Patrick Henry and the Frigate’s Keel: And Other Stories of a Young Nation by Howard Fast Page B

people of the Delta can’t help you. They will remember knowingly that Governor Claiborne re-covered from the hideout of Barataria over half a million dollars’ worth of loot that Laffite’s corsairs had garnered from the shipping of many lands and which he had not found time to remove. But why Laffite avoided and fled from a miserable little force he could have ripped to pieces—that they can’t say.
    The next episode in the strange tale of Laffite concerns a woman, perhaps the same one he had had with him at the hideout when the British officers visited him—although that is hard to say, such a throng of women come in and out of his life. And an emerald necklace, too, as if this story of a pirate were an invented romance, instead of the gospel truth, word for word, detail for detail, as anyone on the Delta will tell you, if you only take the trouble to ask.
    It seems that in his hasty departure from Barataria, Jean had time to take only a few choice items, one of them a necklace of emeralds; and a week later he slipped into New Orleans with a dual purpose in mind, to see his lawyer, Edward Livingston, a friend of Jackson and former mayor of New York City, and to give the necklace to a certain lady. Much legend attaches itself to this necklace, and it has been said that to obtain it Jean and Pierre fought a great battle against a Spanish frigate, sinking it finally; but there is no proof for or against that. Anyway, one night, close to midnight, Jean turned up in the lady’s bedroom, the necklace dangling enticingly from one lace-covered hand.
    She was a practical lady. “Is it true,” she asked the pirate, “that Claiborne took a million dollars’ worth of loot out of Barataria?”
    â€œUnless prices go up—no. Maybe half of that,” Jean smiled.
    â€œAnd you are angry?”
    â€œI am always angry when I lose so much money,” Laffite nodded, and he put the necklace on her. But a little while after, he took it off her, and along with it her long yellow hair; for in a burst of sympathy, she showed him a package of treasonable correspondence she had been conducting with the enemy.
    Perhaps there is nothing new about the French custom of so treating a collaborationist female. But her father had influence with the governor, and it was published around that clipping her hair was Laffite’s vilest crime. However, that is hardly true.
    Afterwards, Laffite told Dominique You, “Love of God, there is no one faithful.”
    â€œNo one.”
    â€œNo one without a price for treason.”
    â€œNo one but maybe that damn Yankee General Jackson.”
    â€œI don’t like Yankees—”
    The Yankee General Jackson, sick with fever, suffering from ulcers and dysentery, lay in bed and cursed the citizens of New Orleans. He had good reason to swear. Having made his way to New Orleans with his army of three thousand backwoodsmen, having opposed, in doing so, much of the vacillating and frightened Washington government, he discovered that the city was ready as a ripe fruit to fall.
    Somewhere to the south of the city was a powerful British army. From one direction or another, the army would make its way north to New Orleans, and it was very necessary that the enemy should be stopped short of the city. But when it came to a knowledge of the wild, swampy land at the Mississippi’s mouth, Jackson met up with a blank wall. Not only did no two maps agree, but no two citizens of New Orleans agreed on the number or direction of the twisting waterways that led to the gulf.
    Jackson called in his friend, Livingston, and pleaded with him that he had to know. He said, they say, “There is someone, Edward, there must be someone who is sane in this damned comic-opera city!”
    â€œUndoubtedly—”
    â€œSomeone who knows the swamp.”
    â€œI know someone who knows the swamp,” Livingston said. “His name is Laffite.”
    A stream of