The play charts the transformation of Jean Durand into the pirate leader Jean Lafitte, interweaving a romantic subplot between him and Mariana D’Acosta with family obligations, inheritance conditions, and political exile. Scenes alternate between a French prologue, New Orleans salons, ships at sea, and the Red House at Barataria, bringing together nuns, voodoo practitioners, merchants, and naval officers as competing authorities. Tensions among loyalty, honor, law, and survival escalate through duels, schemes, and shifting alliances involving American and British officers and local officials. The work contrasts intimate personal loyalties with larger questions of national allegiance and the ambiguous morality of privateering and piracy.