Heritage, Volume 15, Number 4, Fall 1997 Page: 12
38 p. : ill. ; 28 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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SHIPWRECK
PROJECT UPDATE/ie
SiysIery
Jie &ourLiI GCannon
By Curtis TunnellThe French Sun King, Louis XIV,
granted four beautiful bronze cannons to
La Salle for his colony in the New World.
The Texas Historical Commission (THC)
recovered one of these from the wreck of
the Belle in 1995 and two others in 1997.
Where is the fourth cannon of this matched
set? Someone around Matagorda Bay probably
knows.
In a document signed at Versailles on
the 23rd of March, 1684, the king granted
"Twelve pieces of ordnance for the two
fortresses, namely, eight with balls of 10 to
12 pounds, which might be iron guns, and
four bronze ones, of four pounds, so that
they may be used in succession". The eight
iron cannons were recovered from La Salle's
Fort St. Louis by a Texas Historical Commission
field crew in September 1996
(HERITAGE, Summer 1997). In the summer
of 1995, a THC survey crew dove on a
magnetic anomaly in Matagorda Bay and
were astounded to find one of La Salle's
ornate bronze cannons, proving that they
were on the wreck of La Belle, which sank
early in 1686. BetweenJuly 1996 and April
1997, the hull of the Belle and all its contents
were recovered by THC archaeologists
excavating within the confines of a
steel cofferdam. Two additional bronze cannons,
exactly matching the first one, were
recovered from the starboard side of the
Belle, just forward of amidships.
From October 15-17, 1996, this author
was assisting with excavations on the Belle,
and was assigned a one-by-three meter excavation
unit on the port side of the ship,This is a story
of how a tiny scrap
of evidence,
careful recovered,
can create an
archaeological mystery.slightly forward of amidships. This was
prior to discovery of the two bronze cannons
on the starboard side, so nothing was
known at the time about the placement of
the four bronze cannons in the wreck.
Immediately below a thin mantle of sand,
and just inboard of the ship's hull, a limey
encrustation was encountered among a scattering
of lead musket balls. At first this
seemed like the usual massive encrustationcovering some unknown assortment of artifacts.
More careful examination, however,
revealed an irregularly shaped, and
concave smooth area about three to four
inches wide and 16 inches long on top of
the encrustation. After carefully brushing
this area clean, some parallel grooves could
be discerned. At first it was thought this
might be an eroded impression left by the
bronze cannon that the crew removed in
1995 when the wreck site was discovered.
After many hours of careful digging, the
edge of a second much larger impression in
the encrusted mass was encountered at a
lower level and inboard of the first impression.
When totally excavated, this was
obviously an extensive and perfectly preserved
impression of the bronze gun recovered
by the survey crew in 1995. Suddenly,
the awful truth dawned on the stunned
excavation crew. There had been another
cannon, now missing, just above and outboard
of that first bronze cannon. This
missing cannon had leen one of the uppermost
objects in the debris pile of the wreck
and was likely exposed on the bottom of
the bay for awhile following storm surges.
Had it been dragged out of the wreck by
shrimpers? Was it lying on the bottom of
the bay some distance awayfrom the wreck?
Did a shrimp boat snag it and recover it
after some recent storm? Alas...no one
knew for sure.
Months later in the spring of 1997, the
THC crew uncovered the other two bronze
cannons from the starboard side of the
ship.The guns were stowed muzzle to breech,
one slightly above the other, just as the two12 HERITAGE -FALL 199.7
of
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Texas Historical Foundation. Heritage, Volume 15, Number 4, Fall 1997, periodical, Autumn 1997; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth45403/m1/12/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas Historical Foundation.