The Best American Travel Writing 2013 (32 page)

This was the state of affairs on September 16, 1814, when nine U.S. Navy ships appeared off Grand Terre. Sailors manned the cannons, the big black mouths like portals to the next world. The first shell was fired around 8:30
A.M
., dawn buccaneer time, as Lafitte’s men were sitting at tables enjoying a pirate breakfast: rye whiskey and gruel. First the big guns,
ka-boom! ka-boom!
Then the rat-a-tat-tat of small arms, muskets and rifles, then more from the big guns. Cannonballs whistled across the sky, lit up the driftwood houses, set the warehouses ablaze, opening craters on the main street. The slave scaffold fell in a heap. The Planters Hotel was destroyed. The casino collapsed. The pirates had been a gang, but when the onslaught came it was every man for himself. Some stood around, stunned. Some hurried to the warehouses to take whatever they could carry. Some hid. Some unsheathed their swords and ran into battle. Everywhere the uniformed military men, with their starched collars, shiny boots, and shaven faces, fought the pirates, it was classical music versus rock-and-roll. The pirates were long-haired, jewel-bedecked, tattooed, and drunken. Now and then, they fought with an abandon that terrified the regular army, but most of them ran. Away to the flatboats and canoes, to the streams and bayous where the big navy ships could not follow. Grand Terre burned at their backs, got smaller as they went away. First it was the whole world on fire, the sky colored like a bruise, ash falling on the forehead like a benediction, then it was smoke in the distance.

Pierre Lafitte had been staying with his brother at the time of the attack. They fled together, raced through the streets of burning houses, climbed into a pirogue, paddled like mad. Jean was in his midthirties, still handsome but gone a bit soft—too much of the high pirate life. He cursed as he left, exiting his kingdom like Sendak’s Max—all this time, and he was still wearing the wolf costume—driven from the island of the wild things across a sea of flames. They navigated the confused network of rivers and swamps, traveling through afternoon and evening from Little Lake to Lake Salvadore, along channels and estuaries without name, landing, after two days, at a friend’s farm on the German Coast, a dozen miles above New Orleans. The area, which took its name from an early group of settlers, had became a refuge for Frenchmen who fled Acadia when the British took over. Cajun country. The Lafittes hid on the farm for weeks, gangsters on the lam. The other members of the pirate band had been killed, scattered, or captured. Dozens took shelter on Last Island, a sandbar between the Mississippi Sound and the Gulf. Eighty more were in jail in New Orleans. The loot that survived—the goods as well as the ships—was sent back to the city, where it was catalogued, counted, and divvied up among the navy officers. The pirate capital was sunken in the way of Atlantis, turned into a story.

Jean Lafitte continued to scheme. Every trap has a catch, every cell has a secret door. He sent letters, via courier, to the leaders of the city.
Grand Terre is dead and gone. The loot has been retrieved, the privateers killed or jailed. What matters now is the city, which will soon be attacked by the British. And for that, you need the men of Grand Terre
. Lafitte made this case to Claiborne, and Claiborne made it to Andrew Jackson when he arrived in New Orleans in December 1814. By then, Lafitte had become a popular cause. French residents demanded the inclusion of the pirates in the defense of the city. Jackson finally came around when he got a look at the situation on the ground. New Orleans was vulnerable. The defenders were inexperienced in combat, and there were not nearly enough of them. Few were native to the region—they would be as lost in the bayous as the British. But the pirates had lived in the swamps as a man lives in his mind. For every path, they knew a dozen shortcuts, caves, hidden coves. They could serve as scouts, helping General Jackson and his officers understand the maps and the confused ways of the land. They could stand sentry at the heads of the channels, block the British from slipping into the city. Since several of the pirates had served under Napoleon, they could offer hardened battle experience to an army of raw recruits.

There was also the matter of the flints—probably the deciding factor. To fire, the rifles in use at the time needed a flint. This was like the reed used in a wind instrument. No reed, no music; no flint, no bang-bang. As he prepared for the city’s defense, Jackson realized his army was dangerously short on flints. Even if they could outmaneuver the British, the Americans would not have enough working guns. It just so happened Jean Lafitte had thousands of flints hidden in Barataria. It was his insurance policy, his 100k in an unmarked safe-deposit box.

Lafitte traveled to the city to work out terms. He came by canoe, tied at the foot of the parade ground, walked the streets. He met General Jackson in the French Quarter that night. It’s a famous scene. Old Hickory from backwoods Tennessee, the lover of the common man and the wild-haired face on the $20 bill, sharing a brandy with this duded-up gangster in pirate finery, the men chatting as casually as a capo and a Mafia don in folding chairs on Mulberry Street. The terms went as follows: Any pirate who joined the Americans would be freed from jail or welcomed back from Barataria, then assigned a role in the defense of the city. At the end of the war, if the pirate’s service had been honorable, Jackson would request an official pardon from James Madison, the president of the United States.

Jean spent the Battle of New Orleans in the bayou. Though he did not see much action, he played an important role. He was like the bouncer at the side door. His presence pushed the British into the position desired by General Jackson. Pierre was more active. He was a scout, advising the American commanders where to place their ships. Looking at the charts, he told the navy officers which islands were islands and which only looked like islands but were in fact marsh. When the British attacked on January 8, 1815—two weeks after a treaty had been signed and the War of 1812 officially ended—Pierre was at the front. A heavy fog came off the river, making Pierre’s deep knowledge of the terrain invaluable. In the end, this fog, along with luck, led to the rout of the British. It was the Battle of New Orleans, more than anything, that made Andrew Jackson president. And it was President Jackson, with his love of native trash culture, that made America modern. In this hidden, backchannel way, the pirates of Barataria played a role in the creation of modern America. Jean and Pierre Lafitte are black-sheep relatives everyone relied on but few acknowledge.

The pirates were pardoned for their crimes in the afterglow of victory. For a moment, it seemed the Lafittes might settle down to a normal life, open a shop, grow fat and old, and entertain the neighborhood kids with exotic tales of yore. What drove them away? What returned them to sea? Some attribute it to a single slight, a bit of indecorum suffered at the victory ball hosted by Andrew Jackson after the war. It was in a ballroom in the French Quarter on January 23, 1815. For Jean Lafitte, it was a kind of debut, his first affair as a legitimate citizen. The room was crowded with uniformed soldiers. Lafitte approached a group of big shots that included Governor Claiborne, General Jackson, General Coffee, and General de Flaugeac. As Lafitte reached out a hand, de Flaugeac, seeming to notice a friend, turned his back. Claiborne came to the rescue, pulling Lafitte into the circle and introducing him to General Coffee, who blanched when he saw the notorious Lafitte, held out a hand tentatively, then, as if not knowing what to call Lafitte, said something like,
You are uh, uh, uh, uh . . 
.

Jean frowned, said, “Lafitte, the pirate!” and turned and went away, never to be seen in society again.

In the spring of 1816, when the azaleas bloomed and the wind carried the taste of hibiscus and palm, Jean Lafitte borrowed some money, purchased a ship, and went back to the life. Through the summer, several of the pirate’s old mates, men who’d been living increasingly settled lives as merchants and bartenders in the French Quarter, slipped away from everything (wives, children) that nailed them to terra firma—you wake up and the pirate is gone and the promises were lies. From there, Lafitte’s life plays out like a sea shanty in which the hero loves every woman and whips every man. He sailed to Port-au-Prince, where he tried to reestablish his pirate navy but was chased off. He went on to Gálvez-town, a gulf island off the coast of northern Mexico. He built a kingdom that rivaled Grand Terre. His house, which commanded the northern approaches of the island, was tall and clean in the sun. He returned to his hammock and his buccaneer ways, and soon the island filled with rum and pirates and the evils of the barbaric trade—Africans smuggled in chains to New Orleans. When Gálvez-town became famous for its depravity, an American navy ship sailed into view, its crew and big gun driving Lafitte away like a fly driven off by the back of a hand. Out of safe havens, he stayed on the water, guiding a small armada on a mad dash along the Mexican coast. He lost one ship to mutiny, was separated from another in a storm. While Jean was off on an errand, a Spanish galleon spotted Pierre’s ship and gave chase—Pierre, Jean’s only real friend in the world.

Pierre escaped in a skiff with a few others. These men headed ashore, ditching in a desolate cove. Their skiff was recovered later in a lagoon known as Las Bocas. Pierre came down with a fever, was terribly ill. He made his way on foot, wandering to a village called Santa Clara, then to a village called Telyas. The pirates carried him to a hut, where he lay as his fever climbed. Perhaps he saw things in those hours, understood things for the first time. Palm fronds, green and blue, the colors of the pirate life. He died on November 9, 1821. Pink flamingos rising from the bay—was that the last thing he saw? Two men were with him. They carried his body back to Santa Clara, where he was buried in the churchyard. A priest named José Gregorio Cervera performed the ceremony. According to his friends, Pierre was given a headstone with his name and the date of his death—no one knew exactly when he’d been born—but it’s since vanished. Much later, Mexican officials placed a stone cross at the spot where Pierre Lafitte is believed to be buried.

Jean sailed on, unaware of his brother’s death. The news reached him months later when he came ashore in the Virgin Islands. It had been carried in the way of a rumor, port to port. It nearly killed Jean. He went to the wharf, where the ships stood at anchor, and the men drank in the rigging, and the sky was black, and the wind never stopped blowing. Jean vanished after that; the episodes of his later years and death are largely unknown.

In his disappearance, as in so much else, Jean Lafitte the pirate is the spiritual father of New Orleans. This is a city where a friend tells you he’s going to get a drink and never comes back; you see him 30 years later, in the same clothes, wandering with a go cup, face lighting up when he spots you, and he points and says,
There you are!
Boston or Chicago can have a Ward Cleaver–type patriarch who dispenses conventional wisdom, but New Orleans needs a father as crooked and mysterious as the town. George Washington was from Virginia. Abe Lincoln was from Kentucky. Teddy Roosevelt grew up in Manhattan. But no one knows where Jean Lafitte came from or who he really was. Some said he was a Catholic from Spain. Some said he was cured of religion as a boy in France. Some said his father was a noble killed by the guillotine. Some said his father was a fisherman, his fingers scarred by nets. Some said he was raised in wealth; some said he was the pauper who grew into a pirate king.

Others have claimed him as a Marrano, a descendant of Spanish Jews forced to convert to Christianity but who continued to practice their faith in secret—or, if not practice, then at least be aware of the secret thing that made them different. According to
The Early Jews of New Orleans
by Bertram Korn, Jean and Pierre’s parents died young, leaving the boys to be raised by a maternal grandmother, Maria Zora Nadrimal, whose own husband had been killed during the Spanish Inquisition. It was this grandmother who “planted the seed of hatred in her grandsons,” which would manifest itself at sea, when the Lafittes took delight in plundering Spanish ships. The name Lafitte may be a variation of the Hebrew name Levi. A few decades after the pirate vanished, a historian turned up an old Lafitte family Bible, in which the following note, seemingly written in the pirate’s own hand, was found: “I owe all my ingenuity to the influence of my grandmother, a Spanish Jewess, who bore witness at the time of the Inquisition.”

The mystery of Lafitte’s final years gave rise to legends. In some, he settled down to a quiet life in New Orleans. In others, he changed sides and fought for Spain. Few believed he died, or could be killed. In one story, he rescued Napoleon from exile on Saint Helena and spirited him back to Louisiana, where the two men lived for years, dying in their sleep, buried side by side. A more likely version was reported by William Davis in
The Pirates Laffite
. According to Davis, Jean headed south after getting the news of Pierre’s death. He landed in Colombia, where, in the way of the kid who joins the marines when a girl has broken his heart, he enlisted in the navy. For months he followed the rules, patrolling the shores of Cartagena. But on the morning of February 4, 1823, spotting what seemed to be a merchant ship, he felt the old itch. He gave chase and attacked, but he was wrong. It was not a merchant ship but a Spanish man-of-war. It’s a familiar nightmare: you believe you’re the hunter but soon realize you’re the prey. That afternoon, as Lafitte gave orders, a burst of gunfire swept across the deck and cut him in half. He was 41, died instantly, and was buried at sea, 40 miles off Honduras.

The report of his death, as carried in the newspaper
Gaceta de Cartagena
, like so much of New Orleans history, reads like a cover, the version given to the people so they’ll never learn the truth: “The loss of this brave naval official is moving. The boldness with which he confronted the superior forces which hit him manifests well that, as an enthusiast of honor, he wished to follow it down the road to death rather than abandon it in flight.”