word arrived: Fort Bowyer was secure. The giant flash that the relief party assumed was the fort’s powder magazine blowing up was actually the British twenty-gun man-of-war
Hermes
being blown to bits in the pass. The other three enemy ships departed, as did the shore raiding party, leaving 162 Indians and Englishmen dead on the beaches and aboard the ships. Fort Bowyer’s commander, a Major Lawrence, had gathered his defenders before the battle and—in a play on the famous last words of his namesake on the ill-fated
Chesapeake—
made them repeat their new motto: “Don’t give up the fort!”* 33
With Fort Bowyer secure, Jackson set about organizing his attack on Pensacola, a task he looked forward to with relish, since the Spanish
comandante
had replied to his earlier letter by calling him “impertinent.”
Slowly but surely, the troops Jackson had called for from Tennessee began to arrive, among them the reliable General Coffee’s 1,800 cavalrymen. On November 2 Jackson marched on Pensacola with an army of 3,000, including 700 regulars. Four days later it stood before the city while a messenger under a white flag walked toward Pensacola to deliver an ultimatum to surrender. He was fired upon, not apparently by the Spaniards but by the truculent, newly arrived British. That night Jackson maneuvered his soldiers so as to encircle the city, and at dawn on November 7, 1814, they stormed the town. There was brief fighting, but soon Jackson was informed that the Spanish
comandante,
“old, infirm and trembling, was stumbling around with a white flag in distracted quest” of him. The surrender was quickly arranged, but not before the British blew up their commandeered garrison at Fort Barrancas, reboarded their ships, and sailed off for parts unknown. What happened to the majority of hostile Indians has never been fully explained, although a number of them were rounded up after they were observed staggering drunkenly around the city, proudly wearing their British red coats without pants.
Leaving a large number of his men to garrison Pensacola, Jackson then countermarched back to Mobile. After leaving even more men to protect that city, he took Coffee and his cavalry and pushed on to New Orleans, where he expected the main battle to break out.
Five
C entral to the British design for the capture of Louisiana was an extraordinary scheme devised by Colonel Nicholls to enlist the services of the “pirates of Barataria,” who were for the most part not pirates at all but “privateers,” operating under “letters of marque” from foreign countries. Under the agreed concessions of maritime law, these official letters, or commissions, allowed the privateers to prey on the merchant shipping of any nation at war with the issuing country without—in the event they were captured—being subject to hanging as pirates, the accepted punishment of the day. Privateering had a long if not always honorable history—Sir Francis Drake, famed navigator of the Elizabethan era, was also a privateer. In certain instances, New England businessmen owned privateering ships, and Jefferson himself approved of their use in place of naval warships. But any time a diverse band of armed men is organized without the strict discipline of military rules and regulations, excesses can occur, and in privateering, especially, they occurred frequently.
In the Gulf of Mexico, a large gathering of these strange and ruthless men had set up operations on Grand Terre Island, Louisiana, which lies about forty miles south of New Orleans as the crow flies, but with the only route to the city lying along the twisted tangle of rivers, bayous, creeks, and canals, it was about a hundred miles and normally took three days or so to get there. The leader of this band was a tall, handsome, magnetic Frenchman named Jean Laffite, who, using his blacksmith shop in New Orleans as a front, came to run a phenomenal business smuggling contraband (illegal goods on which no
Hermes
being blown to bits in the pass. The other three enemy ships departed, as did the shore raiding party, leaving 162 Indians and Englishmen dead on the beaches and aboard the ships. Fort Bowyer’s commander, a Major Lawrence, had gathered his defenders before the battle and—in a play on the famous last words of his namesake on the ill-fated
Chesapeake—
made them repeat their new motto: “Don’t give up the fort!”* 33
With Fort Bowyer secure, Jackson set about organizing his attack on Pensacola, a task he looked forward to with relish, since the Spanish
comandante
had replied to his earlier letter by calling him “impertinent.”
Slowly but surely, the troops Jackson had called for from Tennessee began to arrive, among them the reliable General Coffee’s 1,800 cavalrymen. On November 2 Jackson marched on Pensacola with an army of 3,000, including 700 regulars. Four days later it stood before the city while a messenger under a white flag walked toward Pensacola to deliver an ultimatum to surrender. He was fired upon, not apparently by the Spaniards but by the truculent, newly arrived British. That night Jackson maneuvered his soldiers so as to encircle the city, and at dawn on November 7, 1814, they stormed the town. There was brief fighting, but soon Jackson was informed that the Spanish
comandante,
“old, infirm and trembling, was stumbling around with a white flag in distracted quest” of him. The surrender was quickly arranged, but not before the British blew up their commandeered garrison at Fort Barrancas, reboarded their ships, and sailed off for parts unknown. What happened to the majority of hostile Indians has never been fully explained, although a number of them were rounded up after they were observed staggering drunkenly around the city, proudly wearing their British red coats without pants.
Leaving a large number of his men to garrison Pensacola, Jackson then countermarched back to Mobile. After leaving even more men to protect that city, he took Coffee and his cavalry and pushed on to New Orleans, where he expected the main battle to break out.
Five
C entral to the British design for the capture of Louisiana was an extraordinary scheme devised by Colonel Nicholls to enlist the services of the “pirates of Barataria,” who were for the most part not pirates at all but “privateers,” operating under “letters of marque” from foreign countries. Under the agreed concessions of maritime law, these official letters, or commissions, allowed the privateers to prey on the merchant shipping of any nation at war with the issuing country without—in the event they were captured—being subject to hanging as pirates, the accepted punishment of the day. Privateering had a long if not always honorable history—Sir Francis Drake, famed navigator of the Elizabethan era, was also a privateer. In certain instances, New England businessmen owned privateering ships, and Jefferson himself approved of their use in place of naval warships. But any time a diverse band of armed men is organized without the strict discipline of military rules and regulations, excesses can occur, and in privateering, especially, they occurred frequently.
In the Gulf of Mexico, a large gathering of these strange and ruthless men had set up operations on Grand Terre Island, Louisiana, which lies about forty miles south of New Orleans as the crow flies, but with the only route to the city lying along the twisted tangle of rivers, bayous, creeks, and canals, it was about a hundred miles and normally took three days or so to get there. The leader of this band was a tall, handsome, magnetic Frenchman named Jean Laffite, who, using his blacksmith shop in New Orleans as a front, came to run a phenomenal business smuggling contraband (illegal goods on which no
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