Texas history:
Ship’s hull, discovered in Matagorda Bay, will be centerpiece of new permanent exhibit.
Crews rolled the remains of a sunken ship through the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum.
More than three centuries after the French ship La Belle sank in Matagorda Bay, Jim Bruseth watched nervously Thursday as crews prepared to wheel the hull to its final resting place at the Bullock Texas State History Museum.
“The worst thing in the world would be to pick up the ship and hear it crack,” said Bruseth, who led the excavation of the ship in the mid-1990s and is guest curator of the museum’s La Belle exhibit. That didn’t happen. Instead, 13 workers from Clegg Services of Victoria lined up alongside the ship’s freeze-dried ribs, jacked up the I-beams they were resting on, and rolled the 17th-century shipwreck 70 feet through the museum like they were pushing a shopping cart. A crowd of schoolchildren whooped as the bow glided into sight and applauded when it came to a stop 35 sec-
onds later.
After a few inch-by-inch adjustments, the long-anticipated move was done. Eventually, crews will tilt the hull to the 21-degree angle at which it was discovered, replace its cargo, encase the whole thing in glass and build a ramp around it so visitors can look inside.
“It’s been a long journey over three centuries,” Bruseth said, visibly relieved after the move. “A big piece of Texas history is in that ship. La Belle has come to her final home.”
Not everyone, however, was impressed.
“I really thought this was going to be more exciting,” said one young observer who watched the move.
Curators and technicians spent the last seven months reassembling the preserved timbers in front of visitors in a side gallery at the museum. They wrapped up the job two weeks ago — and promptly started fretting about this week’s journey.
“Three-hundred-and-thirty-year-old boats that have been water-logged and eaten by worms aren’t supposed to be moved,” said head conservator Peter Fix of the Texas A&M University Conservation Research Laboratory and Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation.
The 55-foot vessel was one of four French ships led by René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle that departed in 1684 on an expedition to establish a French colony at the mouth of the Mississippi River. The voyage went awry when pirates attacked one of the ships, causing the fleet to overshoot the Mississippi by 400 miles. They wound up off the Texas coast, where the sailors skirmished with local Karankawa natives. La Belle sank in a storm, and La Salle was eventually murdered by his own men.
Archaeologists from the Texas Historical Commission discovered the wreckage buried in muck under 13 feet of murky water in 1995. Inside were cannons, rope, barrels, boxes loaded with equipment and a human skeleton, which was later buried in the Texas State Cemetery.
La Belle was excavated in 1996 and 1997 using a steel cofferdam. Researchers dismantled the ship plank by plank and sent the timbers to Texas A&M University for preservation.
Bruseth, the former director of the archaeology division of the Texas Historical Commission, calls La Belle one of most significant shipwrecks in North America. That’s because La Belle was a “starter kit” for the establishment of a colony in the New World. Historians say La Salle’s doomed expedition ultimately spurred Spanish — rather than French — colonization of Texas, by pushing the Spanish to strengthen their claim on the territory.
“The state of Texas placed an awful lot of trust in us getting it to this place,” Fix said.
The permanent exhibit will open in 2016, but a temporary exhibit featuring the hull and select artifacts will open Aug. 8. The total cost of the reassembly, the permanent gallery installation and accompanying movie is $10 million. About $2.2 million of that was financed by the state; the rest was raised from private sources by the Texas State History Museum Foundation.