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

Ships: Updates Ahoy!

Wednesday is grocery day at my house (usually) and since it is one of the chores I hate (mostly because it is inestimably tedious in its never ending round of doing the same thing over and over again, rather like splicing rope aboard ship) I like to do it first thing in the morning. That’s why Wednesday posts are always late. And that’s why today I’m throwing out a bunch of updates on ships we’ve talked about before. It’s all good stuff, but it’s also quick and dirty. Oh, my!

Anyway, first off the U.S. Navy (bless her and all who serve) has completed the 2010 Bonhomme Richard survey. Click over to this post at the Naval History Blog for interesting information not only on the survey itself but on the marine archaeologist in charge.

Next is one of Triple P’s favorite pirate ships: Queen Anne’s Revenge. The remains believed to be those of Edward “Blackbeard” Teach’s flagship which sank off the coast of North Carolina circa 1718 are getting a little attention before winter sets in. A dozen of the ship’s eight feet long guns and her 1.800 pound anchors will receive corrosion prevention this month. Aluminum rods will be applied to what an article at Fox News refers to as “…the boat”. I’m not splitting hairs when I correct that term to ship. Anyway, the rods will act as “anodes”, providing a charge of electricity that will not prevent but will slow down the process of corrosion. The article tells us that the “… last full scale excavation and recovery of artifacts” from the ship took place in 2006. Want to follow the progress of not only this project but many others related to the ship believed to be Blackbeard’s? You can “like” Blackbeard’s-Queen Anne’s Revenge on Facebook for ongoing updates. What a fabulous, modern age we live in.

The last ship on today’s list is the mystery merchant vessel found last July at the World Trade Center construction site in New York City. According to this Fox News article, on October 4th experts gave a lecture documenting what has been so far determined about the life and death of this unexpected find. The scientists are calling the 18th century ship a “Hudson river sloop”; she was evidently a two-masted trading vessel of between 60 and 70 feet long. Whether she sank in place or was used as landfill after she became unseaworthy has yet to be determined. That she certainly sailed outside the Atlantic seaboard and probably as far as the Caribbean has been confirmed by the evidence of small, burrowing clams that ate at the ship’s hull and are native to tropical waters.

The ship was found to have an 18th century copper coin embedded in its structure, probably at the time it was built. The coin was issued during the reign of King George II and helps date the ship to between 1730 and 1760 approximately. As an interesting aside, this ancient tradition for keeping ship’s safe continues to this day, and close to home. USS New York, constructed in part from steel beams from the Twin Towers and completed in 2008, carries modern coins in her hull as well.

The plan for the merchant vessel, which is currently soaking in purified water, is yet to be determined. The Lower Manhattan Development Corp., which has oversight of the entire World Trade Center project, has not announced their intentions with regard to the ship. Scientists hope to be able to preserve her through freeze-drying, much as Texas A & M is doing with La Belle. Let us hope that the right decision is made not with concern for current economics, but for history – and the future.

Header: Blackbeard via the North Carolina Office of Archives and History (looks like Edward has been using his whitestrips!)

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.