Jean Lafitte

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This article is about the pirate. For the town named after him, see Jean Lafitte, Louisiana.

Jean Lafitte (1780? - 1826?), was a privateer in the Gulf of Mexico in the early 19th century.

Jean Lafitte

1 Biography
2 Lafitte's disappearance
3 Lafitte's journal
4 Folklore
5 Other references to Lafitte
- 5.1 Lafitte in fiction
6 External links
- 6.1 On the life of Lafitte
- 6.2 Other sites

[edit] Biography

Lafitte was a colourful 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', 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. 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 Lafittes 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.

[edit] Lafitte's disappearance

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. Sadly, 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 shore of Panama.

[edit] 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^{[citation needed]}.

[edit] Folklore

Lafitte claimed never to have plundered an American vessel, and though he engaged in the contraband slave trade, he is accounted a great romantic figure in Louisiana. The mystery surrounding Lafitte has only inflated the legends attached to his name. Lafitte was said to be a master mariner; according to one legend he was once caught in a tropical storm off the coast of North Galveston and steered his ship to safety by riding the storm surge over Galveston island and into the harbor. Lafitte's lost treasure has acquired a lore of its own as it, like his death, was never accounted for. He reportedly maintained several stashes of plundered gold and jewelry in the vast system of marshes, swamps, and bayous located around Barrataria Bay. One such legend places the treasure somewhere on the property of Destrehan Plantation, and Lafitte's spirit walks the plantation on nights of full moons to guide someone to the treasure's location. Other rumors suggest that Lafitte's treasure sank with his ship, the Pride, either near Galveston or in the Gulf of Mexico where some believe it went down during an 1826 hurricane.

His legend was perpetuated in Cecil B. DeMille's classic film The Buccaneer and its 1958 remake, and even by a poem of Byron:

He left a corsair’s name to other times,

Linked with one virtue, and a thousand crimes^{[citation needed]}.

[edit] Other references to Lafitte

Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve in Louisiana is named for him.

Lafitte, Louisiana is the name of a Cajun fishing village and tourist spot on Bayou Barataria, and Chalmette, Louisiana has a street named after the pirate.

Lafitte is also the subject of the Contraband Days festival of Lake Charles, Louisiana, held during the first two weeks of May to celebrate rumors of buried treasure in Lake Charles and Contraband Bayou. The festival features a band of actors portraying Lafitte and his pirates, who sail into the city's namesake lake and capture the city's mayor, forcing him to walk the plank. No such event is known to have occurred, although there are unsubstantiated legends that Lafitte hid treasure in the area of the lake.

Carl Ouellet played a rendition of him in the World Wrestling Federation.

[edit] Lafitte in fiction

The figure of Jean Lafitte has been used in a number of works of fiction.

He appears in the pages of DC Comics' Swamp Thing title, and is said to have been slain by a fellow pirate named Dark Conrad Constantine.

The descendants of Jean Lafitte's men play an important role in Lovecraft's story The Call of Cthulhu.

The breakfast cereal character Cap'n Crunch for a while had a pirate nemesis named Jean LaFoote, after Lafitte.

Lafitte plays a prominent role in Isabel Allende's novel Zorro, where the real pirate and the fictional hero fall in love with the same woman in 19th century Louisiana.

A fictional descendent, Johnny Lafitte, is the main character of Edgar Rice Burroughs' novel Pirate Blood.

"Pirates of the Caribbean", possibly the most famous of the attractions at Disneyland begins at Lafitte's Landing in a New Orleans-themed area of the Park.