Story Behind Festival continues to Thrill
Fictional history of pirate prince heart of city's festival
Jul 14, 2008
Long a fixture of Tampa area, the Gasparilla Pirate Festival owes its origins to a fisherman who told stories about a pirate captain he once worked for.
The actual history of the festival has its roots in both fact and legend, with the two sometimes blending together better than tequila and margarita mix, but both aspects of the creation of Gasparilla start with the exploits a fictional 18th century Spanish pirate named Jose Gaspar.
Gaspar embodied the most romantic aspects of a pirate: brilliant, ruthless and bloodthirsty, but also cultured, gallant and possessing an eye for beauty. Like other legends, Gaspar’s story has many different versions ranging from the political to the truly romantic. Centuries of telling these different versions have made Gaspar’s legend so dense that some even consider it to be factual.
In 1980, French writer Andre-Marcel d’Ans wrote a detailed history of the event. Titled The Legend of Gasparilla: Myth and History on Florida’s West Coast, it gave an in-depth look at Gaspar’s legend.
Every version of the legend starts in 18th century Spain. One version states that in 1783, at the age of 27, Gaspar had been serving as a lieutenant on the ship Floridablanca. The ship and crew suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the English navy that year and the crew, beaten and bloody, narrowly escaped the battle with their lives. The defeat left Gaspar angry and disappointed with what he viewed as the decadence of his motherland. As a result, the ambition he had to build his personal glory through continued military service disappeared and he turned his back on Spain. Deciding to earn fortune and glory by other means, Gaspar commandeered the ship and became a pirate.
The second, more romantic version has the king, mislead by false evidence on a trumped up charge created by political rivals, ordering the young admiral arrested. Gaspar escaped, took charge of a band of convicts and stole a ship. Now labeled a traitor, Gaspar turned to piracy and swore revenge on the Spanish crown for betraying him. To finish his turn, Gaspar renamed the stolen ship “Gasparilla” and spent the next 38 years patrolling the coast of Florida, sacking every ship unlucky enough to pass within range.
On the morning when he was set to retire and the valuables divided among the crew, a British merchant ship passed by the pirates’ hideout. Seeing the opportunity as too good to pass up, the Gasparilla caught up with the ship. But when the pirates approached, the merchant sailors lowered the Union Jack and raised an American flag. The ship was actually the USS Enterprise on a pirate-hunting expedition, and Gaspar had walked right into a trap.
The battle went badly for Gaspar. With his ship and crew riddled by cannon fire and facing arrest, the story goes that Gaspar chained the anchor around his waist and leapt from the bow, shouting that his enemies would not kill him.
Most of the remaining pirates were killed or captured and subsequently hanged, but a few escaped, one of them being Juan Gómez, who would tell the tale to subsequent generations.
This Juan Gómez, or John Gómez, was a real person who lived in southwest Florida in the late 19th and very early 20th century. The old man was well known locally for his tall tales of his supposed life as a pirate, and Gómez is widely speculated to have been the foremost contributor to the development of the Gasparilla legend.
Out of the legend of Jose Gaspar grew the annual event known as the Gasparilla Pirate Festival. Gasparilla has grown from a local festival to a huge event drawing corporate backing and larger crowds every year. In 2001 the parade took place over Super Bowl weekend and over 600,000 people attend.
