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Before
Texas was known as a haven for Old
West outlaws it was a haven for pirates. All the famous pirates
of the day sailed the Gulf Coast waters: Captain Kid, Henry Morgan,
Jean Laffite and Blackbeard. Of those, Laffite was the best known
and casts the longest shadow across Texas
history.
As is often the case with legendary almost mythical characters like
Jean Laffite, the legend gets the spirit of the man right but is
glamorized beyond recognition by history and especially popular
culture. With Laffite, it’s likely that he was not a pirate at all,
not in the way that pirates are portrayed in movies and novels.
What he was, particularly in Texas,
was a privateer.
A privateer differed from a pirate, according to the participants
anyway, in that they carried letters of marquee from one nation
or another, allowing them to pillage and plunder ships with who
the nation was at war. With France, Britain and the United States
still trying to settle things, somebody was at war with somebody
nearly all the time.
Jean Laffite was also a national hero, along with Andrew Jackson,
at the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, the war that settled
once and for all whether or not Britain was going to control any
of the still-developing United States. Despite shifting loyalties
(almost a job requirement for pirates or privateers) Laffite can
be viewed as much a patriot as a pirate.
Soon after his heroics at the Battle of New Orleans, where he cast
his lot with Jackson and America despite a financially lucrative
offer from the British for his help, Laffite found himself something
of a liability to the American government. Snubbed in polite society
he moved his operation to a remote part of Texas
known then by the Karankawa tribe as Snake Island and today as Galveston
Island.
Laffite and a few dozen buccaneers sailed seven ships into Galveston
Harbor in April of 1817, named it Campeachy and treated it as if
they owned it, a rude shock to the Karankawa who had believed for
centuries that the land and its many snakes belonged to them.
The island was soon lined with houses, taverns, gambling parlors,
houses of ill repute and other free enterprises. The town grew to
more than 2,000 people and many of them made a lot of money. One
of Laffite’s men wrote that gold doubloons were “as plentiful as
biscuits.” Campeachy also became the largest slave market in the
New World. Jim Bowie and his brothers were regular customers.
A hurricane leveled the Island in 1818. Laffite traveled to New
Orleans for a loan to rebuild the town but an officer of the U.S.
Government was waiting on him when he returned. Laffite was told
that he would have to leave the Island. Laffite assured the officer
that he would do just that but he stayed right where he was.
Laffite used a plot by former U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr to
claim everything from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean
for himself to stall for more time. General James Long, a confederate
of Burr, declared the island as an official Port of Entry to the
Republic of
Texas and appointed Laffite as governor, as if Laffite needed
an appointment to run the island like it was his own private kingdom.
That situation was as temporary as Burr’s hare-brained scheme. Laffite
soon found that the times they were ‘a changin’. The pirating business
just wasn’t what it used to be. The United States ordered Laffite
off the island and this time they meant it.
In 1821, Laffite and a handful of men sailed out of Galveston
and “into the white mists of oblivion” as one poet put it. Where
Jean Laffite went and what he did after he left Galveston
is the subject of much conjecture and debate, but in Texas
the conjecture and debate usually centers on plundered treasures
that he or his confederates may or may not have buried at different
locations along the coast and southern waterways of the state.
Since the U.S. claimed much of Laffite’s fortune as its own once
he left Galveston,
Laffite is believed to have buried an enormous treasure on one of
the sandy islands near the Texas
coast. The northwest tip of Padre Island has for years been
known as Treasure Dunes.
The rumors and tales of Laffite’s buried treasure extend to the
mouth of the Lavaca River and to the Sabine River near the town
of that same name. The Sabine River treasure is thought to have
been dumped into the muddy waters by Laffite’s men after they took
down a Spanish ship and confiscated its $2 million in silver.
There may have been something to this claim. In the 1880s some fishermen
with hoop nets scooped up a few silver bars, making the Sabine
ground zero for treasure hunters everywhere. The search was renewed
in the 1960s but came to nothing.
That doesn’t mean someone isn’t out there looking for it right now.
© Clay Coppedge
"Letters from Central Texas" January
1, 2010 Column
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