Fact Behind the Legend in "The Pirates Lafitte"

The Pirates Lafitte: The Treacherous World of the Corsairs of the Gulf, William C. Davis, Harcourt, Inc., hardcover, 706pp, notes, index, photo insert. $28.00 Amazon: $18.48. Also available in paperback.

One of my favorite late Golden Age adventures was The Buccaneer starring Yul Brynner with hair as Jean Lafitte, the privateer who fought with Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. Supposedly, first-time director Anthony Quinn did such a bad job of it that his movie mogul father-in-law never let him direct again, so Quinn had to settle for the acting life and a future Academy Award.

I don't know what the problems were. I always liked it and it was a fun movie. Pirates, Charlton Heston growling through his role as Andrew Jackson, intrigue, colorful battle scenes, redemption, Inger Stevens at her loveliest, the good guys beat the bad guys. What's not to like?

But in "The Pirates Lafitte," author William C. Davis makes clear this wasn't the truth. And you can't entirely blame Hollywood. The truth of the Lafittes is pretty murky, due to circumstances including a lack of records and the Lafittes' own talents at making themselves look good.

Lafittes? Plural? Yes. Almost ignored in legend is Pierre Lafitte, Jean's older brother, and as implied by Davis's story, the dominant of the two. Of course, since Pierre, due to illness, was reduced to handling the business end of the brothers' activities in New Orleans while Jean was at the pirate retreat at Barataria, south of the city, the older brother was bound to leave more of a paper trail for author Davis to pick up on. At the same time, Jean, in his role, was likely end up the more colorful of the two.

But they worked together like Chang and Ing, P.T. Barnum's Siamese twins.

One clear message Davis gets across is that the brothers and their contemporaries were dedicated, calculating, manipulating crooks who profited not nearly as much as one might expect.

The Lafittes excelled at playing both ends against the middle -- trading in African slaves seized from Spanish ships despite an American ban on importation of slaves, scheming with would-be conquerors in Spanish Texas while ratting them out to the Spanish who had them on retainer, dispatching privateers against Spanish ships but without sharing the spoils with the country whose flag they flew (making them pirates and not legitimate privateers).

The Lafittes' role in the Battle of New Orleans was inflated by them and persists to the present-day, as evidenced by the Yul Brynner movie. The fact is Jackson apparently trusted them no more than anyone else did although he gave them fairly high standing so they could coordinate the privateers under them.

The Lafittes made quite a bit of money, but a lot went for lawyers and they wasted even more, Davis says. Although the legend of buried treasure persists, Davis doesn't buy it...nor do most who write about pirates, for that matter. The Lafittes in particular, spent what they had and Pierre, at least, was always in debt to someone.

These guys didn't focus on gold, silver, or the rich variety of more mundane cargo Spanish ships carried. The real riches were in African slaves, whose import was illegal, thus making them a valuable commodity. The Lafittes were, above all, slavetraders.

The Lafittes do provide an interesting contrast to other corsairs. Although those plying the privateer trade could be pretty casual with the rules they were supposed to operate under and exceptionally brutal, the ships operating under the Lafittes never attacked American ships and prisoners were always treated decently. Maybe I missed the author's explanation, but I found it unclear why the Lafittes acted that way. It would seem they sought a practical advantage. One would naturally assume that treating prisoners well would work to their advantage if their behavior became widely known, but a Spanish ship under attack by privateers isn't in a position to determine if the attacker is working for the Lafittes and thus safe to surrender to. And there were a lot of other pirates besides the Lafittes, and many of them slaughtered the crews of captured ships.

Maybe the Lafittes wanted good press. After all, they had strong support among the French and Creole citizens of New Orleans. But like all pirates of the era, their time was short-lived. In the end, the United States made piracy a hanging offense and began enforcing it. The Lafittes disappeared into the Caribbean, still flying the flags of countries revolting against Spanish rule.