Pierre Lafitte

Overview

Pierre Lafitte was the elder of the two Lafitte brothers and the principal land-side operator of the Barataria and Galveston privateering enterprise. Where Jean Lafitte commanded the operational base and the fleet captains, Pierre handled the New Orleans-side commercial work: brokering prize cargoes into the city’s wholesale market, managing relations with the merchants who took inventoried goods on consignment, negotiating with sympathetic officials, and acting as the public face of the family blacksmith shop that served as the enterprise’s urban front.

Origins

Pierre, like his younger brother, is poorly documented before his arrival in New Orleans around 1809. Family accounts vary between French (Bordeaux or Bayonne) and Saint-Domingue origins; the brothers’ emigration to Louisiana followed the great wave of refugee migration from the Caribbean and the 1809 Spanish expulsion of French settlers from Cuba. By 1810 the brothers had established the blacksmith shop on Bourbon Street in New Orleans that traditionally bears their name and were already running goods through the Barataria network of bayous south of the city.

Career

Pierre’s role in the Barataria enterprise (roughly 1811–1814) was central but largely indoors: he managed the wholesale relationships with the New Orleans merchants who took the broken-down prize cargoes, kept the books, and was the brother that Louisiana officials negotiated with when negotiations were politically possible. He was arrested in 1814 on warrants issued by U.S. district attorney John Randolph Grymes during the federal pre-Battle-of-New-Orleans crackdown, and held in the calabozo on Royal Street until the night of his escape — assisted from outside, almost certainly by his brother’s contacts — just before the British approached the city.

After the 1815 pardons, Pierre relocated with Jean to Galveston Island, where the brothers re-established the operation under Mexican letters of marque (the “Campeche” settlement, 1817–1821). Pierre’s Galveston-period correspondence with the Spanish colonial authorities — recently reassessed in William C. Davis’s 2005 dual biography — establishes that he was also, during these years, an informant to Spanish intelligence, reporting on the brothers’ own privateering operations in exchange for payments and protection of his property. The dual loyalty is anomalous in pirate history and remains imperfectly explained.

Fate

After the U.S. Navy’s 1821 expulsion of the Galveston settlement, Pierre left with Jean for the Yucatán coast. He died at Dzilam de Bravo (then Dzilam González) in November 1821, several months before his brother’s death in the western Caribbean. The cause is disputed: contemporary local records mention illness, possibly yellow fever then prevalent on the coast, but no death certificate has been located and the grave at Dzilam de Bravo identified as Pierre’s rests on local tradition rather than documentary attestation.

Legacy

Pierre has been overshadowed by his younger brother in every popular treatment of the Lafittes from the nineteenth century onward. The cinematic adaptations — DeMille (1938, 1958), the various pulps — consistently flatten the operation to Jean acting alone, and Pierre, when he appears at all, is either the bumbling older brother or an outright invention. The recovery of his role in the enterprise is the principal contribution of modern Lafitte scholarship.

Associates & contemporaries

• Jean Lafitte — Younger brother and operational head of the privateering enterprise.
• Dominique Youx — Senior Baratarian captain managed in the field by Jean but on the books that Pierre kept.