal injuries in a battle with Spanish merchant vessels and illness. Lafitte set sail, perhaps for the Yucatán, and survived for another few years before he died around 1823. In 1820, after one of his men raided an American ship, the U.S. Photo courtesy Rosenberg Library, GalvestonĪn estimated 1,000 people, mostly men, lived in the encampment at its peak, Curley says, but in 1818 a storm swamped much of the island and destroyed many of Lafitte’s ships. Lafitte’s letter to James Long, held at the Rosenberg Library in Galveston. His home, reportedly painted red, was dubbed Maison Rouge. Ousting a few other low-rung smugglers in the process, he established Campeche. Lafitte kept up his smuggling after the war until pressure from authorities forced him to leave Louisiana and move to the windswept sandbar of Galveston in 1817. President James Madison granted him a pardon. And after Lafitte and his men aided American forces in the Battle of New Orleans, the last major clash of the War of 1812, U.S.
Louisiana officials didn’t approve of the Lafitte brothers’ ways, but they were popular among the citizenry because their goods were inexpensive.
It gave him a flimsy guise of legality to board Spanish ships and seize their cargo, which he then sold at auction. As a privateer-an agent for hire-Jean held a “letter of marque” from Cartagena, a port on the coast of Colombia. The Lafitte brothers eventually moved their headquarters to Barataria Bay, in the swampland south of New Orleans. “Those swashbuckling tales are the stuff of Robert Louis Stevenson.” “I don’t think there was any walking of the plank in the days of Lafitte,” Curley says. Lafitte acted more like a mob boss than a sword-wielding swashbuckler, even though paintings sometimes depict him wearing a plumed hat (he probably didn’t). Though he’s remembered as a pirate, he was late to the game the golden age of piracy had fizzled a century earlier under pressure from the British navy. He began his criminal career in New Orleans around 1805 when he worked with Pierre to peddle stolen goods. He spelled his name Laffite, but English documents switched the spelling to Lafitte, and it stuck. Historians believe Lafitte was born in France, or possibly the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, around 1790. “Outlaws don’t keep good records,” Curley notes. He could get them anything they wanted and sell it to them cheaper than merchants.”Įxcept for a few letters and accounts from contemporaries, and some notarized documents in New Orleans, where Lafitte conducted much of his business before moving to Galveston, hard facts about Texas’ most famous smuggler remain elusive. “He was very handsome and gentlemanly-suave, well dressed, charming, and charismatic,” says Lou Graves MacBeth, vice president of the Galveston-based Laffite Society, echoing the portrayals found in historical depictions. Still, one can imagine his dashing figure on the humid coastline directing boat raids, steering ships into the natural harbor, and sorting booty he raided up and down the Gulf Coast. The crumbling arches and steps now occupying the lot on Harborside Drive had nothing to do with Lafitte-they were part of a home built decades after the pirate died. Nothing remains of Lafitte’s old Galveston village, which he named Campeche, because he burned much of it when fleeing the island under pressure from the U.S. “The legends and lies and truths about Lafitte are great fun, but some of the reality is pathetic and tragic.” “There’s a real cachet about pirates, even if the legends take on a life of their own,” says Stephen Curley, a retired English professor from Texas A&M University at Galveston who lectures about Lafitte. He and his older brother, Pierre, patrolled the Gulf of Mexico as pseudo-agents of New World governments that had revolted against Spain, exploiting the naval routes that linked the Gulf Coast to the rest of the globe. Aside from a state historical marker out front, there’s little sign this overgrown lot was once the encampment of Texas’ most infamous pirate, Jean Lafitte.įrom 1817-20, Lafitte headquartered his smuggling business on Galveston Island, which was then part of Spanish Texas. On Galveston Island’s east end, behind a rusting chain-link fence, the concrete bones of an old structure sit between a residential home and a metal-sided warehouse.