Pirates & Jean Lafitte's Campeche

Before Galveston was a port of cotton kings, it was a nest of privateers. In the years around 1817 the island belonged to buccaneers and soldiers of fortune, and its most famous resident was the notorious Jean Lafitte, who built a fortified settlement he called Campeche and reigned over it like a king from a red-painted house full of captured treasure. Ships flying uncertain flags slipped in and out of the harbor, cargoes changed hands, and the line between patriot and pirate blurred in the Gulf haze. This drive follows the buccaneer chapter across the island — from the harbor where the raiders anchored to the site of Lafitte's fabled Maison Rouge, and on to the home of the very different man, Michel Menard, who would buy the island and found the respectable city that grew over the pirates' old ground. As the story goes, treasure may still lie buried somewhere beneath it all.