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

History: Piracy Statutes of 1724 and Beyond

The British statute against piracy issued by the Crown in 1724 as an addendum to the nation’s civil law is one of the most far reaching pieces of legal action in history. The law, as it is presented in Johnson’s History of Pyrates effectively ended the so called Golden Age of piracy, leaving only pockets of plundering in out of the way places. A resurgence in freebooting would not occur until the late 18th century with the dawn of the age of privateering that began with the great American revolutions and ended when David Porter’s Mosquito Fleet put down the last of the “Caribbean” pirates.


You can find the statute as set down by Johnson online here. Over the course of a few recurring posts, I’d like to take a closer look at the points of law in the statute, and see how they have effect piracy and the battle against piracy over the course of almost three hundred years.

The first paragraph notes “Though Pyrates are called common Enemies, yet they are properly not to be term’d so.” Sighting Cicero, the law points out that only a group with an “ongoing Government or State” can be called an enemy and uses the example of the Barbary states, who should be afforded the “Solemnities of War, and the Rights of Legation.” It would be another hundred years before the combined forces of British, French, Dutch and U.S. navies put this point to the test in the Mediterranean and at last ended the predations of Barbary corsairs.

This principle was followed in dealing with pirates by almost every nation in the western world within just a few decades of the British statute. A pirate was not an enemy but a criminal; a rogue working under his own auspices and outside any law. This principle “of necessity” allowed privateering but set up a gray area in such ventures as well. “Unrecognized states” such as, at various points in history, Bolivar’s Grand Columbia, Mexican rebels, Texas, and others could have their privateers prosecuted and hanged as pirates because of their questionable status according to established nations. This was certainly the case with the Continental Navy during the Revolutionary War.

This idea also, in an even deeper shade of gray, applied to the Laffite brothers Barataria operation. The brothers together, and Jean in particular, claimed Barataria was a sovereign state and therefore above the laws of piracy. Their ships were not engaged in criminal activity, they reasoned, but the taking of enemy ships. It is worth noting that, though the Laffites issued passports to those who wished to enter Barataria, they never went so far as to create their own letters of marque but used those issued from Cartagena, Caracas and Mexico.

The issue of enemy vs. criminal continues to create problems for modern navies battling pirates in Southeast Asia, the Gulf of Aden and elsewhere. The pirates claim they are freedom fighters from nations in revolt; the navies claim they are thugs. Iran’s recent protest against U.S. naval presence in the Persian Gulf is an excellent example of this ongoing issue.

This idea also applies in part on the issue of “Subjects in Enmity with the Crown of England”, mentioned a few paragraphs later. In this point of law, a foreigner whose country is at war with (in this case) England but is serving aboard a pirate ship run by a British national is not subject to prosecution as a criminal. Though the foreigner would still be tried for piracy, his proceeding would be under the auspices of Martial rather than Civil Law. This may appear to be splitting hairs but it certainly gives the foreigner an out that his mates would not have. Enemies of the state can be exchanged for prisoners of war or espionage.

All this legal jargon goes right out the window in paragraph number six:

If Pyracy be committed on the Ocean, and the Pyrates in the attempt be overcome, the Captors may, without any Solemnity of Condemnation, hang them up at the Main-Yard; if they are Brought to the next Port, & the Judge rejects the Tryal, or the Captors cannot wait for the Judge, without Peril or Loss, Justice may be done upon them by the Captors.

At this point the gloves are off and so are all bets. Those capturing pirates on the high seas may quite literally do with them as they please “without peril or loss”. Since just about every sovereign state with an Atlantic coast established similar piracy statutes by the mid-18th century, piracy was a very dangerous profession indeed. Even men that we think of now as legal privateers – John Paul Jones and Renato Beluche, for instance – could easily have been put to death “on the Ocean” under similar law.

That’s enough for today, I think. Next time, bribes, goods and when ransacking a ship at anchor is – and isn’t – piracy.

Header: 19th century engraving of a pirate via gutenberg.org

Sea Monsters: Bigger is Better

Over at Nat Geo’s website they’re touting the skull of potentially the “largest sea monster” yet discovered. Of course, journalists will snicker behind their fans at the title of the article; everyone knows you bring them in with big promises. The facts of the case, as it turns out, are a little less impressive if no less interesting.


The skull in question is that of a pliosaur and was found by amateur fossil hunter Kevan Sheehan at the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site in Dorset County, England. Pliosaurs were a form of plesiosaur which was, according to The Encyclopedia of the Sea by Richard Ellis, not a dinosaur but a marine lizard. These creatures swam the coastal oceans of most of the world in the Triassic and Jurassic periods. They averaged about 15 feet long, had four, flat flippers and sported pair of high nostrils similar to a modern whale’s blowhole. The long necked versions, called elasmosaurs, are sometimes bandied about as a possible relative of the elusive Loch Ness Monster.

The skull in question is almost eight feet long and the article notes that it “… would have had a strong enough bite to snap a car in half…” Disconcerting on any level but is it the “largest” prehistoric skull yet found?

Hans Sues, a paleontologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. puts the brakes on that kind of hyperbole with this statement at the end of the article:

… there is an unfortunate tendency to brand every new find as the largest…

That said, this article at Archaeology Daily News discusses the find of a huge, prehistoric crocodile in – of all places – Texas. As noted, it weighed a ton and was 25 feet in length. I’m compelled to wonder what insight Dr. Sues might have on this mammoth monster…

Header: Pliosaur via Cosmos online

Women At Sea: History Misremembered

Though today's lady gets a lot of attention in her home state of Texas, she is not (as she and her Texan brethren would have you believe), all that famous. Like Hannah Dustin and Diamond Lil (oh how Mrs. Long would cringe at that comparison), she is essentially a product of her time and place, no different in many ways than any other Anglo-American, female pioneer. She seems, however, to have had a snappy gift for self-promotion that foreshadowed future American idols like Joan Crawford, Madonna and Lady Gaga. My personal interest in Mrs. Long lays not so much in her many travels, the bulk of which were by sea, but in one particular meeting with an international pirate superstar. I’m getting ahead of myself, though.

Jane Herbert Wilkinson was born July 23, 1798 in Charles County, Maryland to Captain William MacKall, who served in the Revolutionary War, and his wife Anne (or Ann) Herbert Wilkinson. As an aside, I can find no explanation for the confusion in surnames in this family of 14. Some children are listed as MacKall or Mackall while Jane and some others are Wilkinson. A comment on this anomaly would be more than appreciated if anyone knows the answer. MacKall was a leading figure in the County but Anne does not seem to have been a popular hostess or even neighbor. She kept to herself with her large brood, of whom sturdy Jane was the tenth. It is telling that when MacKall dropped dead in 1799, Anne packed up the family and moved to Washington in what was then Mississippi Territory.

Having a fair number of strong boys to manage a farm, Anne and her children did relatively well on the frontier with 10 of her 12 children surviving to adulthood. By the time Anne died in 1813, many of Jane’s older siblings were married, established and able to take the younger children in. Jane went to live with her oldest sister Barbara, who was married to one Alexander Calvit. Calvit was a relatively wealthy landowner and her sister’s home on Prospinquity Plantation on the Natchez Trace must have seemed as grand as any palace to Jane.

By the time she arrived, Jane was pushing the envelope of marriageable age at 16. Never remarked upon as a beauty, there must have been grumblings at Prospinquity that Jane might languish into spinsterhood. Fortune smiled on both Jane and the Calvits when Dr. James Long, who had been serving as a physician under Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, stopped in at Prospinquity on his way home to Virginia. He was welcomed at the plantation and stayed to help tend an outbreak of fever among the slaves. Jane and the good doctor (perhaps through the machinations of Barbara and Alexander) found each to the other’s liking. They were married in May of 1815. Considering that the Battle of New Orleans technically ended in mid-January of that year and that the need for doctors continued well into February and even March, it seems a rather hasty union.

Probably while in New Orleans James, like so many others, caught the filibustering bug. He was gung-ho to free Mexico from Spanish bondage but, rather than put up his money for arms, munitions and privateering commissions, James sank everything he had into a private army. He rounded up disenfranchised men who milled about the Natchez Trace after the War of 1812, armed them, supplied them and would himself lead them into Texas and establish first one fort and then the entire Territory as a free and independent state. Jane had hitched her future to a man full of dreams and prepared to die for them. Fortunately, she was hardy, loyal and blind to her husband’s follies, or so it seems.

Long left for Nacogdoches in June of 1819 and Jane stayed behind to give birth to their second child. It is interesting to note that their first daughter, Ann Herbert, was born in November of 1816 (you do the math) and that by the time James headed off Jane was no longer living at splendid Prospinquity but in the more humble house of her widowed sister Anne Chelsey. Rebecca was born shortly after her father’s departure and six days later her mother packed her things, climbed aboard a merchant vessel and followed James Long to Nacogdoches. Ann was left with Anne Chelsey.

Not surprisingly, illness dogged Jane’s journey. The Calvits had by now established another plantation in Alexandria and Jane was forced to seek refuge there. In short order, though, Jane dropped her infant off with Barbara and continued on to meet her husband, although she was still ill. Jane arrived in August to find her husband’s people living on the edge of subsistence. By October James was in Galvez Town making nice with the local pirates. The Spanish stormed the Nacogdoches fort and Jane and her fellows had to flee to the Sabine River. Long met Jane there and they returned to Alexandria and the Calvits, only to find that baby Rebecca had died.

The couple retrieved Ann, now three, from the newly married Anne Chelsey Miller and James turned back to Texas. Now that he was chummy with Jean Laffite at Galvez Town, he dragged his family, their one slave, a twelve-year-old girl named Kian, and his remaining men to Point Bolivar northeast of what is now Galveston Island. James seems to have been enchanted with Laffite, who – as he was packing up to leave the island – invited the Longs to what Jane remembered as a “sumptuous feast” aboard his flagship General Victoria (remembered by Jane as La Fierté: The Pride).

None of it amounted to much as Long, driven now to personal destruction in liberty’s cause, hauled his family back and forth to New Orleans, Point Bolivar and various places in between. By 1821 they were back in the tent city at Point Bolivar which now boasted a half dozen families as well as military men. James followed Laffite off to Mexico that September, leaving his pregnant wife with pubescent Kian and four-year-old Ann. He would be captured by the Spanish, taken to Mexico City and killed – the Spanish called it an “accidental death” – April 8, 1822.

Jane knew nothing of her husband’s death until the summer of 1822 and, though the others slowly sailed away from the lonely “fort” at Point Bolivar, she waited dutifully for James to return. She gave birth to another daughter, Mary James, on December 21, 1821 under an ice-encrusted tent. She managed to fool the local natives into believing the fort was still full of militia and she and the girls with her almost starved until March of 1822. A party of retreating settlers found them and convinced Jane to come east. The trek was slow and Jane did not return to Alexandria and the comfort of her sister’s home until September of 1823. By that time she seems to have resigned herself to her fate and, though she did return to Texas to first open boarding houses and eventually run a ranch and cotton plantation that succeeded for a while, she never really attained the station in society that her birth and marriage must have given her leave to imagine.

Both Mary and Ann married well. Ann and her husband Edward Winston moved to Texas and started their own ranch not far from Jane’s in the late 1830’s. It was at this time, with her children grown and her life settled if not terribly prosperous, that the men (according to Jane, anyway) came calling. Famous Texans like Sam Houston and Ben Milam courted her aggressively but she refused them all as she was still mourning James Long. Only Mirabeau Bonaparte Lamar (who, if his parents had added Robespierre, would have had the entire French Revolution in one name) was given Jane’s confidence, if not her hand. He listened to and wrote down her stories of pioneering in Texas. He promoted her assertion that she, as the first white woman to give birth on the Territory’s soil, was the “Mother of Texas” (in fact there is clear documentation that at least six Anglo-American babies were born in the Territory between 1807 and 1821). And, most fascinating of all to me, wrote down her recollection of the pirate Jean Laffite:

He was of middle stature, perhaps a little above it, graceful, well-spoken… dark hair, brown complexion and a pair of eyes as vivid as the lightning and as black as ebony. In conversation he was mild, placable and polite; but altogether unjocular and free of levity. There was something noble and attractive in his aspect in spite of its occasional severity; and between the fierceness of his glance and the softness of his speech, the disparity was striking…

Mrs. Long told Lamar she heard Laffite’s many stories of his life at sea but that she found him frustrating in conversation. He would not reveal “… important information… respecting himself” despite his tall tales. In this Mrs. Long and Jean Laffite seem very similar to me. What did the “Mother of Texas” really think about the life she had quite literally been dragged into by her dreamer of a husband? Lamar does not say, and doubtless neither did Jane.

Jane Herbert Wilkinson Long outlived both her daughters and fell into the care of Ann’s children. By 1877 she was living with one of Ann’s sons, James Winston, and his family. Mrs. Long died there December 30, 1880. She is buried in Morton Cemetery in Richmond. Jane remains a fascinating study of pioneering America and a heroine of early Texas with statues and markers scattered around the state, particularly in Fort Bend County. How much truth there is to the stories she told Lamar is open for debate. But then so are a lot of things we call “history”.

Header: Jane Long c 1870

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.

Booty: Fortune Favors The Brave

An American milestone came and went on Tuesday and I didn't say word one about it so, in all humility, I'm playing a little bit of catch up today. On March 2, 1836 the then Mexican Territory of Texas declared her independence and went forward as the Republic of Texas. It was a bold move considering that Mexico's siege of the Alamo was going on at the same time. But Texans were undaunted and one of the first things they did was set up a navy of privateers (smart Texans).

As we discussed here, the Laffite brothers proved that a handy profit could be made running a privateering operation with their boom town in Galveston. In 1836 there were still people around who remembered that golden era and the new government of Texas went straight to work handing out letters of marque and reprisal including a nice chunk of profits for themselves. By November Texas had a register of ships and Captains who held their commissions and shown above is a page from that book (courtesy of the State of Texas Navy webpage).

The Captains names, their ships and the current known state of the vessel are listed on the document, dated November 3, 1836. The list of four ships indicates that John M. Allen is the Captain of the pilot schooner Terrible, W.S. Brown captains the schooner Benjamin R. Milam, Peter Grayson has the schooner Tom Toby and a man named Moore is in command of schooner Jim Bowie. Two of the ships are out of New Orleans which is no surprise since - just like the Laffites - the privateers and the Texas government would have been selling their plundered goods in that capital of decadence and excess. The document is signed by chief clerk John Buchanan.

So there's a well established privateering tradition in the great state of Texas and it all started with our cher amis Jean and Pierre Laffite. But there's another, more subtle connection to the Emperors of Barataria here. The name of the last ship is the key.

Here is the man after whom the schooner was named: Of course that's James Bowie, who died at the Battle of the Alamo on March 6, 1836. He was an instant hero in the Republic of Texas and still is in the State. Plus he invented this grizzly bear:

(source)

Here's the thing most people don't know about Mr. Bowie, though. When he and his brother Rezin left the army in 1819, they returned to their home state of Louisiana and found a booming market in slaves. But slaves could not (legally) be brought into the U.S. via ship as was the habit of the Laffites in Barataria. Again, the Laffite brothers were way ahead of the curve, and the Bowie brothers wanted in on the lucrative action. Thanks to the U.S. Congress, their partnership worked beautifully.

The Laffites sold slaves literally by the pound at their slave market at Deweyville on the Texas side of the Sabine river. The Bowies would show up, buy a likely batch of healthy humans, and march them into Louisiana. There they would take the slaves straight to the U.S. authorities and claim that the unfortunates were cargo from a ship that Bowie associates had captured in the name of the U.S. Well done boys, the authorities would say. Now - again thanks to Congress - we'll sell this chattel and give you 50% of the profits. These sales were usually handled quickly and, since a good field hand could bring as much as $1,500 or more at auction, the Bowies made money hand over fist.

The Bowie brothers visited Galveston more than once and evidently Jim and Jean Laffite struck up something of a friendship. Old salts would later remark that the two men looked similar, to the point where some thought they might be related.

While there is not genealogical evidence of relation, in my mind they are kindred spirits. Two men prepared to look out for themselves and their brothers and step on or over anyone else. All the same managing, despite their questionable deeds, to come down to us as heroes.

"Fortune favors the brave", by the way, is the motto of the Texas Navy. Apparently it really does.