Jean Laffite: Prince of Pirates

Jean Laffite has been called everything from a blood thirsty pirate to a gentleman corsair. Tales of his adventures, fights, and buried treasure have been told, fictionalized and made into movies. He smuggled slaves with Jim Bowie and fought beside Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. The author traces Laffite's life from his birth to his days at Barataria and to his final years on Galveston and Mujeres Islands.

Index and Endnotes. 209 pages. Eakin Press.

Jack C. Ramsay, Jr., though born in Virginia was raised in Laredo, Texas, the border town in which his grandfather settled soon after the Civil War. For several years, he lived in Louisiana, where he first heard tales of the bayou country and legends of Gulf Coast pirates. In later years, he returned to the area and applied the techniques of a trained historian to the mystery of Jean Laffite. A graduate of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where he received a Ph.D. for his work in historical research, Ramsay also studied at the University of Texas at Austin, Davidson College (North Carolina) and Union Seminary in Virginia. He and his wife now live in Denton, Texas, where he is concentrating on writing, traveling in the pursuit of historical research and speaking. They are the parents of a son and a daughter and have four grandchildren.