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Their village was burned, their fortifications razed; and, when the triumphant Americans returned to New Orleans, they brought in their train ten armed prizes and a number of prisoners, although Lafitte was not to be found among the latter. Thereafter, the Baratarians, as an organization, vanished from history.
The offer was refused, and instead, the chief men of the pirate colony went straightway to New Orleans to put Jackson on his guard, and when the opposing forces met on the plains of Chalmette, the very center of the American line was held by Dominique Yon, with a band of his swarthy Baratarians, with howitzers which they themselves had dragged from their pirate stronghold to train upon the British.
Lafitte had too many friends in New Orleans not to know of the force thus sent against him; and, when the Americans reached Grande Terre, they found the pirates at their batteries, and the Baratarian flotilla drawn up in order of battle. The contest was sharp, but ended in the rout of the Baratarians.
And, indeed, the Baratarians were not without a certain rude sense of patriotism and loyalty to the United States, whose laws they persistently violated.
Breastworks, well dotted with the muzzles of cannon, commanded the approach by sea. More than once, from behind those ramparts, the Baratarians had proved that they could fight, and that they acknowledged the authority of no flag.
Lafitte was afterwards occasionally heard of as a desperado on the more western shores of the Mexican Gulf; and it is further noticeable, that two guns were served by Baratarians under their old lieutenant, Dominique Yon, on that bloody day when Packenham's forces were beaten back on the field of Chalmette. Early in December the movement of the British upon New Orleans took definite shape.
And when a power known as the United States Government, that had its quarters more than a thousand miles from the country of the Creoles, passed an outrageous law known as the embargo, what was more natural than that the Baratarians, knowing the mysterious waterways that led up to the Crescent City, should utilize their knowledge to take ships and cargoes in and out without the formality of a custom-house examination?
The sailors of the "Carolina," on that day of desperate fighting, were in the centre of Jackson's line, between the Creoles and the swarthy Baratarians under Dominique Yon. Here they worked their howitzers, and watched the scarlet lines of the enemy advance and melt away before that deadly blaze; advance and fall back again in hopeless rout.
All her years she had squatted and waddled there upon the island, gathering legends of the Baratarians and the sea. The night came on, with the moon to lighten it. Edna could hear the whispering voices of dead men and the click of muffled gold.
We read of his politely alluding to them as "these gentlemen," and he gave into their charge the siege-guns in several of the forts. These guns were skilfully handled and vigorously served, the Baratarians fighting far more bravely in defence of the city than they had done in defence of their ships.
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