By Scott Gold Times Staff Writer -- LA Times, ca 2-10-04
MATAGORDA, Texas His water supply was exhausted, his last bits of food ceded to rats and roaches. Once the sailor's ship ran aground on a mud flat and the weather turned sour, he must have known the end was near, that his dream of a better life in the New World, a life of adventure and riches, was over.
Fighting arthritis that left him with a jerky limp, he crawled into a damp cargo hold, climbed atop a pile of thick anchor rope and, it appears, waited to die. Today, more than 300 years later, he will finally have some peace.
Officials are planning to bury the remains of the 17th century French sailor at the Texas State Cemetery in Austin, an austere place reserved for people who left a lasting impression on Texas governors and generals and such. Historians believe it is the proper resting place for this lowly deckhand.
Archeologists discovered the sunken wreck of La Belle, a ship commanded by the famed and tortured French explorer Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, in 1995.
The ship, which sank in 1686 in Matagorda Bay, north of Corpus Christi, became a significant marine archeological find, largely because the bay's fine silt appears to have entombed La Belle almost immediately after it went down. The silt created a coffin of sorts for the wreck, keeping oxygen out and decay to a minimum, preserving even the items that are typically the first to go, from hemp rope to the oaken hull.
The excavation yielded more than one million artifacts, from bronze cannons artfully inscribed with the crest of King Louis XIV to a brass colander whose holes formed the shape of a delicate flower.
"What we had found here was basically a kit for building a colony in the New World. It's the only place that these objects have all been found together," said Jim Bruseth, a key player in the excavation of La Belle.
The shipwreck yielded only one body, however, and that alone has been enough to give the sailor almost mythological status in these parts.
His identity unknown, the sailor was given the crude but endearing nickname Dead Bob. His remains, largely skeletal and well-preserved, have been studied exhaustively by historians and archeologists; poked and prodded and scraped for DNA. He appears to have had a hard life. Among his meager possessions were a pewter drinking cup and shoes that were little more than patches of leather.
Still, the sailor has come to embody the history of what was then called the New World, and the spirit of adventure that drove its exploration in the face of great danger.
"He will have a very honorable burial," said Bruseth, director of the archeology division of the Texas Historical Commission in Austin. "This is the completion of one individual's incredible life."
The bones will be sealed in a steel container and placed in a vault. The service will be conducted by Father Albert Laforet, associate pastor of St. Mary's Cathedral in Austin, and will be attended by, among others, Jean-David Levitte, the French ambassador to the United States. A plaque affixed to the vault will simply describe the sailor as "a member of an ill-fated French expedition."
Levitte said the ceremony, which will be conducted in French and English, will serve as a reminder of the long and storied relationship between France and the south-central United States.
"His was a very sad story," Levitte said of the sailor. "But it represents the beginning of a long, beautiful and fruitful friendship. It is important to stop and remember."
La Salle, before he took La Belle across the Atlantic Ocean, had already claimed for France portions of what would become North America. With his country enmeshed in a tense standoff with Spain over colonization of the continent; including the valuable silver mines of what is now Mexico; La Salle persuaded Louis XIV to let him explore and settle the mouth of the Mississippi River.
The trip was a disaster from the start.
According to accounts of survivors who made it back to France, as well as government records and recovered journals, La Salle left with four ships and 300 colonists. Not long after shoving off from La Rochelle, France, in 1684, one ship was captured by pirates. Another sank and has never been found.
The crew aboard La Belle would never see their leader again. Still on foot, still trying to regroup, La Salle was soon murdered by his own men, probably near what is now the Texas town of Navasota. The dozen or so sailors on board the ship had no way of communicating with those on land, and remained in the bay awaiting his return.
Within weeks, however, they began to grow desperate. Studies of the wreck suggest that rats, lice and roaches were rampant. According to survivors' accounts, the captain La Salle had left in charge was surviving on a steady diet of wine and brandy. The crew soon ran out of drinking water and began to panic.
Using La Belle's last ship-to-shore boat, a group of sailors made a brief foray to land in search of water. They were killed by Native Americans. Defying La Salle's orders, the remaining crew members hoisted the anchor in an attempt to reach the fort on the other side of the bay. They lost control of the ship, sending it careening across the bay before it ran aground.
"When things start going south, they go south," Hollister said.
A group of sailors built a raft to reach a nearby barrier island, but it sank and several of them drowned. Survivors put together a sturdier raft and managed to ferry enough supplies to the island; a thin strip of sand and shrubs now known as Matagorda Peninsula to establish a small camp.
Dead Bob, however, was still on board the grounded ship.
Archeologists who have scrutinized his remains believe he was between 35 and 45 years old and of sturdy build, but his bones suggest he suffered from severe arthritis. Studies show he had been the recipient of a stiff uppercut — from a right-handed assailant that broke his nose. His teeth, those still in his mouth, were riddled with abscesses that had begun to eat through his jawbone.
He may have been the last person alive on the ship, and he was almost certainly starving and dying of thirst, they believe.
To the north, freshwater rivers and creeks spilled into the gulf, but he could not retrieve water because he knew he would be killed by Native Americans if he went ashore. To the south, some of his comrades were relatively comfortable at their camp on the peninsula, a mere 200 yards away. But historians believe that the sailor, like most in his day, could not swim.
He was, evidently, trapped.
At some point, he crawled into the cargo hold in the bow of the ship. He took off his shoes. Toward the end, his fingers appear to have uncurled, and he dropped a pewter drinking cup, which was found near his body. The cup was inscribed with the letters "C. Barange," which might have been his name.
"Things were not going well," Bruseth said. "He knew he was looking at the last moments of his existence."
Soon, a series of cold fronts "blue northers," in Texas vernacular raked the bay. The storms sank the ship in about 12 feet of water, driving its bow into the silt.
Historians had been excavating at the wreck site for several months when, on Halloween 1996, they found the sailor's remains. The discovery changed everything.
"This was already an incredible archeological project," said Bruseth, whose book, "From a Watery Grave: The Discovery and Excavation of La Salle's Shipwreck La Belle," will be published next summer by Texas A&M University Press.
"But with the human remains, we had an electric connection to these people," he said. "You couldn't help but think about him, what his life was like, who he was."
Craig Hlavinka, a harbor master from Matagorda and one of scores of area residents who volunteered at the wreck for weeks, was standing on a catwalk above the excavation site shortly after the body was discovered.
"It was kind of somber," Hlavinka said. "It felt very scientific until then. All of a sudden there is a human face on it. It was a shame he couldn't talk."
Standing with Hlavinka, looking down at the body, a friend asked what they should call him.
"I said, 'How about Dead Bob?' " Hlavinka said.
The name has caused some consternation, particularly among professional historians and archeologists leading the excavation, who felt it was disrespectful. The volunteers assured them it was affectionate, and the name stuck.
"We compromised a little," Hollister said. "Some of us tried calling him Mort Robert." That's French, loosely, for Dead Bob.
Scientists used lasers and CT scans to paint a computer-generated face on the structure of his skull, revealing a strong-jawed man with bushy eyebrows and dark eyes. Another group tried to link him with ancestors in France by extracting DNA from his remains. All they could find was DNA of the marine creatures who ate away at his body after he died.
The body then became a focal point of a dispute over who owns the remains and the artifacts lifted from the wreck. A treaty enacted last year assured France that it is the proper owner of the artifacts and the remains, but entrusted their care to Texas.
Many who have worked on the project believe that for Dead Bob, it is time for a long and peaceful rest.
"I feel like I know him, in some way," Bruseth said. "I feel like we have had an opportunity to get inside his head and understand his difficulties. I don't think anybody would choose to be in the situation that he found himself in. But this is who he was. He represents a time of exploration, a time of dreams."
