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Laffite is believed to have been born either in Biarritz, in the French Basque Country, France, or the French colony of Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean. By 1805, Laffite was operating a warehouse in New Orleans to help distribute the goods smuggled by his brother Pierre Lafitte.
The Buccaneer is a 1938 American adventure film made by Paramount Pictures starring Fredric March and based on Jean Lafitte and the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812.
Since his previous pirate colony had been raided by the government and since he conveniently found himself in command of a completely different Gulf coast island, Jean Lafitte decided to pull up stakes and establish a new colony on Galveston Island.
- Early Life
- Piracy & Privateering
- The War of 1812 & New Orleans
- Galveston & Death
- Jean Lafitte in Fiction
Lafitte was born around 1780, probably in France, but very little can be said for certain about his early life. He must have gone to sea, for by 1809, he ended up working for a time with his brother Pierre as a blacksmith, or at least fronted such a business, in New Orleans. The forge and anvils likely concealed the pair's smuggling activities. The...
From around 1810, Lafitte made his base at the secluded Barataria Bay inlet, located to the south of New Orleans and the west of the Mississippi Delta. The location was ideal since the maze of shallow waterways and secret bayous made it very difficult for the authorities to search the area. On the other hand, it was close enough to New Orleans and ...
Lafitte was first approached by the British who realised that a man who commanded a large fleet could be a very useful ally in their war with the U.S. The British were impressed with how Lafitte managed to get through their blockade of the Mississippi Delta. In September 1814, Lafitte was offered various incentives to join the British side and help...
By 1817, Lafitte and his 1,000 loyal men, who crewed some 20 ships, had returned to piracy, attacking merchant ships of the Spanish Empire. This time, the pirate chief chose Campeche as his base, an island that would become Galveston, Texas, in what was then an unstable and much-disputed Spanish province. Lafitte took advantage of the volatile loca...
Lafitte's colourful exploits led to him becoming a favourite figure for later fiction writers. Lord Byron got in early when he wrote the poem The Corsair, perhaps loosely based on Lafitte's life but set in the Aegean. If it is indeed based on Lafitte, Byron did not limit himself to very much historical accuracy in his poem published in 1814. The wo...
- Mark Cartwright
Mar 6, 2014 · Almost 200 years ago, privateer-smuggler Jean Laffite became a hero because he did something most people wouldn’t have done: in the face of extreme adversity, he had helped save New Orleans for the Americans, even though United States officers had destroyed his home base and seized his property a few months earlier.
Aug 15, 2020 · A daring privateer who worked along the Gulf of Mexico, Jean Lafitte helped America defend New Orleans from the British during the War of 1812. Then-General Andrew Jackson approached Jean Lafitte personally to enlist his help against the British.
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In this joint Beyond the Big Screen and Key Battles of American History episode, Steve and James discuss the 1958 movie The Buccaneer, a highly fictionalized telling of the role of the pirate Jean Lafitte and his men in the Battle of New Orleans.
