Combat· West Indies Anti-Piracy Campaign
USS Fire Brand captures La Maison
Another capture from the confused privateering war in the Gulf.
The USS Fire Brand took the Mexican-flagged La Maison and sent her into New Orleans as a prize for adjudication, the Marine guard assisting in the boarding. Like the Surprise's capture a few weeks earlier, the seizure turned on the impossible task of telling a legitimate revolutionary privateer from a pirate, since both sailed under the flags and commissions of the breakaway Spanish-American republics. Bringing the prize into a U.S. port for a prize court to rule on was the orderly way of resolving such cases, rather than summary action at sea. The capture was bloodless. It reflects the broader pattern of 1818, when American warships in the Gulf were as much engaged in legal enforcement and the protection of New Orleans commerce as in any shooting war against the raiders.
Record no. 271