Gasparilla: The Invented Pirate
Near Tampa Bay, Florida
Tampa's biggest annual festival is organized around a pirate who never existed.
José Gaspar, also known as Gasparilla, was supposedly a Spanish naval officer who turned pirate and terrorized the Gulf Coast of Florida from the seventeen eighties through the eighteen twenties, preying on ships and hoarding treasure somewhere along the Pinellas and Charlotte Harbor coasts. The legend is detailed, dramatic, and entirely without documentary support. His name appears in no Spanish naval records, no American archive, no contemporary newspaper account. The scholarly consensus is that he was invented, probably assembled from fragments of other stories and embellished for promotional purposes in the early twentieth century.
The festival was organized anyway, and it has become one of Tampa's most beloved traditions.
In nineteen oh four, a society editor for the Tampa Tribune named Louise Francis Dodge and Tampa's customs director George Hardee conceived of a Mardi Gras-style civic spectacle for Tampa. Hardee recruited fifty men, formed a secret society called Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla, dressed them as pirates, and staged a mock invasion of the city from Tampa Bay. The event was a hit. It became an annual tradition.
What the Krewe also built, and maintained for most of nine decades, was a membership that was exclusively white and male. The Gasparilla Pirate Fest drew hundreds of thousands of spectators to a party organized and led by Tampa's white business and civic elite. African Americans participated as spectators, on the margins, excluded from the Krewe itself. The Knights of Sant' Yago, a Krewe formed by Tampa's Latin community in nineteen seventy-two, ran their own parallel parade in Ybor City beginning in nineteen seventy-four.
When Tampa hosted Super Bowl Twenty-Five in January of nineteen ninety-one, civil rights groups used the national spotlight to challenge the Krewe's all-white membership. The Krewe canceled that year's parade rather than integrate immediately, and a substitute city event was held instead. Later in nineteen ninety-one it admitted its first Black members.
Nearly nine decades of exclusion. Economics, not ethics, ended it.
