Here he was shortly joined by two other adventurers: our old friend, Colonel Perry, who had escaped to the United States after the disaster of the Medina, and Francisco Xavier Mina, a soldier of fortune from Navarre. Mina’s parents, who were peasant farmers, had destined him for the law, but when Napoleon invaded Spain, young Mina threw away his law books, raised a band of guerillas, and harassed the invaders until his name became a terror to the French. He was captured in 1812 and, after several years in a French prison, went to England, where he made the acquaintance of a number of Mexican political exiles, who induced him to take a hand in freeing their native country. In September, 1816, Mina’s expedition, consisting of two hundred infantry and a battery of artillery, sailed from Baltimore for Galveston, where he found De Aury with some four hundred well-drilled men and Colonel Perry with a hundred more. In March, 1817, the three commanders sailed for the mouth of the Rio Santander, fifty miles up the Mexican coast from Tampico, and disembarked their forces at the river bar. The town of Soto la Marina, sixty miles from the river’s mouth, fell without opposition, and with its fall the leaders parted company. De Aury returned to Galveston, but, finding the pirate Lafitte in possession, sailed away in search of pastures new. Mina, ambitious for further conquests, marched into the interior, capturing Valle de Mais, Peotillos, Real de Rinos, and Venadito in rapid succession. At Venadito, however, his streak of good fortune ended as suddenly as it had begun, for while his men were scattered in search of plunder a Spanish force recaptured the town and made Mina a prisoner. So relieved was the Spanish Government at receiving word of his capture and execution that it ordered the church-bells to be rung in every town in Mexico and made the viceroy a count.
When Colonel Perry learned of Mina’s plan for marching into the interior with the small force at his disposal, he flatly refused to have anything to do with so harebrained a business and, with fifty of his men, started up the coast in an attempt to make his way back to the United States. As the disastrous retreat began in May, when water was scarce and the heat in the swampy lowlands was almost unbearable, they suffered terribly. Just as the little band of adventurers reached the borders of Texas and were congratulating themselves on having all but won to safety, a party of two hundred Spanish cavalry suddenly appeared. Perry, throwing his men into line of battle, received the onslaught of the lancers with a volley which checked them in mid-career and would doubtless have ended the contest then and there had not the garrison of the near-by town sallied out and taken the Americans in the rear. Clothed in rags, scorched by the sun, parched from thirst, half starved, surrounded by an overwhelming foe, gallantly did these desperate men sustain their reputation for valor. Again and again the lancers swept down upon them, again and again the garrison attacked them in the rear, but always from the thinning line of heroes spat a storm of lead so deadly that the Spaniards could not stand before it. Blackened with smoke and powder, fainting from hunger and exhaustion, bleeding from innumerable wounds, the adventurers fought like men who welcomed death. The sun had disappeared; the shadows of night were gathering thick upon the plain; but still a handful of powder-grimed, blood-streaked men, standing back to back, amid a ring of dead and dying, held off the enemy. As the darkness deepened, a single gallant figure still waved a defiant sword: it was Perry, who, true to the filibusters’ motto that “Americans never surrender,” fell by his own hand.
Probably the most remarkable of this long list of adventurers was the Jean Lafitte whom De Aury found in possession of Galveston. A Frenchman by birth and an American by adoption, he and his brother Pierre had, during the early years of the century, established on Barataria Island, near the mouth of the Mississippi, what was virtually a pirate kingdom, where they drove a thriving trade with the planters along the upper river and the merchants of New Orleans in smuggled slaves and merchandise. Although both the State and federal authorities had made repeated attempts to dislodge them, the Lafittes were at the height of their prosperity when the second war with England began. When the British armada destined for the conquest of Louisiana arrived off the Mississippi, late in 1814, an officer was sent to Jean Lafitte offering him fifty thousand dollars and a captain’s commission in the royal navy if he would co-operate with the British in the capture of New Orleans. Though Governor Claiborne, of Louisiana, had set a price on his head, Lafitte, who was, it seemed, a patriot first and a pirate afterward, hastened up the river to New Orleans, warned the governor of the approach of the British fleet, and offered his services and those of his men to Andrew Jackson for the defense of the city. His offer was accepted in the spirit in which it was made, and Lafitte and his red-shirted buccaneers played no small part in winning the famous victory. They were mentioned in despatches by Jackson, thanked for their services by the President and pardoned, and settled down for a time to a lawful and humdrum existence. But for such men a life of ease and safety held no attractions; so, about the time that De Aury’s squadron sailed for Soto la Marina, Lafitte, with half a dozen vessels, dropped casually into the harbor of Galveston and, as the place suited him, coolly took possession.
By the close of 1817 the followers of Lafitte on Galveston Island had increased to upward of a thousand men. They were of all nations and all languages—fugitives from justice and fugitives from oppression. Those of them who had wives brought them to the settlement at Galveston, and those who had no wives brought their mistresses, so that the society of the place, whatever may be said of its morals, began to assume an air of permanency. On the site of the hut occupied by the late governor, De Aury, Lafitte erected a pretentious house and built a fort; other buildings sprang up, among them a “Yankee” boarding-house, and, to complete the establishment, a small arsenal and dockyard were constructed. To lend an air of respectability to his enterprise, Lafitte obtained privateering commissions from several of the revolted colonies of Spain, and for several years his cruisers, first under one flag and then under another, conducted operations in the Gulf which smacked considerably more of piracy than of privateering. In 1819 Lafitte was taken into the service of the Republican party in Mexico, Galveston was officially made a port of entry, and he was appointed governor of the island.
By the terms of the treaty whereby Spain, in 1819, sold Florida to the United States, the latter agreed to accept the Sabine as its western boundary and make no further claims to Texas. Though this treaty aroused the most profound indignation throughout the Southwest, nowhere did it rise so high as in the town of Natchez. From Natchez had gone out each of the expeditions which, since the days of Philip Nolan, had hammered against the Spanish barriers. To it had returned every leader who had escaped death on the battle-field or before a firing-party. In it, as a great river town enjoying a vast trade with the interior, was gathered the most reckless, lawless, enterprising population—flatboatmen, steamboatmen, frontiersmen—to be found in all the Southwest. So, when Doctor James Long, an army surgeon who had served under Jackson at New Orleans, called for recruits to make one more attempt to free Texas, he did not call in vain. Early in June Long set out from Natchez with only seventy-five men, but no sooner had he crossed the Sabine and entered Texas than the survivors of former expeditions hastened to join him, so that when Nacogdoches was reached he had behind him upward of three hundred men: veterans who had seen service under Nolan and Magee, and Kemper, and Gutierrez, and Toledo, and Humbert, and Perry, and Mina, and De Aury. At Nacogdoches Long established a provisional government, a supreme council was elected, and Texas was proclaimed a free and independent republic. Realizing, however, that he could not hope to hold the territory thus easily occupied for any length of time unaided, Long despatched a commission to Galveston to ask the co-operation of Lafitte. Though the pirate chieftain received the commissioners with marked courtesy and entertained them at the “Red House,” as his residence was called, with the lavish hospitality for which he was noted, he told them bluntly that, though Doctor Long had his best wishes for success, the fate of Nolan and Perry and Mina and a host of others ought to convince him how hopeless it was to wage war against Spain with so insignificant a force. Upon receiving this answer, Doctor Long, believing that a personal application to the buccaneer might meet with better success, himself set out for Galveston. As luck would have it, he reached there on the same day that the American war-ship Enterprise dropped anchor in the harbor and its commander, Lieutenant Kearny, informed Lafitte that he had imperative orders from Washington to break up the establishment at Galveston. There was nothing left for Lafitte but to obey, and a few days later the rising tide carried outside Galveston bar the Pride and the other vessels comprising the fleet of the last of the buccaneers, who abandoned the shores of Texas forever.[B]
Doctor Long, thoroughly discouraged, returned to Nacogdoches to find a Spanish army close at hand and his own forces completely demoralized. Surrounded and outnumbered, resistance was useless and he surrendered. Though Spanish dominion in Mexico was now at an end, Doctor Long and a number of his companions were sent to the capital, where for several months he was held a prisoner, the vigorous representations of the American minister finally resulting in his release. The Mexicans had no more intention than the Spaniards, however, of permitting Texas to achieve independence, which, doubtless, accounts for the fact that Doctor Long, who was known as a champion of Texan liberty, was assassinated by a soldier in the streets of the capital a few days after his release from prison. But he and the long line of adventurers who preceded him did not fight and die in vain, for they paved the way for the Austins and Sam Houston, the final liberators of Texas, who, a few years later, crossed the Sabine and completed the work that Nolan, Magee, Kemper, Gutierrez, Toledo, Humbert, Perry, Mina, De Aury, and Long had begun. As for Lafitte, the most picturesque adventurer of them all, he sailed away from Galveston and, following the example of that long line of buccaneers of whom he was the last, spent his latter years in harrying the commerce of the Dons upon the Spanish main. Along the palm-fringed Gulf coast his memory still survives, and at night the superstitious sailors sometimes claim to see the ghostly spars of his rakish craft and to hear, borne by the night breeze, the rumble of his distant cannonading.
“The palmetto leaves are whispering, while the gentle trade-winds blow,
And the soothing Southern zephyrs are sighing soft and low,
As a silvery moonlight glistens, and the droning fireflies glow,
Comes a voice from out the cypress,