Letter to La Salle

Over the years, as I tried to understand your struggles, my files about you have become rather bulky.  therefore, when after three hundred years your ship La Belle  was discovered at Matagorda Bay, Texas, I had to investigate.

Walking along the shore of Matagorda Bay where once you left your footprints, the first white man to do so, I thought about your unusual past.  My mind heard voices, squabbles--squabbles that erupted when you were particularly unsympathetic and smothered your emotions.  You were distrustful, stern to your followers, and pitiless to yourself, bearing the brunt of every hardship and danger.  You demanded of others an implicit respect, and heeded no counsel but your own.  In the end you attempted the impossible and only grasped momentarily what was too vast to hold.  You had dreams and treasured them too much to share.  One by one your dreams went awry as you strove to transform them into reality.

Let me begin this tale in Rouen, Normandy, where you were born on November 21, 1643, and christened Robert-Rene Cavelier.  You studied at the Jesuit College and in 1658 entered upon your novitiate in the Society of Jesus in Paris.  You spent nine years in that religious order:  However, you were restless and felt a perpetual need to change.  Being impulsive--you were described as inquietus--you dreamed of seeing new horizons.  On several occasions you asked your superiors to be sent to one of the Jesuit missions, but your requests were refused.  Finally, you were released from your vows, and on March 28, 1667, the seminary doors closed behind you forever, leaving you resentful toward the Jesuits.  Six months later, despite meagre financial resources, you sailed to Canada and went to see your elder brother, Jean Cavelier, who was a Sulpician at the seminary in Montreal.

The Sulpicians granted you a seigneury on the Island of Montreal and you became a seigneur.  Like so many of your contemporaries, you were obsessed with finding a passage to China, and your place was referred to as La Chine.  In the course of time, Governor Frontenac became your friend and assisted you in securing a seigneury at the fort of Cataraqui (Kingston).

The fort consisted of wooden palisades, earthworks, and log buildings.   After renaming it Fort Frontenac, you ordered the wood replaced with stone walls and bastions, and built barracks, a mill, a guardhouse, and a forge.  The location of the fort was intended to eliminate the trade of the English and the Dutch with the Senecas, an Iroquois tribe.  Soon after, the Senecas became your friends.  Here I cast my thoughts back to Teiaiagon (now Baby Point, Toronto) where you left instructions with the Senecas to attack any fur trader who did not have a permit issued by you.   There, in the summer of 1682, the Senecas plundered the canoes of three Frenchmen--Lachapelle, Leduc, and Abraham.  The three traders lost their cargoes but luckily kept their scalps.  One of these men was my husbands's ancestor.  That was what piqued my interest and you would not leave me alone.

I wanted to know more.

As I studied seventeenth-century records, reports, correspondence, private journals, and government documents, it was difficult to see any consistency, or to comprehend your life as a unified whole.  The journals of your various friends and enemies are full of contradictions.  Is there any truth in their writings?

Under your command at Fort Frontenac, several ships were built and launched in Cataraqui harbour.  Meanwhile, in search of new places and in pursuit of furs, you built more forts as you expanded your territory southward.  In the course of time your luck ran out.  Most of your ships were lost, your enemies wrecked your forts and plundered your storehouses, and your creditors clamoured for their money.   You tapped every financial source, borrowed from family and friends in France, from fellow adventurers and merchants in Canada, even from your friend Madeleine de Roybon d'Allonne, who also lived at Fort Frontenac.  You were so eager to leave on your voyage that you did not take the time to marry Madeleine--probably the only woman you ever cared for.   Born in Montargis, France, she was three years younger than you.  She understood your ambitions and your need to find money to support your endeavour.   Your creditors had already seized your furs at the fort when Madeleine showed her trust in you and loaned you more than 2,000 livres.

During those years, while you traded, you explored a large part of North America.  And although robust, you often suffered from violent fever attacks.   You were planning to venture farther and farther south as you and your ally, Louis Hennepin, a Recollet Friar, read about the voyages of Fernando de Soto and other discoverers.

During a visit to France in 1678, you had become acquainted with two priests, Abbe Eusebe Renoudot and Abbe Claude Bernou, who offered to be your agents.  If their petition to the King was successful, they could expect to profit from your voyages.   Renaudot, with his passion for geography and his religious zeal tinged with hostility towards the Jesuits, seemed the right person to protect you.  Bernou, too, had definite personal ambitions for your success--as the newly dubbed Sieur de La Salle, you could fulfill his dream of a southern episcopate.

You returned to France in 1683, after having traveled to the mouth of the Mississippi--so you alleged.  Did you explore the delta projecting into the Gulf of Mexico?  Did you actually see the build up of sediments that the river carries down to a cabo de lodo--a cape of mud?  You named the territory Louisiana and claimed it for France.  Still, Abbe Bernou understood that for you to make your fortune, and consequently his own, it was simply a question of presenting the King with the right proposal. 

Previously, an idea had been suggested to Bernou by a certain Count Penalosa.   This man was a Spanish Creole born in Peru, who had been governor of New Mexico until the Inquisition took too close an interest in him and he was forced to seek refuge in Europe.  Living in France at the time, Penalosa described to Bernou and Renaudot the fabulous riches of New Spain, and a plan to conquer it's silver mines.  The two priests considered the adventure worth trying.  From this perspective Sieur de La Salle, your arrival in 1683 could not have been more  timely, and your agents quickly analyzed the situation for their benefit.  Proposals were addressed to the court of Louis XIV, explaining how the project of a French colony close to New Spain and it's mines would be of greatest advantage to France.

You agreed to falsify the geography.  The result was an altered course of the Mississippi--far to the west--to coincide with the Rio Grande.  This proposal, in Bernou's peculiarities of spelling (such as writing the plural aux as aus), was supported by downright lies and wild exaggerations.  So was the statement that the Mississippi Delta would allow for an excellent port, where large vessels would be able to ascend to a distance of hundreds of kilometers.  And of course there was no mention of the petrified tree trunks that blocked the river.

Louis XIV agreed to your proposal and supplied four ships, Le Joly, one of the King's man-of-war; the Saint-Francois, a ketch; L'Aimable, a fly-boat; and La Belle, a small, two-masted sloop; mounted with six four-pounder cannons.  The latter was an outright gift from the King to you.

On July 24, 1684, you sailed from France with some 300 men and women, including your brother Jean, and a certain outward bravado.  You must have had doubts about reaching the mouth of the Mississippi River.  You certainly were apprehensive.   Dreading that someone could interfere, you kept your plans secret.  I know you worried about the Jesuits.  You and your group at the French court were determined to establish a new colony in North America, free from Jesuit control.  That was the reason you avoided sailing to Quebec. 

You little fleet sailed instead to Haiti, where you suffered a fevered delirium.  Later, sailing past Cuba before entering the Gulf of Mexico, the Saint-Francois was captured by pirates.  However, you continued the voyage.  Eventually you overshot the Mississippi Delta.  How could you not recognize the delta's vast cape of mud which extend 20 kilometers into the ocean?  Were you not the explorer of the river's mouth?  Yet you landed 600 kilometers west, at Matagorda Bay, in early February 1685.  You soon realized your mistake.  You had been deceived, not only by your own map but also by the sea charts of the day, all of them inaccurate.  Or were you perhaps trying to mislead Captain Beaujeau, with whom you often disagreed?   The Captain concluded that because his wife had a Jesuit confessor, you did not trust him.  Finally, as had been stipulated by Louis XIV, Beaujeu sailed La Joly back to France, believing you had landed at the river you were seeking.  At once you began to search the numerous channels of the Bay, hoping to find a passage to the Mississippi.

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Meanwhile, on February 20, 1685, L'Aimable, your main supply ship, ran aground on a sandbar near Matagorda Island, spilling most of it's precious food.   Soon after, the ship sank, and with it the cargo of cannons, weapons and tools.

Supervised by you, the colonists constructed a fort further inland on Garcitas Creek, which you named Fort St. Louis.  Disease, alligators, and the local Karankawa tribe wiped out many of your people.  The remaining colonists lost confidence, and moral was low. Whenever--to forget their misery--someone tried to initiate some amusement with song and dance, you were adamant:  you would not tolerate any frivolous activities.  Your only ambition was to find the Mississippi. 

Disaster struck once more.  In January, 1686, a norther blew La Belle across the bay, where it grounded in shallow water.  After a half-hearted attempt to salvage the cargo, the crew abandoned the vessel.  But you did not give up.  You continued to organize over-land scouting journeys with some of your companions, going east as far as the Trinity River.  Quite often feverish illness overtook you.  In October, 1686, back at Fort St. Louis, you were laid up by a painful hernia.  Your life-long perseverance astounds me.

According to some of your companions, in March, 1687 you were shot in the head over some minor disagreement, and, at age 43, left to die in the bushes.  But your body was never found.  Only six of your companions made it back from Texas to Canada and on to France.  Their tales and journals show evidence of their hardships and of murders among the last remaining colonist.  But their memory of events and the passing of time during their years spent in the wilderness is contradictory and puzzling.   Or could it have been their preoccupation with trying to conceal your death?   Before leaving Texas, your brother, Jean Cavelier, had extracted from his five companions a promise to keep your death a secret.  He planned to cash in on the furs you had traded years earlier at your fort on the Illinois River, and succeeded.  Only after their arrival in France did the rumours of your death surface.

Now, three centuries later, your ship La Belle has been discovered in it's final resting place by archaeologists working for the Texas Historical Commission.   A watertight wall called a "Cofferdam" was placed around the shipwreck.   It consisted of two concentric octagonal walls of interlocking steel plates sunk twelve meters below the Bay floor and rising about two meters above sea level.  Sand and gravel fill between the walls served as a work platform for the archaeologists.   Pumps were used to draw the water out, exposing La Belle, which lay 4 to 5 meters below the surface of the water.  After resting all that time at the bottom of Matagorda Bay, the oak ribs of the fifteen-by-four meter ship were very well preserved.   Some of the pottery still contained food.

I was amazed to see pewter plates, sword hilts, bronze rings, boxes of muskets, casks of axe heads, and thousands of glass beads--wampum--to be used for trade with the natives.  The bronze cannon recovered from La Belle is proof of her identity.  It bears the name of Le Comte de Vermandois, who was an illegitimate son of Louis XIV.

Archaeologists also discovered, near coils of rope in the bow of the ship, the skeletal remains of an unknown male passenger.  With the skeleton was a wooden cask containing the residue of distilled spirits.  Nearby they found a leather shoe with a high heel--obviously not the shoe of an ordinary sailor.

The skeleton was in very good condition.  The man was approximately 1.55 meters tall, but quite robust and strong, estimated to have been between the ages of twenty-five and forty-one.  A study of the skeleton by physical anthropologists determined that he had dental problems and suffered from numerous ailments, including arthritis and a herniated disc.  He had obviously been in a fight--his nose and cheek were broken.  A computer scan revealed evidence of an old wound to the head--an eighteen millimeter-long piece of metal was imbedded in his skull.

Sieur de La Salle, you were proud, independent, had bold vision and untiring energy.  But you were also stubborn and did not allow anyone diversion from the daily hardships in the wilderness.  There had been a quarrel when you were shot in the head.  Did you seek refuge in the hold of La Belle to nurse your pride and escape the noisy distractions at the fort?  Perhaps, when the remains are finally disposed of under the guidance of the French Consulate in Houston, Texas, we will know the answer.

With the recovery of La Belle you seem to have come to life again, and at last I understand many of your struggles.  May your spirit find in death the peace which escaped you in life. 

Respectfully yours,

Adrienne Leduc

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