Last year's installment:
The son of my old business partner graduated from Texas A&M’s school of Marine Archeology. He was one of the leaders of the diving archeological expedition on Port Royal years ago.
After that, he headed the discovery and recovery of a French ship that had been lost in Matagorda Bay in 1681, Texas as part of the La Salle expedition to colonize Texas.
The Belle
http://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/belle/index.html
An Unprecedented Excavation
The Belle remained mired in mud for 310 years, untouched but not forgotten. After years of unsuccessful searching, archeologists from the Texas Historical Commission (THC) finally found the prize in 1995. The crew discovered one of the Belle’s cannons, an elaborately inscribed gun that confirmed the age and identity of the wreck.
Properly excavating the shipwreck would require one of the most extraordinary engineering feats ever associated with an archeological excavation in Texas or anywhere else in the world. In 1996, at a cost of over $2 million, a double-walled cofferdam was built around the sunken ship. This allowed THC archeologists to pump out the wreck site and excavate the Belle almost as if they were on dry land.
The nine-month excavation yielded equally astonishing results: gooey gray mud had encased the Belle and sealed its contents from the air. Most of the ship’s stores—wooden boxes jammed with trade goods, tools to support a variety of trades, muskets and munitions, yards of rope, cannons, dishes, and more—were found in remarkably good condition. Here, for the first time, was an intact 17th-century French colonizing kit containing everything needed to establish a colony in the New World.
