Abstract
The discovery of Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle’s last ship, La Belle (sunk 1686) and its excavation in a cofferdam and recovery was one of the most significant maritime archaeological projects of the 1990s. The little ship is a rare example of a colonial ship found stuffed with the trade goods and supplies needed for establishing a settlement, plus the accumulated goods and leavings of a venture fallen on increasingly hard times. It is both a great story and a unique opportunity to investigate the broader subject of European colonization.
The subsequent conservation of over 1.8 million artefacts (a bit of padding there, as over 1.75 million of these are either glass beads or lead shot), and the successful reassembly of the hull as a museum exhibit in Austin, Texas represent a pioneering effort in American archaeology. While all of that work was going on, scholars and students were steadily working their way through the analysis of the material, and now the work has been collected into a substantial publication.
This work is meant to be a comprehensive presentation and interpretation of the find as a whole at an academic level. It makes for a physically unwieldy volume, and the compression of so much information into a single binding means that the text is uncomfortably dense and many of the illustrations would be more intelligible if they were larger, but it is convenient and useful to have everything in one place at one time, so that one can cross-check material between chapters. It is an ambitious work, and in general succeeds in its goal of making the information accessible and providing an analysis that will stimulate a wide range of discussions.
The main body is divided into 40 chapters grouped in seven sections: introduction (including historical context, excavation methodology and conservation), the ship (including rigging, the galley, stowage and navigation), armament, trade goods, domestic items, organic remains and specialized analyses (human, faunal, botanical, textiles, pigments and contents of containers) and conclusions. There are two appendices, on ballast stones and an anchor stock fragment, which really should have been integrated into the main text. This organizational scheme, for the most part, follows current conventions of grouping materials by function, which makes it easier for the reader to see connections between objects and contexts, but there is some departure in the sections on domestic objects and specialized analyses. The grouping here is often on the basis of material, with chapters on glass, ceramics, and textiles, as well a large chapter on a wide range of miscellaneous domestic objects, from lighting to kitchen utensils. Shoes are considered separately from clothing remains, which are separate from buttons and clothing fasteners. It would have made the collection easier to understand if some of this material could have been combined in functional groups.
The introduction addresses the historical context, providing a good coverage of the documentary sources on LaSalle’s last voyage and what they might tell us. The account of Henri Joutel, thanks to its wealth of detail, often provides good counterpoint to the find material, and many of the individual chapters refer to it. The historical context tends to focus very much on the voyage and LaSalle’s attempt to establish a colony. While there are frequent references to his secondary or secret goal, to threaten the Spanish silver mines of Mexico, the historical study does not really explore the larger context of the long-term struggle between France and Spain which lay behind the granting or withdrawing of royal support for the colonial venture. The use of French sources poses some problems for the editors, and there is no consistent translation of key French terms and measures. For example, not all authors appear to be clear on the difference between ‘livre’ as a unit of currency and as a unit of weight and how these are normally treated by English-language histories of France. The conservation chapter provides a good explanation of the challenges facing the laboratory which did most of the work, and extols the virtue of silicone oil as a treatment for fragile organic material, but does not address the ethical and practical issues that this controversial treatment has raised in the conservation world generally.
The remaining sections consider the find material, and it would take a review nearly as long as the book to do justice to the amount of work that so many authors have put into such a large achievement. There is a genuine attempt in each chapter to present the physical site context and the historical context for each find group, to describe it, and to relate it to the voyage, and many of the chapters (often derived from graduate theses) follow a broadly similar format, which is a help to the reader and makes the material more accessible.
Several chapters stand out for various reasons. Glenn Grieco’s presentation of the reconstruction process required to build a model of the ship is one of the most clearly written in the entire book, and highlights the creative and sound use of a wide range of physical evidence to understand missing areas of the ship – Richard Steffy would be proud. Eric Ray’s work on the galley and cooking is a classic study of minimal remains to maximum effect, and would have benefited from including the cooking pots and utensils in an integrated analysis. Brad Loewen’s study of the casks complements his publication of the Red Bay cooperage, and demonstrates the amount of information which can be extracted from a large and apparently homogeneous collection, while connecting the ship to the much larger hinterland of French naval procurement and provisioning.
Steve Hoyt provides a detailed study of the one gun carriage recovered, and can serve as a model for how such objects can be recorded and analysed. Eric Ray and Julie Stryker’s analysis of the unique firepots includes an excellent experimental study, which is a good model for how the practical aspects of munitions can be studied. Amy Borgens and Jay Blaine succeed in extracting an enormous amount of information from the fragmentary remains of the shoulder arms, and relating these in a clear way to the process of outfitting expeditions, as well as the problems of trying to achieve standardization in a pre-industrial economy. Durst’s analysis of the gunflints, while it may seem to be of interest only to a small, niche audience, is actually a ground-breaking study, employing new methodologies to overturn long-held beliefs based on connoisseurship rather than science. Donald Keith’s chapter on the polearms is outstanding, combining ideological history, detailed archaeological analysis and even some art history in an engaging way.
All of the chapters on trade goods maintain a high standard, although the volume lacks any real discussion of how one can distinguish trade goods intended for Native Americans, who preferred common domestic items to gold and silver, from those domestic items needed on board a ship or in a new colony. This is, I think, a central question for a site such as La Belle, and so it is disappointing to see the objects divided up between these categories with no systematic discussion of the criteria used in making the division. Some objects might be obvious, such as the glass beads, but others are not.
West’s chapter on a closed find of a chest with a wide range of goods is an interesting study of a single context. It raises a number of questions about shipboard equipment versus private property, the disposition of the possessions of people who died in the course of the voyage, and the presence of specific craft skills among the participants in the venture. West sees the tools which make up the bulk of the objects in the chest as evidence of a cooper, but this is problematical. All of the tools found have general woodworking applications, even if some of them, such as the hand adze, are often associated with coopering, and none of the tools which are unique to coopering, such as the croze, are present. This chapter mentions a large cooper’s bench plane found near the chest, but this object is not illustrated or described anywhere in the volume. One wonders how many other objects are not included.
Steele and Raisor’s study of the human remains is classic osteology, and illustrated with the beautiful black and white images for which Gentry Steele was famous. Regardless of the text, these are the aesthetic high point of the entire volume.
The conclusion, by the editors, is an outstanding model of how such a work should be finished. It does not just summarize the results of the individual studies, but combines them in a more comprehensive analysis of the find as a whole. The editors take the trouble to address some of the problems in the main text, even largely contradicting the conclusions of Chapter 5 (see below), and set the finds in a clear historical, environmental, and social context.
There are a few weaknesses. In a general sense, the comparative material and context chosen by most authors is largely limited to a French colonial/naval perspective, and there is little use of non-French material, so it is sometimes difficult to locate this wreck in the broader context of seventeenth-century colonial expansion and naval activity. In particular, the lack of reference to Baltic material robs several authors of data that could have helped illuminate some of the finds. For example, the sections on pharmacopia would have benefitted from comparison to the nearly-contemporary apothecary’s chest from Kronan (1676), and the textile analysis of possible sailcloth fragments would be much clearer if it related these fragments to the sails from Vasa (1628), which should be French cloth. In particular, the use of a balanced weave in the La Belle fragments argues against them being sailcloth.
The greatest disappointment in the volume is the study of the largest artefact, the ship itself. Although Catherine Corder does an excellent job of presenting the rigging evidence, there is no actual presentation of the hull remains, no proper hull report which describes and illustrates the surviving parts of the hull in detail. There are three chapters which address the construction of the ship (Chapters 5, 6, and 9, by Carrell, Pevny, and Grieco, respectively), but none of the authors offers a detailed description of the hull remains as a base for the analysis. Grieco comes closest, and offers the most systematic account of some of the hull data, but his task is to describe the reconstruction of the hull for a model. Carrell and Pevny provide two widely differing discussions of the design methodology, offering two fundamentally incompatible conclusions, but neither presents the basic hull data. There is no final lines drawing (other than Grieco’s simplified version for the model), no comprehensive longitudinal section, cross sections, or plan of the remains, in short no proper set of drawings that will allow the reader to see the construction of the hull and no comprehensive set of scantlings. For the reconstructed hull, there is no calculation of displacement, internal capacity, or the form coefficients that would allow us to compare La Belle to other hulls. Such things are, by now, more or less standard components of archaeological hull reconstructions. Why are they missing?
The conventional reading of the written records identifies La Belle as a barque longue originally ordered as a kit of parts (barque en fagot) to be carried in knocked-down form in the hold of a larger ship, to be constructed once the expedition had reached its destination. In the course of preparing the expedition, it was found that there was insufficient room to carry the vessel, and so it was decided to build and complete the ship in France so that it could accompany the expedition on its own keel. The conventional reading of the archaeological remains is that this explains the extensive use of markings on the timbers, which identify the function and location of each timber.
Carrell’s contention is that the ship was not originally a barque en fagot, but was an older vessel rebuilt for the expedition with parts, including whole frame sets, from even older ships. This conclusion requires her to reinterpret the written record dramatically, to create the existence of another barque longue which is otherwise unattested. She also largely dismisses the significance of the markings on the timber, as well as the lack of the normal evidence for the reuse of ship timbers (extra fastenings, damage to joining faces, differential wear between newer and older timbers, etc.). She even goes so far as to claim that the extra fastenings are absent from the frames because the shipwrights managed to reuse the original fastening holes, an extraordinary practice not attested in any other known find and one which would be, in practice, impossible. The primary evidence on which her case rests is the wide range in dating of the timbers in the ship, based on dendrochronology, which leads her to believe that many of the timbers had been cut decades before La Belle sailed for America; she cites felling dates from the late sixteenth century through to the 1660s.
Carrell is misled by a fundamental, but not uncommon, mistake in interpreting the dendrochronological results. In the conclusion, the editors admit that there are problems with the dendro, since the lab in France which processed the samples only compared them to the local curves, so could not date all of the samples. Many of the samples are also short sequences (<100 rings, often <80), which do not always give reliable results. This is discussed in both Carrell’s chapter and the conclusions, but Carrell has committed the fatal error of taking an estimated minimum felling date as the actual or maximum date. The dendrochronologists have provided an estimate of a minimum number of heartwood rings removed plus an average number of sapwood rings, but the result is only an estimate of the earliest possible date of felling (effectively the terminus post quem). In nearly every case she cites of a timber felled well before 1683, the sample in question has no surviving sapwood. In such a case, there is no way to know how many rings have been removed in shaping the timber, and thus no way to know in which year the timber was felled. In fact, the actual date could be a century or more later, so all of the timbers cited as key evidence of the reuse of timber could actually have been cut in 1683, and the major support for Carrell’s argument disappears.
Although Pevny also accepts these dates, they are not central to his argument. He argues from the archaeological evidence, and presents a clear and sound case for his interpretation, which does not require any tortured gymnastics in interpreting the historical evidence or ignoring the significance of the markings on the frames. In fact, his interpretation rationally explains the meaning of all of the archaeological evidence in a coherent construction context. To him, La Belle is an early example of a new method of scientific design known to have been in use in the yard where the ship was built in the 1680s; it is by far the more convincing argument.
Despite these weaknesses, this work is a monumental achievement, and the editors are to be especially congratulated for assembling and consolidating the many disparate chapters, composed over many years, into a coherent whole that is surprisingly consistent in presentation and standard. I am confident that it will prove to be one of the standard reference works in the field, alongside such series as the Red Bay publications from Parks Canada.