Читать книгу The Iron Mistress - Paul Iselin Wellman - Страница 52

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Barataria had been reduced. The last of the buccaneers under Jean Lafitte in the year 1818 roosted on a low sandspit off the coast of Mexican Texas, known as Galvez Island, and the seafaring men of the Gulf prayed that if they were cast ashore it would not be on that coast.

It was not the rocky shore they feared, but the rocky hearts of those who dwelt there. For the people of Galvez-town, which was the name of the pirate settlement, were broken men from all countries: prison breakers, gallows birds, fugitives from justice, thieves, murderers, degenerates, who had made their way to that outland place and held it for the time being against the world.

There, and for the last time, the despicable institutions of piracy and slavery met: the one living off the other. Spanish slave ships were the preferred prey of Lafitte’s rovers. In spite of the law forbidding importation of African Negroes, there were always men who, caring little for their good names or the dangers they encountered, were willing to smuggle the cargoes from the captured slavers into the United States, where the expansion of cotton and sugar lands created an insatiable demand for chattel labor.

The year 1818 was the high point of the colony’s prosperity. Very soon the American navy would root the settlement out. But meantime every night was a saturnalia, rum and wine were unlimited, blood-lust and cruelty held full sway, women of many races were at any man’s whim, slaves were in the barracoon to bring more wealth, and living was high, if foul and vicious, in the merry village of Galvez-town.