Treasure Hunting in a Pirate’s Park

Ranger Bruce Barnes shined his spotlight over the black waters of the bayou from his canoe.

Everywhere he moved the light, he picked up glowing red eyes of alligators.

He imitated the sound of an alligator’s bark.

A pair of red eyes headed in his direction.

As Barnes, 26, led the monthly, three-hour, full-moon canoe trip in the Barataria unit of Jean Lafitte Park, 18 miles south of New Orleans, owls hooted. Coyotes howled. Fish jumped out of the water. Ten different species of frogs croaked.

Barnes’ spotlight picked out river otter, muskrat and nutria swimming in the bayou as park visitors in a dozen canoes paddled behind him.

Barnes leads a day canoe trip into the bayous every Sunday. He patrols the waterways in the park the rest of the week. He is a canoe ranger.

“I enjoy it all, but most of all I enjoy coming out in a canoe at night,” he said. “It’s a whole different world out here. You really get to hear and feel the presence of nature.”

Other park rangers lead visitors on hikes through 12,000 acres of bayous and swamp land, over trails and boardwalks, through a dripping canopy of Spanish moss, draping red maples, Baldcypress, live oak and water tupelo.

The bayous, echoing with a symphony of song birds, are also crawling with 16 species of snakes, including 7-foot Texas rat snakes, copperheads and water moccasins.

Louisiana has one national park, Jean Lafitte National Historical Park, named after the pirate.

It’s a park in several pieces scattered about the state.

But it captures the joie de vivre of Louisiana’s people in so many ways--in the swamp lands and bayous of Barataria, along the cobblestone streets of the French Quarter, at Chalmette Plantation, where Andrew Jackson defeated the British at the Battle of New Orleans.

A celebration of Cajun life is broadcast each Saturday night from the 1920s-era Liberty Theater in Eunice, 150 miles west of New Orleans. The theater seats 800, and it is always filled. It, too, is part of Jean Lafitte Park.

The two-hour program heard over a number of radio stations is produced by the National Parks Service, the city of Eunice and the University of Lafayette. It features storytelling in Cajun French, and zydeco and Cajun music.

There are 300,000 Cajuns in Louisiana, descendants of French Canadians who fled Nova Scotia and came to Louisiana in the 1700s. Cajun band instruments always include a washboard and an accordion. Zydeco is a black version of Cajun music, played by blacks who grew up in the Cajun culture and speak Cajun French.

Lafitte National Historical Park Cajun Cultural Centers are located in Eunice, Thibodaux and Lafayette.

Also part of the national park are Chitimacha Indian and Isleno Cultural Centers. Islenos are descendants of the 244 Canary Islanders who arrived by ship in Louisiana in 1778.

In the French Quarter or Vieux Carre (pronounced voo-cah-ray; it means the Old Square), National Parks Service rangers lead daily walking tours of the 70-block historical area. Walks are given on different topics, such as voodoo, dueling, jazz, legends, ironwork architecture and old graveyards.

There are cooking demonstrations at the park’s visitors center at the French market on Decatur Street. There, experts offer advice on how to make such popular Louisiana dishes as gumbo, jambalaya, rice and red beans. There also are musical programs featuring live Dixieland jazz, zydeco, and Cajun and gospel singing.

It was in the French Quarter, a collection of quaint late 18th-Century and early 19th-Century structures jammed together along narrow streets in a 1 1/2-mile area of downtown New Orleans, that Jean Lafitte had an office in Pirates Alley in the early 1800s.

Lafitte and his rag-tag band, numbering upward of 1,000, operated a fleet of pirate ships from a network of bayous and swamps connecting to Barataria Bay, now the Barataria unit of Lafitte Park.

For nearly two centuries, treasure hunters have looked for Lafitte’s legendary buried loot at Barataria, a practice now forbidden within the park boundaries.

Lafitte and his buccaneers evaded arrest by U. S. authorities for preying on merchant ships. The British offered the pirate $30,000 and the rank of captain in the Royal Navy if he would participate in an invasion of New Orleans.

Instead, Lafitte interrupted his illicit activities and warned Gen. Jackson of the plot. Lafitte’s men joined forces with the American defenders.

The Jan. 8, 1815, Battle of New Orleans between 6,000 U. S. soldiers and volunteers, including Lafitte’s Baratarians, who distinguished themselves in battle, and 7,500 British soldiers was fought in the fields of Chalmette Plantation on the shores of the Mississippi, six miles downriver from New Orleans.

Thirty-one Americans and 298 British were killed in the last battle of the last war (the War of 1812) ever fought between Great Britain and the United States.

Lafitte and his Baratarians were issued a public pardon. The pirate went straight until 1818, when he and his men moved to the present site of Galveston, Tex., and reverted to their old ways.

In 1820, Lafitte sailed from Texas on his ship “The Pride,” heading for South America. He was never heard from again.

Because of Lafitte’s activities in the French Quarter, because he operated out of Barataria and because of his participation in the Battle of New Orleans, the historical park was named in honor of Lafitte, one of America’s best-known pirates.