Heritage, Volume 14, Number 4, Fall 1996 Page: 16
30 p. : ill. ; 28 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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THE BELLE
Technology Brings Underwater Artifacts
to the SurfaceThe Belle, a sunken ship
once belonging to the
French explorer Rene Robert
Cavelier, Sieur de La
Salle, was found last summer
in Matagorda Bay by a
team of underwater archaeologists
from the Texas Historical
Commission. The
treasure, the oldest French
shipwreck ever discovered
in the Americas, laid buried
off the Texas coast for more
than 300 years before its discovery
by a team of modern
explorers led by State Marine
Archaeologist Barto
Arnold. (See HERITAGE,
Winter 1996.)
Since its discovery, THC
divers have turned up many
artifacts of French origin
from the late 17th century. Perhaps the
most significant - and the one that convinced
the underwater archaeologists that
the ship was indeed La Salle's Belle - was
the ornate six-foot-long bronze cannon
decorated with leaping dolphin handles
and the royal crest of King Louis XIV (the
Belle was a gift to La Salle from the king).
Divers also located musket balls, pottery, a
brass buckle, small bronze bells, and finger
rings stamped with the letter L. It is believed
that many of the artifacts recovered
from the French vessel were going to be
used as trade goods with Indians.
These artifacts reveal much about the
people on the Belle and about the times in
which they lived. Since only one percent
of the ship's contents had been excavated
by the divers and because visibility beneath
the bay's surface was so poor, underwater
recovery of the artifacts became a
challenge. Furthermore, the threat of
storms and other disturbances made it crucial
that the excavation of the ship begin
in earnest this past summer. Thought to be
one of the best preserved shipwrecks found
to date, the Belle artifacts are priceless in
terms of their historical value.
But tons of mud and silt stood in the
way of the archaeologists. Attempting adock
6.5' ab
be built around the shipwreck.
feat that was never before done in ocean
waters, THC authorized and supervised
the building, which began in June, of a
cofferdam around the 1686 wreck. The
cofferdam, designed and constructed by
engineers in Port Lavaca, consisted of sheet
pilings three feet wide and approximately
60 feet long, that were inserted to a depth
of 41 feet below the bay's floor in order to
prevent seepage. The cofferdam consists of
two concentric, rectangular walls surrounding
the shipwreck. The outer wall of the
Each artifact tells the story
about the people on the Belle
and about the times in which
they fived. If this discovery
were a book we'd only be on
the introduction,"says Texas
Historical Commission State
Marine Archaeologist
Barto Alrnod, who leads the
excavation activities.structure extends approximately
five feet above the
water's surface. Plans call for a
ove sea level steel protective roof to be
erected over the inner portion
of the site to offer protection
from the weather.
The initial phase of the cofferdam
construction was completed
in August of this year.
outer wall At that time, water was pumped
out of the inner ring of the dam,
and the site was ready for excavation.
The watertight structure
surrounding the Belle, built
at a cost of about $1 million,
will allow dry-land excavation
of the 20 percent of the ship's
hull that remains intact. (Funds
for the construction of the structure
came from state and private
donations.) To facilitate
the archaeologists, a mobile crane will operate
on a specially constructed roadway
between the outer and inner walls of the
cofferdam. It will be used to lift the excavated
shipwreck materials from the site and
place them on a transport barge docked at
the site.
The Texas cofferdam is only the second
to be used in this hemisphere for excavation
of a sunken vessel and the first one
from which water was pumped. The first
cofferdam to be used in shipwreck excavation
in the United States was built during
the late 1970s for recovery of a Civil War
ship sunk in the James River in Virginia.
The recovered artifacts, which have been
temporarily deposited in the conservation
laboratory at the Corpus Christi Museum
of Science and History for cleaning, will
eventually be incorporated into a major
museum and various traveling exhibits.
Excavation is scheduled to be completed
by January of 1997, at which time the
cofferdam will be dismantled and the steel
resold to recover some of the construction
costs.
For updated information on the La Salle
Shipwreck Project, visit the Texas Historical
Commission's Web site at http://
www.thc.state.tx.us16 HERITAGE *FALL 1996
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Texas Historical Foundation. Heritage, Volume 14, Number 4, Fall 1996, periodical, Autumn 1996; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth45407/m1/16/: accessed April 20, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas Historical Foundation.