The disabled pirate ship was quickly captured, and not long afterwards twenty-five of her crew were tried, convicted, and hung near Newport, Rhode Island.  But the arrant Low escaped without injury, and continued his career of contemptible crime for some time longer.  What finally became of him is not set down in the histories of piracy.  It is not improbable that if the men under his command were not too brutally stupid to comprehend his cowardly unfaithfulness to them, they suddenly removed from this world one of the least interesting of all base beings.

Chapter XXX

The Pirate of the Gulf

At the beginning of this century there was a very able and, indeed, talented man living on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, who has been set down in the historical records of the times as a very important pirate, and who is described in story and in tradition as a gallant and romantic freebooter of the sea.  This man was Jean Lafitte, widely known as “The Pirate of the Gulf,” and yet who was, in fact, so little of a pirate, that it may be doubted whether or not he deserves a place in these stories of American pirates.

Lafitte was a French blacksmith, and, while still a young man, he came with his two brothers to New Orleans, and set up a shop in Bourbon Street, where he did a good business in horseshoeing and in other branches of his trade.  But he had a soul which soared high above his anvil and his bellows, and perceiving an opportunity to take up a very profitable occupation, he gave up blacksmithing, and with his two brothers as partners became a superintendent of privateering and a general manager of semi-legalized piracy.  The business opportunity which came to the watchful and clear-sighted Lafitte may be briefly described.

In the early years of this century the Gulf of Mexico was the scene of operations of small vessels calling themselves privateers, but in fact pirates.  War had broken out between England and Spain, on the one side, and France on the other, and consequently the first-named nations were very glad to commission privateers to prey upon the commerce of France.  There were also privateers who had been sent out by some of the Central American republics who had thrown off the Spanish yoke, and these, considering Spanish vessels as their proper booty, were very much inclined to look upon English vessels in the same light, as the English and Spanish were allies.  And when a few French privateers came also upon the scene, they helped to make the business of legitimate capture of merchantmen, during the time of war, a very complicated affair.

But upon one point these privateers, who so often acted as pirates, because they had not the spare time in which to work out difficult problems of nationality, were all agreed:  when they had loaded their ships with booty, they must sail to some place where it would be safe to dispose of it.  So, in course of time, the bay of Barrataria, about forty miles south of New Orleans and very well situated for an illegal settlement, was chosen as a privateers’ port, and a large and flourishing colony soon grew up at the head of the bay, to which came privateers of every nationality to dispose of their cargoes.