'I saw guys chain-smoking cigarettes.with tattoos out there saving dozens of lives,' he said in a recent address to the annual meeting of the Council for a Better Louisiana. The sight of it all made him rethink his view of some laborers. It was also used in 1995 by a sub-krewe of the Krewe of Denham Springs as part of the krewe's Mardi Gras parade theme of "And Away We Go." Ĭontemporary usage appears to have been coined in 2005 to describe private boaters who served as volunteer rescuers in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina it was apparently used as such by then- Tulane University history professor Douglas Brinkley in a speech, as cited in the Baton Rouge Advocate: Īmong the unsung heroes, Brinkley said, are those anonymous boat operators-dubbed the Cajun navy-who navigated their private fishing boats and other vessels through flooded New Orleans to lend a hand after the hurricane hit.
#CAJUN NAVY ZELLO PLUS#
The earliest documented use of the term occurred in 1964 when outgoing governor Jimmie Davis received "a commission as a commodore in the Cajun Navy plus a four-star pirogue for his personal use" as a going-away gift by the Greater Lafourche Port Commission.
The term Cajun Navy had earlier, unrelated jovial origins before it evolved into its current usage. 2.2 South-central Louisiana flood (2016).