The Pirates Laffite by William C. Davis

Author:William C. Davis [Davis, William C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

SEVENTEEN

Deadly Friends 1817–1818

Slight are the outward signs of evil thought,

Within—within—'twas there the spirit wrought!

Love shows all changes—Hate, Ambition, Guile,

Betray no further than the bitter smile.

EVEN AS JEAN LAFFITE sailed west along the Louisiana coast toward Galveston, information that he and Pierre passed to Fatio helped discomfit Aury yet again. When he left Galveston in July, Aury sailed to Old Providence, an island off the east coast of Colombia, where one of his corsairs informed him that the revolutionary juntas of Buenos Aires and Chile had empowered him to take both Old Providence and Santa Catalina islands on their behalf. He raised the flag of the insurgencies and proclaimed himself a governor once more, then sailed on to Florida.1 When Aury reached Amelia Island on September 15, an adventurer named Gregor McGregor had occupied the place, but had left on September 4 in a huff.2 Colonel Jared Irvine had taken over from McGregor, and Aury simply pushed Irvine aside upon arrival. He raised the Mexican insurgent flag, and prepared to make the island a base for privateering. A week later he had a dozen ships in the harbor.3 Nevertheless, the United States was not about to risk Florida going from a Spanish colony to a Mexican one. By early December even the British knew that President Monroe would take action, and later that month American forces occupied Amelia Island. Aury gave it up without a fight. He went to Charleston, then Jamaica, and wound up on Old Providence in July, where he would operate for the rest of his brief life. 4

The British ambassador in Washington expected Monroe to move against Galveston as well, noting that a squadron of four ships—consisting of the corvette John Adams, the brig Prometheus, the schooner Lynx, and another vessel—had been ordered into the Gulf of Mexico.5 Indeed, the day that Charles Bagot sent his report to London, Monroe issued a state of the union message in which he said that he intended to suppress the pirates at Amelia and Galveston. Significantly, he referred to Galveston as being "within the limits of the United States, as we contend, under the cession of Louisiana," not failing to get in a subtle complaint about Spain delaying the boundary negotiation.6

The week after his message, Monroe told the secretary of war to notify the military to be ready for orders. When Captain John D. Henley of the navy asked for 150 soldiers and officers for a joint operation against Galveston, General Andrew Jackson agreed, and on the last day of the year General Robert Butler, in command of the Division of the South at Nashville, Tennessee, ordered men from the United States Army garrison at New Orleans to be ready to march "to suppress the military establishment" at Galveston Island.7 When Henley and the squadron led by the John Adams got Florida without a fight, though, Monroe decided to cancel the Galveston movement. American soldiers were now occupying Spanish Florida, and one diplomatic crisis with Spain was enough for the moment.

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