scene of combat as swiftly as it was possible for the wind to force his
vessel through the water.

The disabled pirate ship was quickly captured, and not long afterwards
twenty-five of her crew were tried, convicted, and hung near Newport,
Rhode Island. But the arrant Low escaped without injury, and continued
his career of contemptible crime for some time longer. What finally
became of him is not set down in the histories of piracy. It is not
improbable that if the men under his command were not too brutally
stupid to comprehend his cowardly unfaithfulness to them, they suddenly
removed from this world one of the least interesting of all base
beings.

Chapter XXX

The Pirate of the Gulf

At the beginning of this century there was a very able and, indeed,
talented man living on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, who has been
set down in the historical records of the times as a very important
pirate, and who is described in story and in tradition as a gallant and
romantic freebooter of the sea. This man was Jean Lafitte, widely known
as "The Pirate of the Gulf," and yet who was, in fact, so little of a
pirate, that it may be doubted whether or not he deserves a place in
these stories of American pirates.

Lafitte was a French blacksmith, and, while still a young man, he came
with his two brothers to New Orleans, and set up a shop in Bourbon
Street, where he did a good business in horseshoeing and in other
branches of his trade. But he had a soul which soared high above his
anvil and his bellows, and perceiving an opportunity to take up a very
profitable occupation, he gave up blacksmithing, and with his two
brothers as partners became a superintendent of privateering and a
general manager of semi-legalized piracy. The business opportunity which
came to the watchful and clear-sighted Lafitte may be briefly described.

In the early years of this century the Gulf of Mexico was the scene of
operations of small vessels calling themselves privateers, but in fact
pirates. War had broken out between England and Spain, on the one side,
and France on the other, and consequently the first-named nations were
very glad to commission privateers to prey upon the commerce of France.
There were also privateers who had been sent out by some of the Central
American republics who had thrown off the Spanish yoke, and these,
considering Spanish vessels as their proper booty, were very much
inclined to look upon English vessels