Ships: La Belle Reborn

We have spoken on a number of occasions about La Belle, the now infamous ship once commanded to some degree by Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle. Cavelier was trying to establish a French settlement in what is now Texas when La Belle, the last lifeline of Cavelier's settlers, sank in Matagorda Bay. Just one of Cavelier's many gaffes, the loss of La Belle would lead almost directly to the mutiny of the bedraggled French settlers and Cavelier's eventual gruesome death at their hands.

La Belle remained elusive to archaeologists until 1995, when she was found and painstakingly extracted from the muddy bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. According to this article over at Telegraph UK online, La Belle is ready to be reborn.

The hull and many artifacts - including the skeleton of one settler or sailor - were carefully removed from the Gulf. La Belle's hull was significantly in tact, and the archaeologists at Texas A & M University devised a way to preserve it in polyethylene glycol. As the Telegraph article notes, the cost of this chemical rose substantially with the cost of oil, so another preserving method needed to be found. The scientists finally hit on freeze-drying, and La Belle was packed away in "the biggest [freeze-drying] machine on the continent devoted to archaeology." (You can see a video of the process at this previous post).

Now that La Belle's hull is thoroughly and safely preserved, the plan is to rebuild the 54 foot, early frigate-type ship. She will then become the centerpiece of the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin.

As Jim Busheth of the Texas Historical Commission comments in the article:

When La Belle sank, that doomed La Salle's colony and opened up the door for Spain to come in and occupy Texas. People can see firsthand how history can turn on a dime.

The article does not give time frames as to the estimated completion of the project. For anyone interested in the seafaring history of Europe and the New World, however, La Belle reborn is certainly something to look forward to with eager anticipation.

Header: Painting of La Belle via Gulf Wrecks where you can see many of the artifacts from the ship

People: The Man Who Would Build Empires

On this day in 1682, Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, claimed the Mississippi basin for France and named it La Louisiane in honor of King Louis XIV. This story has been told and retold to the point where much of the truth has been lost and Cavelier now is framed as a hero. In fact he was an obstreperous, power-mad individual whose personal strength was sometimes all that got him through.


Born to a comfortable bourgeois family in November of 1643, Cavelier grew up in Rouen at his parents’ estate which was named La Salle. The family was not of the nobility, but Cavelier would eventually be granted a minor peerage that made him the seigneur of a small estate on Montreal Island in modern day Canada.

Initially, Cavelier felt a calling to the priesthood. He entered the novitiate with the Society of Jesus in 1658 and took vows as a Jesuit priest in 1660. His hope was to be assigned to a mission in New France but his superiors thought better of such a plan. Cavelier was particularly accused of “inquietus”, unsteadiness and lack off good judgment, according to his biographer Celine Dupre (find her excellent discussion of Cavelier, to which I am much indebted, here). The Jesuits were not about to send someone with such an unsettled spirit out into the wild. As it turns out, they knew whereof they spoke.

By 1667, Cavelier had had enough of the priesthood. On March 28th he left the Jesuits behind and later in the same year sailed for Canada. He arrived in Montreal before November and attached himself to the missionary order of Sulpicians. It was this order that would grant him his siegneury.

Certain that he could be the one to locate the Ohio River and with it the fabled Northwest passage, Cavelier embarked on a hastily put together expedition into the wilds beyond Montreal (then called Ville-Marie) in July of 1669. Deacon Brehant de Galinee, who was along on the expedition as cartographer, would later write:

M. de La Salle, who said that he understood the Iroquois perfectly, and had learned all these things from them as a result of the perfect knowledge that he had of their language, did not know it at all, and was undertaking this voyage almost blindly, without knowing where he was going.

That single sentence presciently summed up all of Cavelier’s future undertakings, in the wilderness and back home in France. He groped his way around the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes, building forts and ships as he went, travelling by canoe, horse and on foot as necessary to satisfy his almost megalomaniacal goal to be the one explorer who could claim discovery of both the origin of the Ohio River and the end point of the Mississippi. In the process, he would abuse and even kill men who did not follow his express orders, start wars between Native tribes and enrage both the clergy and the French crown. His commitment to his own righteousness knew no bounds and he slogged on through weather, disease, starvation and loss to finally dawn his trademark scarlet coat and claim La Louisiane for France.

Called back to the mother country to account for his adventuring, Cavelier, with a straight face, fictionalized the location of the Mississippi delta. The map he had drawn up moved the outlet of the river some 250 leagues to the west, making it appear to dump into the Gulf of Mexico not far from the modern city of Galveston, Texas. As d’Irberville, who would later found the city of New Orleans, noted dismissively, “M. de la Salle [was] a man who passed for being clever…”

Louis XIV, believing Cavelier’s nonsense and wanting to make inroads into the vast territories accumulated by Spain, sent Cavelier back to America to found a city at the imaginary mouth of the Mississippi. With three ships, including the now famous La Belle, Cavelier set out for the coast of Texas, finally dropping anchor in Matagorda Bay in February of 1685. With him were a number of colonists, women and children included, who immediately knew deprivation thanks to the disastrous foundering of their provision ship, Aimable.

Unphased by the setback, Cavelier immediately put his people to hard labor building Fort Saint-Louis. Several men died during the construction, and grumbling among the settlers at the ineptitude of Cavelier grew louder when La Belle – their only way out of an increasingly horrible situation – sank in Matagorda Bay.

Meanwhile, Cavelier took a party of men and set off to try to find a branch of the Mississippi, which he was still convinced must be nearby. When the party lost their canoes they continued on foot through torrential rains that made exploration and even making a fire next to impossible. Fed up with the insults Cavelier heaped on them at every turn, a small group used a dispute over the meat of a bison to take down their leader. As Cavelier approached the group, who had just chopped up his priest, servant and Native guide with an axe, they shot him through the head. Unsatisfied with so easy a death evidently, the men stripped Cavelier’s body and left it exposed. On their way back to Fort Saint-Louis, the men would turn on one another, killing each other one by one. Needless to say, Cavelier’s Fort Saint-Louis failed.

The Sieur de La Salle’s legacy, as the explorer who mapped out – however erroneously – the Mississippi basin remains to this day. As Dupre notes, “few historical personages are more difficult to judge than La Salle.” He was both physically capable and closed minded to anyone else’s wants or needs. His striving for empire building eventually got him killed, and who knows what might have become of him otherwise.

Header: Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle via Wikimedia

People: The Pirate Corso

When we speak of pirates and privateers during the age of buccaneers we tend to gravitate to British, Dutch or French names. Henry Morgan, Laurens de Graff and Michel de Grammont come to mind readily. It is rare that a Spaniard – whose holdings in the New World were usually the targets of plundering buccaneer from England, France and Holland – comes to mind. So it was with surprise and delight that I sat down to read a chapter in Benerson Little’s most recent book about a freebooter who called himself Juan Corso.


Corso’s moniker in and of itself is something of a pun. Though, as Little notes, Corso was a common surname in Spain, it also translates literally as “privateer”. Corso’s name is the equivalent of a Frenchman calling himself Jean Corsaire or an Englishman going by Johnny Privateer. Since we know nothing about Corso’s childhood or early life, it is not a stretch to say that his name is an alias if not an out and out joke.

Much of the action that made up Corso’s career is educated guess, but he appears first on the historical record cruising under the command of Captain Felipe de la Barrera y Villegas. Barrera was at the head of a small flotilla of light, shallow draft “half-galleys” that were searching the inlets and lagoons off the Gulf Coast of Mexico for illegal logwood cutters. Men from the British island of Jamaica in particular made a living cutting down, chopping up and selling logwood surreptitiously in these areas. The Spanish, who considered the costly resource theirs alone, hunted these men without remorse. Even during peace with England, Spain marked the men criminals regardless of written passes they may hold from English lords.

This was the case in 1681 when Corso, along with his frequent partner Pedro de Costa, was among Barrera’s men as they cruised into Laguna de Terminos on the coast of Campeche. The logwood cutters were surprised and, though one of their number in the form of a British sloop named Laurel managed to escape, they were rounded up or slaughtered, their camp burned and their goods seized. Though Barrera initially promised the Englishmen safe passage, they were in fact packed into the holds of his ships and taken to Campeche where they were sold to the city as slaves. Most would be worked mercilessly in the sodden swamps around the city with little water and less food, their skin burned black by the sun, their feet riddled with parasitic worms and their bodies infested with fleas and lice.

Barrera made a tidy profit on this enterprise of human misery and Corso and de Costa may have decided they wanted to rake in the same kind of cash. The two men received a commission from the mayor of Campeche and, with a group of small ships or canoes probably amounting to no more than three or four, they headed south for the Gulf of Honduras. Here logwood smuggling was particularly heavy, and Corso and his mate planned to increase their odds of catching larger ships by the capable use of stealth.

Rather ironically they ran into Laurel, the British ship that had escaped Barrera, near Trujillo, Honduras. This time the Spaniards were victorious, boarding Laurel and seizing her small crew. Her captain, Robert Oxe, would later write that he fought two hours with the freebooters and that, when they did board, he offered them his legal commission from the Earl of Carlisle. Corso and de Costa, unimpressed, disposed of the papers. Oxe says:

They said that they would come to Jamaica, too, presently, and that they had taken five hundred English prisoners.

Though Oxe and his men would not fair as badly as the unfortunates who labored in Campeche, he was ordered tortured and beaten by Corso. He complained of being hung up “… at the fore braces several times, [and beaten] with cutlasses…” about the body and face. Little tells us that Oxe and eight of his men were finally set free in a single canoe.

Doubtless aboard their prize ship, now called Leon, Corso and de Costa managed to re-capture a Spanish treasure ship that had been taken off Honduras. They renamed Nuestra Senora del Honhon the Leon Coronado. With these two ships they went to work clearing the Gulf of Honduras of the logwood cutters, tallying up a fortune in prize goods. When they headed back to Campeche in triumph, they were sadly disappointed to find the mayor eager to accept their prizes after which he unilaterally sent them off to Veracruz. Despite Corso’s protests – for which he was briefly jailed – it would be months before the Governor of Mexico finally awarded him and his mates a share of their booty.

In 1682, the Spanish government reclaimed their treasure ship and Leon Coronado was made part of the Armada de Barlovento, the official pirate hunting fleet of New Spain. Probably frustrated at being slighted not only by the loss of his ship but by failure to be asked to join the Armada, Corso gathered a new set of small ships and headed for Cuba. There he began a systematic round of attacks on British and French buccaneers who stopped at the island for water and provisions. Corso sailed under a red flag of no quarter, according to Little, and he made a habit of torturing and killing the crew of ships that dared resist him. His depredations were so successful that the Governor of St. Domingue (modern Haiti) began issuing commissions against Spain at Petit Goave and Britain threatened to declare war against Spain once again. The sack of Veracruz, usually considered to have been mounted after the fate of the unfortunate logwood cutters from Laguna de Terminos was discovered, may have been just as much the result of Corso’s unchecked success in the Caribbean.

Corso retaliated for the brutal raid at Veracruz which, though largely the work of Petit Goave corsairs, he seemed to blame on the British. He raided the island of New Providence in January of 1684, leaving only a handful of people alive and free. The island sat uninhabited for three years thereafter according to Little. Corso also managed to virtually shut down sea turtle harvesting in the Caribbean causing a shortage of meat particularly in Jamaica.

Pressure from the Royal Navy in particular drove Corso away from Cuba and, by early 1685, he was back in Mexico and once again with his old mate de Costa. The two were sent out by the Governor to try and find the Gulf Coast settlement of French explorer Rene Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle. The Spanish were antsy about any encroachment on their vast holdings around the Gulf. Who better to send as a destroying force than two notorious privateers? Though Cosro and de Costa seem to have thoroughly searched the shores of the Gulf, they missed de La Salle’s sad tent city at Matagorda Bay.

Corso kept up the search and landed at several points in the Florida. At Cape San Blas his flotilla hit rough weather, possibly a hurricane, and was wrecked with the loss of all ships. Little says that approximately 35 men walked ashore alive but without supplies, firearms and little in the way of clothing on their backs. Most died of starvation, injuries and exposure including Corso and de Costa. The rest, Little tells us, set upon the bodies of the dead, carving them up and cooking them “without wasting even the heads.”

Though Corso’s success against just about every nation who colonized the West Indies at the time was matched by very few, he is largely forgotten today. He was, to my way of thinking, a Spanish version of the notorious corsaire Francois L’Olonnais whose hatred for the Spanish led him to torture and murder. Corso, a strident Spaniard if not by birth certainly by nationalization, vented his wrath in turn on the British and French.

Header: Dead Men Tell No Tales by Howard Pyle

Booty: La Belle

In January of 1686 a French ship of the early small frigate type went down in Matagorda Bay in what is now Texas, approximately 200 miles south southwest of Galvez Bay (modern day Galveston). The ship carried 43 souls and was part of the exploration flotilla led by Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle. The lovely vessel, with her clean lines and shallow bottom, lay in the bay for nearly 300 years.

The Sieur de La Salle dreamed of claiming the vast western territory of what is now the U.S. for France. Though he did manage to establish what would become the Louisiana Territory, his efforts in Texas led to disaster. Illness, hunger and Spanish and native onslaughts destroyed his settlement, Fort St. Louis. La Belle was the last of his ships, wrecked on a sandbar in heavy seas. Though La Salle and most of his crew escaped, his vision faded to black. La Salle was ambushed and murdered by two of his own men in March of 1687. The Spanish built Fort La Bahia on the ruins of Fort St. Louis in 1722.

But La Belle survived in surprisingly good condition. She was meticulously excavated and moved to a huge vat of oil on Texas A & M’s Riverside Campus. Now the college’s Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation is trying out a new process for preserving and eventually displaying the frigate: freeze drying.

According to this article from Texas A & M, La Belle will be placed in a freeze dryer “large enough to hold a few head of cattle”. The goal is to have the ship reassembled and put on exhibit at the Bob Bullock Museum in Austin, Texas within three years.

The project is massive, groundbreaking and certainly worth keeping an eye on. You can bet Triple P will keep you updated. More pictures of the original excavation are available here. And here is the fascinating video that explains the process of preserving La Belle. A worthwhile endeavor indeed.