Gasparilla: Like Marriage of Mardi Gras and New Orleans, It’s a State of Mind

gasparill a LIKE THE MARRIAGE OF MARDI GRAS AND NEW ORLEANS, IT’S A STATE OF MIND AND NEW ORLEANS, IT’S A STATE OF MIND

Story by Tom Jackson

Gasparilla – Tampa’s 100+ years old celebration - began with a prank during the local 1904 May Day celebration. As the story goes a bevy of horse mounted businessmen, disguised in be-jeweled pirate regalia (rented from New Orleans, of course) came crashing into Tampa’s May Day celebration. Weaving their steeds among the fl oats of the Floral Parade, the rowdy lot of about 400 — the charter class of Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla lead by the legendary Jose Gaspar a/k/a Gasparilla the Pirate King — declared that they had claimed the city for themselves, and would have for their spoils a queen and assorted maidens from among Tampa’s fairest and fi nest.

Week long appearances of the masked marauders culminated in an unmasking at the week’s fi nal and most prestigious ball — where the rapscallions turned out to be, *GASP*, representatives of Tampa’s upper crust.

Now, 119 years later, Gasparilla is something almost magical in the life of the city. Reduced to mere numbers, Gasparilla season, stretching from the dawn of the new year through mid-March, is an economic powerhouse, generating upwards of $40 million from a string of events visited by roughly 1 million people.

In truth, however, Gasparilla is far more than fi gures on a spreadsheet, or even simply the crown jewel of the city’s busy winter calendar. It has its season, all right - a bustling series of sun-washed fun, games, and culture that surround the main event - the cannons-booming arrival of the good ship Jose Gasparilla II and the boisterous pirate parade on the last Saturday of January.

In actuality, Gasparilla’s rascally, seize-the-gusto attitude lasts year round, seasoning Tampa’s culture, adding to the city’s strut, and feeding its saucy personality. Gasparilla lurks, always. So much more than just an interval of money-changing frivolity, like the marriage of Mardi Gras and New Orleans -it’s a state of mind.

That’s an impressive legacy for someone who (probably) never existed. Not that any members of Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla would ever admit to such, no matter how much evidence historians pile up. For them, Jose Gaspar, Gasparilla the Pirate King, was the original, genuine Capt. Jack

Sparrow, a “hearty old swashbuckler with courtly manners and possibly, just possibly, mischievous habits.”

For YMKGers, the tale of Spanish nobleman Jose Gaspar is too rich with adventure to dismiss as fiction: A high-ranking Spanish Royal Navy officer and councilor to King Charles III, Gaspar was expelled from court over an ill-advised romance that led to charges (unfounded, of course … unless they weren’t) that he stole the crown jewels. Beating a hasty exit, Gaspar and his mates commandeered the Floriblanca, a Spanish warship, and fled across the Atlantic for a lucrative life of piracy that lasted some 30 years.

At last, the folklore goes, in 1821 with the USS Enterprise (initially mistaken for a British merchant ship by the pirates) bearing down in the Gulf of Mexico off Florida’s southwest coast—Gaspar, vowing not to be taken alive, wrapped himself in his ship’s anchor chain and threw himself overboard to rest eternally in Davy Jones’ locker.

Never mind that countless researchers have unearthed exactly zero evidence of the existence and exploits of the pirate Gasparilla.

So it is, as with any beloved legend, Jose Gaspar’s saga continues to wield an outsized influence on Florida’s west coast.

Remove Gaspar/Gasparilla from local folklore, and maybe the glue that binds the region dissolves and exits with Tampa Bay’s next low tide. Krewes, invasions, parades, festivals, football bowl games, and charities are all gone. Without the tales of Jose Gaspar, the two-time Super Bowl champion NFL team surely would not be the Buccaneers, had the league seen fit to expand to Tampa in the first place.

Minus the legend of the gentleman swashbuckler, Tampa would be the Oakland of Florida, Newark with a sunburn, Biloxi without the charm. With him, Tampa soars with swaggering ambition pushing achievement: downtown spires shooting for the sky, a world-class arena at the heart of a bustling entertainment district, a thriving riverfront cultural center, and a classy theater district in a single building.

And serving it all, an international airport ranked No. 1 for traveler satisfaction by J.D. Power.

So, OK, Virginia, maybe Gasparilla the pirate is 90 percent fiction and 10 percent marketing genius. So what? With the apocryphal sea wolf as its inspiration, once a year, Tampa unfurls the Jolly Roger, dons its puffy pirate shirt, clinches a mug of grog in one hand, plastic beads in the other, and a cutlass in its teeth. Then, with one eye patched and the other eye gleaming, the town that owes its enviable distinction to the picaroon-whowasn’t lets its inner rogue run wild.

For the record, Mayor Jane Castor says, “Gasparilla is pure Tampa: historic but ever-changing, sometimes crazy and always fun.”

That fun begins a couple of weeks before the invasion with the ceremonial subduing of a U.S. Navy ship — the museum ship SS American Victory, permanently docked in Tampa’s Channelside District — by small boats comprising the Ybor City Navy. Following a brief battle involving water hoses and the brandishing of loaves of Cuban bread, the Navy ship surrenders to the Alcalde of Ybor City, hired by Gasparilla to leave the city defenseless.

Thus emboldened, a few days before the invasion and parade, Ye Mystic Krewe pirates kidnap Tampa’s mayor, and to the delight of onlookers and local media, demand the city’s surrender. Sternly, the mayor refuses, casting the pirates out. They depart, grumbling and proclaiming they’ll be back to take what they came for.

Like clockwork, on the appointed Saturday morning, they make good on their threat, churning across Tampa Bay and up the channel on the Jose Gasparilla II, a fully rigged, 147-foot flat-bottomed ship (christened in 1954 with, appropriately, a bottle of Jamaican rum). With tugboats propelling her along and colorful flags flying, the ship full of pirates clogging the deck, hanging from the rigging, and laying waste to 100 cases of beer (while testing the capacity of the onboard restrooms) makes its way to the Tampa Convention Center, escorted by a flotilla of small private craft numbering in the hundreds.

Once docked, around noon, the pirates spill out; again, the pirate captain demands the mayor hand over the key to the city. That business completed, the Parade of Pirates, a four-mile-long affair of conquest along Bayshore Boulevard, commences with dozens of area krewes joining YMCG.

Strolling beside or riding one of the nearly 90 floats, leering brigands and their ladies fair fling necklaces of colorful beads, gold doubloons, and other souvenirs to a cheering throng annually estimated at 300,000, making it the third best-attended parade in America (trailing only the Rose Parade and Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade).

While organizers urge bead-flingers to take care with their aim, countless necklaces sail over the crowd into Tampa Bay. Divers annually retrieve beads by the hundreds from the bay’s mucky depths, but they miss a lot, a fact exposed twice in recent years when hurricanes Irma and Ian sucked water from the bay, exposing its sparkling bottom.

Area residents get a taste of the pirate hijinks to come the Saturday before the invasion and Parade of Pirates with the Children’s Gasparilla Extravaganza, billed as a family-friendly and ostensibly sober event. Unlike Invasion Day, no alcohol is sold along the parade route. The offspring of krewe members join their parents aboard floats as junior pirates-in-themaking.

The final parade of the season, the Sant’Yago Illuminated Knight Parade, winds through Ybor City in mid-February, usually two weeks after the Parade of Pirates.

But wait. There’s more. Among the more notable events of Gasparilla season are the Gasparilla Festival of the Arts, the Gasparilla Distance Classic (a footrace), and the Gasparilla Film Festival. Expanding the pirates’ footprint into December, the Gasparilla Bowl college football game is played at Raymond James Stadium a couple of days before Christmas.

Over the years, Gasparilla has grown and matured to the point that it offers something for everyone, making the words of a beaming Mayor Curtis Hixon from 1950 as accurate now as they were then:

Gasparilla, he said, is “Tampa’s greatest day of joy … but also the city’s most important medium of goodwill.”

Gasparilla season, stretching from the dawn of the new year through mid-March, is an economic powerhouse, generating upwards of $40 million from a string of events visited by roughly 1 million people.

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Area residents get a taste of the pirate hijinks to come the Saturday before the invasion and Parade of Pirates with the Children’s Gasparilla Extravaganza, billed as a family-friendly event. The offspring of krewe members join their parents aboard floats as junior pirates-in-the-making.