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On a cold winter day in 1686, the Belle, flagship of the French explorer La Salle, foundered in Matagorda Bay, the victim of a run of bad luck and a blue norther. The Belle was part of a four-ship expedition led by the Sieur de La Salle, born René Robert Cavelier, that sought to establish a fortified trading port near the mouth of the Mississippi. Such a port would have given the French an advantage over the Spanish. But the transatlantic voyage was marred by a pirate attack—which claimed one ship—and poor navigation. The remaining three ships landed on the Texas coast in February, 1685, some 400 miles west of the intended destination. Spates of ill fate continued in succession as La Salle's attempts by land to find the Mississippi failed, and then the Aimable, the largest ship carrying most of the would-be colony's supplies, sunk in Matagorda Bay. To provide a temporary sanctuary and protection from the local Karankawa Indians, who did not take kindly to the French intrusion into their home turf, a small fort was established on the banks of Garcitas Creek above the head of Lavaca Bay. The expedition was further weakened by the departure of the naval vessel, Joly, and its collection of discontented colonists, soldiers, and crew. Meanwhile, La Salle kept widening the search, leaving a small detachment at Fort Saint Louis and a few crewmen on the last remaining ship, the Belle. The crew was dying of thirst, and the ship's best sailors had been killed by the Karankawa in a failed attempt to go ashore to get water. On a blustery cold day, with fierce winds pounding the small vessel, the ship's master pulled anchor to sail across Matagorda Bay to get help—violating La Salle's orders—and lost control of the ship. When it capsized, crew members managed to salvage a few supplies, but most were lost, and the ship gradually disappeared beneath the muddy bay waters. In a final twist of bad fortune, La Salle himself was murdered at the hand of one of his own men, an event which led the Karankawa to sack Fort Saint Louis and kill most of the remaining French settlers. The Belle remained mired in mud for 310 years, untouched but not forgotten. After years of unsuccessful searching, then Texas State Marine Archeologist J. Barto Arnold of the Texas Historical Commission finally found the prize in 1995. Arnold's crew brought up one of the Belle's cannons, an elaborately inscribed gun that confirmed the age and identity of the wreck. But properly excavating the shipwreck would require one of the most extraordinary engineering feats ever associated with an archeological excavation in Texas or anywhere else in the world. At a cost of over 1.5 million dollars, a stout double-walled cofferdam was built around the sunken ship in 1996. This allowed archeologists from the Texas Historical Commission to pump out the wreck site and excavate the Belle almost as if they were on dry land. The extraordinary excavation yielded equally astonishing results: gooey gray mud had encased the Belle and sealed its contents off from decay. Most of the ship's stores—wooden boxes jammed with trade goods, casks lined with muskets, miles of woven rope, cannons, dishes, and more—were found in remarkably good condition. Here, for the first time, was an intact seventeenth-century French colonizing kit containing everything needed to establish a trading post in the New World. Even the ship's hull and timbers were still intact, water-logged and fragile, but still looking very much like they did when La Salle last saw them The timbers still bore the original numbers scrawled into each piece to aid the ship's builders in assembling the Belle. The Texas Historical Commission's unprecedented excavation was completed in 1997 under the direction of Dr. Jim Bruseth. Ever since then, the analysis and conservation of the Belle and its more than one million artifacts has continued apace. At the Conservation Research Laboratory at Texas A&M University, thousands of wooden and metal artifacts from the Belle are being cleaned and preserved. The ship's hull is being reassembled in a giant vat filled with water and a stabilizing compound that gradually will replace the water and harden the wet wood. It will take five years before the reconstructed Belle will be ready for public viewing in the new Texas State History Museum in Austin. In the meantime, you can visit the websites linked below to learn more about this lost ship and its sunken treasure. For archeologists and others interested in Texas history, the quantities of astonishingly well-preserved artifacts and the ship itself represent a far more valuable and informative treasure than gold bars and silver coins. (Those too, have been recovered from a shipwreck on the Texas coast, but that is another story.) Teaching about the French in TexasThe
French in Texas Other teaching materials can be found in the book by Wheat-Stranahan listed below and on several of the websites linked below. Print SourcesBruseth, James E. and Toni S. Turner Wheat-Stranahan, Pam Linkswww.thc.state.tx.us/lasbelle.shtml www.archaeology.org www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lasalle/ http://nautarch.tamu.edu/CRL/Report7/hull.htm http://nautarch.tamu.edu/model/report1/ |
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21 February 2005