The Legend of José Gaspar — Tampa, Florida

No historical record confirms that he was. A WUSF Florida Matters program from January 2019, republished by WJCT, states plainly that there is no evidence he actually existed, even though Gaspar was adopted as patron rogue of the Tampa celebration. Hillsborough County, in its Faces Behind the Places series on the namesakes of local landmarks and events, is more careful: it says Gaspar allegedly was a pirate of Spanish descent who pillaged vessels along Florida's West Coast and held people at an island hideaway, and calls his existence a matter of perennial debate.

The City of Tampa uses the language of legend too. Its special events page says the pirates take over the city each year in honor of the mythical legendary pirate Jose Gaspar, and that Gaspar reputedly patrolled the waters of West Florida during the late 18th century. Even the organization that built Gasparilla around him hedges. The Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla legend page ends by quoting a dictionary definition of legend as a story popularly regarded as historical although not verifiable.

The fullest telling is the Krewe's own, and it should be read as a story rather than a biography. In that version, Jose Gasparilla was born into an aristocratic family in 1756, grew up by the sea in Spain and at the age of 18 entered the Naval Academy in Barcelona. He made lieutenant by 22 and served aboard the sloop-of-war Florida Blanca. After Spain's fleet was beaten by the British in 1783, the tale says, he led a mutiny, seized the ship, renamed it the Jose Gasparilla and sailed west to Florida.

The legend sets his headquarters among the barrier islands of Charlotte Harbor, well south of Tampa Bay. It credits him with naming Gasparilla Island after himself and with naming Sanibel, Captiva and Useppa, the last supposedly a corruption of Joseffa, a woman in the story. A neatly written personal diary, quoted on the Krewe's page, states that 36 ships were captured during the 11 year period from 1784 to 1795. A larger ship seized near Cuba in 1795 supposedly became Jose Gasparilla II with 14 guns, a name the Tampa Krewe later gave its own steel ship. WUSF's finding that there is no evidence Gaspar existed covers every one of these episodes.

Every version ends in December 1821. The account by Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla says that on December 12, 1821, the aging pirate gathered his crew to divide the treasure and retire, but chased one last merchant ship. That ship ran up a United States flag and revealed itself as the U.S.S. Enterprise under Captain Lawrence Kearney, disguised as an unarmed trader. With his ship disabled and burning, Gaspar wrapped an anchor chain around himself and leapt into the Gulf of Mexico, sword raised.

The festival operator's Gasparilla Pirate Fest history repeats the outline: in 1821, a US Navy ship in disguise confronted Gasparilla's ship, and a furious battle ensued, and the pirate tied himself to an anchor chain and jumped into the sea. Both tellings leave the treasure buried and lost, which keeps the story open. The Krewe's history page states that the treasure has never been discovered, and that Gaspar supposedly left an untold fortune somewhere along the Florida coast.

The Krewe's own page traces the tale to one teller. It says there were 12 survivors of the final fight, 11 men and a cabin boy named Juan Gomez, who had joined the crew after being taken from a Spanish ship in 1812. Gomez spun stories of the pirate and the missing treasure for decades, moved to Panther Key in the Ten Thousand Islands, where he was known as Panther Key John, and in 1900 drowned while fishing for mullet at the alleged age of 120. Many of the tales of Gasparilla, the Krewe concedes, have been generated from Gomez.

Promotion then gave the tales a wider audience. According to the same page, G.P. LeMoyne, a press agent for the Charlotte Harbor and Northern Railroad Company of Florida, printed Gomez's pirate stories in a pamphlet for tourists, written to bring visitors to the Boca Grande area to purchase property and to visit the Gasparilla Inn. In Tampa, Edwin D. Lambright, editor of the Tampa Morning Tribune, wrote Life and Exploits of Gasparilla, The Last of the Buccaneers in 1936 and ran portions of it in the paper around the invasion and the Florida State Fair. The Krewe's history timeline credits Lambright's story with adding authenticity to the legend of Gasparilla.

Tampa borrowed the pirate in 1904. The Krewe's history says Gaspar's memory was revived that year when Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla was formed and adopted the pirate as patron rogue of its city-wide celebration. WFLA describes the founders adopting the legendary pirate, Jose Gaspar, as the mascot of the city-wide celebration, and Hillsborough County frames the choice as a question: why name an annual celebration for a (perhaps) make-believe pirate? The county's answer is practical. Borrowed from New Orleans Mardi Gras with a nautical edge, the idea was to keep visitors around and residents enthused during the area's May Day celebration.

Tampa has no claim to Gaspar's supposed home waters, which the legend places along Charlotte Harbor, but the city made the character its own. The Krewe describes its mascot today as a hearty old swashbuckler with courtly manners and possibly mischievous habits, and the pirate ship that crosses Hillsborough Bay each winter bears his name. The Krewe's legend page puts its own position simply: whether or not Jose Gasparilla ever existed is not important, because the legend does exist.

Because the sources are retellings, they drift on basic facts. The City of Tampa and WFLA place Gaspar in the late 18th century; Hillsborough County and the Krewe's history page extend his career into the early 19th century, which the 1821 ending requires. EventFest says only that he invaded the coast of Florida hundreds of years ago. Even the name varies between Jose Gaspar and Jose Gasparilla, and Tampa writers use both.

What the Tampa sources agree on is the chain of transmission: a cabin boy's stories, a railroad pamphlet for Boca Grande, a 1904 festival that needed a mascot, and a 1936 Tampa Morning Tribune serial. That chain is documented in the Krewe's own pages, while the pirate at its start is not. For readers, the reliable history here is the history of the legend in Tampa, not the life of the man.