"It is a melancholy truth," continued the court, "too well known to this court, that the instruments used in these predatory voyages, carried on under the colors of the South American states, are among the most abandoned and profligate of men."
Under the treaty mentioned, these American-owned cruisers were pirates. How many cruisers of the kind were fitted out from American ports (there were some European ships in the business also) cannot be learned now, but a list of twenty-eight is printed in the Annals of the Fifteenth Congress. The list is incomplete. Most of them were owned in Baltimore, and in 1823 the Columbia, South Carolina, _Telescope_ denounced that city as "the home port of a fleet of Spanish-American pirates." In reply to this, _Niles's Register_, dated May 24, 1823, said:--
"Perhaps it may afford the editor of the _Telescope_ some satisfaction to learn that _every_ person who was fully regarded as being engaged in whatever could have given rise to his censure for piracy has become a bankrupt as well in character as in property."
It is to be noted, further, that these cruisers were not pirates merely by the existence of a treaty with Spain. They captured the ships of all nations when it could be done safely, and sometimes they did this openly. When Almeda was blockading Havana, he seized a British vessel at the mouth of the harbor because she happened to have some Spanish property on board. But the most deplorable cases were those in which the ships were seized by cruisers that had been unlucky. For in such cases the prizes were robbed and then sunk with all hands.
Still another result of the work of these pirates was the establishment of two remarkable communities, one in Texas and the other in Florida, both of which territories were then under the Spanish crown. Both settlements were made to provide a market for the goods which these cruisers captured; for after the decision of the courts noted above, the prizes could be no longer sent to the United States.
The Texas community was established by Jean Lafitte, who had had much experience as a smuggler at Barataria Bay, Louisiana, both before and during the War of 1812. He had also made several cruises on pirate ships--enough to learn that more money could be made buying prizes from the cruisers than in cruising.