the public eye, Visit Tampa Bay, the local tourist bureau, has run multimillion-dollar promotional campaigns across the United States, Canada, and Europe to attract visitors to the area during "Gasparilla Season". Inspiration The theme of the Gasparilla Festival was inspired by the legend of the pirate José Gaspar, who supposedly operated off the west coast of Spanish Florida from the 1780s until the 1820s. Different versions of the story say that he was either a Spanish nobleman and advisor to King Charles III of Spain who was exiled after a romantic scandal in court, a traitorous admiral of the Spanish Royal Navy who stole a ship and fled when his treachery was revealed, or an ambitious young officer in the Spanish navy who was driven to mutiny by a tyrannically cruel captain. Whatever his supposed origins, the legends agree that Gaspar fled to the virtually uninhabited southwestern coast of Spanish Florida in the 1780s and established his "pirate kingdom" on Gasparilla Island in Charlotte Harbor, south of Tampa Bay. Gaspar is said to have taken many ships and held many female hostages for ransom while preying on shipping in the Gulf of Mexico from Louisiana to the Spanish main aboard his flagship, the Floriblanca. His exploits came to a sudden end in 1821 when, to avoid being captured by the U.S. Navy pirate hunting schooner USS Enterprise, he wrapped himself in anchor chains and threw himself overboard while shouting ""Gasparilla dies by his own hand, not the enemy's!" Despite this colorful history, there is no evidence that a pirate named "Gaspar" or "Gasparilla" ever roamed the Florida coast. Archives in Spain make no mention of Gaspar as a member of the Spanish court or an officer in the Spanish navy, the U.S. Navy has no documentation indicating that any of its vessels ever encountered a pirate named Gaspar or a ship named Floriblanca, and neither Gaspar nor anyone claiming to be a member of his crew are mentioned in the records of hundreds of piracy trials from the era, which was well after the "Golden Age of Piracy". Also, despite the fact that the supposed location of Gaspar's "regal base" at Gasparilla Island has been developed into the resort town of Boca Grande, no artifacts or other physical evidence of the hideout, his ship, or his lost treasure has ever been found in southwest Florida despite years of searching by