Those Were the Days
Gasparilla: marauder or myth?
By LESTER R. Dailey
Article published on Thursday, Aug. 4, 2005
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| Photo by LESTER R. DAILEY |
| A mixture of authentic and reproduction 1790s pirate artifacts are part of a private collection. |
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Anyone who has lived in Pinellas County for any length of time has heard the legend of Jose Gaspar, the aristocratic young Spanish naval officer who morphed into Gasparilla, the bloodthirsty Florida pirate. Since 1904, except in a few war years, our neighbors across the bay in Tampa have held an annual festival commemorating his exploits.
Gaspar, the story goes, was born into a blue-blooded family near Seville in 1756 and showed early signs of his larcenous future. At the age of 12, he was caught kidnapping a neighbor girl for ransom. The judge gave him the choice of going either to jail or to the Royal Spanish Naval Academy. He chose the academy.
A small man with the courage and tenacity of a Spanish bull, Gaspar had a spectacular naval career. He was named admiral of the Atlantic Fleet while still in his mid-20s.
At 27, he was appointed naval attaché to the court of Spain’s King Charles III, but his fondness for the ladies soon got him in trouble. He carried on simultaneous affairs with several women at court, including the king’s daughter-in-law.
When he jilted her for another lady, she vowed to get revenge. She conspired with the prime minister to frame Gaspar in a plot to steal the crown jewels of Spain.
Learning that his arrest was imminent, Gaspar stole the ship Floridablanca, recruited a crew of cutthroats and embarked on a life of piracy along Florida’s west coast. Operating from his base in Charlotte Harbor, near present-day Fort Myers, he is said to have plundered more than 400 ships in his decades-long career under the Jolly Roger. Sometimes, he teamed up with other buccaneers, such as Jean Lafitte, the Louisiana pirate who helped Andrew Jackson win the 1815 Battle of New Orleans.
At the age of 65 – ancient for a pirate – Gaspar decided to retire. He and 10 of his most trusted men went ashore near the mouth of the Peace River to bury their 20 chests of ill-gotten loot, worth more than $30 million in today’s money. But immediately upon landing, they spotted a sail. It was the USS Enterprise, an American warship, disguised as a fat British merchantman in hopes of trapping Gaspar.
The ruse worked. Gaspar decided that retirement could wait. Leaving the 10 men on shore to guard the treasure, he returned to his ship to give chase. But the Enterprise soon reduced the outgunned Floridablanca to a smoldering, sinking hulk.
“Gasparilla dies by his own hand, not by the enemy’s,” Gaspar shouted from the bowsprit. He then wrapped himself in a length of anchor chain and, defiantly waving his cutlass, leapt overboard to his death.
The pirates on shore, after watching the Floridablanca go down, loaded the treasure into a longboat and headed, unseen, up the Peace River to Spanish Homestead. There, they gave the homestead’s owner, Lady Boggess, a small part of the treasure in return for her promise not to tell the Americans she had seen them. Folklore has it that treasure worth $300,000, presumably the hush money, was found years later near Spanish Homestead, but the main treasure is still waiting to be found.
The legend of Gasparilla is a great story, but there’s one problem with it: Most historians believe it is a total fabrication and Jose Gaspar never actually existed.
In Surf, Sand & Post Card Sunsets, his history of Pinellas County’s gulf beaches, St. Pete Beach historian Frank T. Hurley Jr., goes a step further and opines that the Gasparilla legend originated in the “fertile imagination” of John Gomez, a colorful character who hung around the Pass-a-Grille section of what is now St. Pete Beach in the late 1800s.
Gomez claimed to be a former pirate, slaver, smuggler and Second Seminole War Army scout, born in the Madeira Islands in either 1776 or 1778 (which would have made him 122 or 124 when he died in 1900). He brought excursionists from Tampa to Pass-a-Grille aboard his boat, the Red Jack, sat them around a campfire and regaled them with tales of his swashbuckling days. When he ran out of stories about himself, Hurley believes, Gomez invented Jose Gaspar.
But if you want to believe that Gasparilla was real, there’s no harm in it. Heck, you can even believe in Santa Claus if it makes you feel better.
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Article published on Thursday, Aug. 4, 2005
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