Restoration of the La Belle, which left France on the orders of King Louis XIV in 1684 to establish a new colony, took 17 years after worms damaged the ship

Archaeologists have restored the remains of a 330-year-old frigate that carried hundreds of French settlers on a doomed journey to the coast of Texas, where they set up an ill-fated colony that led to a grim end for a famous explorer.

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La Belle departed France on the orders of King Louis XIV in 1684, to establish a new colony on the western range of his kingdom’s new territory. The explorer Robert de la Salle had already made a name for himself by canoeing down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, where he declared the vast land he had just crossed La Louisianne (Louisiana), a territory of New France.

But his final expedition with La Belle did not go so well, or, as Texas A&M archaeologist Peter Fix put it: “It went kaboom.” A series of calamities began before the 300 colonists even arrived, when Spanish privateers took one of their four ships off the coast of Hispaniola.

In December, the three remaining ships reached the Gulf of Mexico, which their captains had no experience navigating, not helped by the inaccurate maps they had to guide them. They could not find the mouth of the Mississippi, and the largest of the ships ran aground, forcing La Salle to transfer supplies onto the 54ft-long La Belle.

The exhausted colonists landed 400 miles west of the Mississippi, entirely out of their depth in eastern Texas. The third ship in the small fleet left for France, taking many would-be colonists with it, but a small number stayed and tried to found a settlement, Fort St Louis. La Salle set off to look for the Mississippi by land.

Meanwhile La Belle, still full of cargo, was struck by a storm and sank into the muddy waters of the Gulf, where it remained until archaeologists discovered it in Matagorda Bay, about 100 miles south-west of Houston.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The French expedition inspired the Spanish to build missions, including the Alamo, all over Texas. Photograph: Alamy

They excavated “a treasure trove” of artifacts on board, Fix said, “a cross-section of everything that was requisite to start a trading colony in North America”: cannons, three dozen long guns, swords, Jesuit rings, combs and clothing, glass bottles and beads, brass tins, casks and pewter plates. “The La Belle herself is just the largest artifact that came out of the excavation.”

The ship and colony’s survivors were in dire need of all of it. They ran low on drinking water, did not know what to forage, suffered from dysentery, and made quick enemies of the Karankawa people, who raided their camps and fought with settlers. They were mystified and alarmed by rattlesnakes and prickly pears. The settlers dwindled, and without their last ship La Salle grew desperate. He decided the French colonists needed to reach their comrades in Canada, and set off to the north.

“His crew mutinied, killed and stripped him and left him under a bush,” Fix said. “And those members of the party that weren’t mutinous attacked the mutineers the next day. All in all, six people finally walked back to Canada and escaped, and the rest of the colony fell apart.”

The disastrous, largely forgotten expedition changed the history of Texas: it spooked the Spaniards into a major expansion for fear of French encroachment, and inspired them to build a trail of missions – including the Alamo – through central Texas. “We’d be speaking Cajun here right now had La Salle been able to stand and resupply the colony,” Fix said.

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The restoration of the La Belle took 17 years in all. “Voracious” undersea worms did most of the damage to the ship, Fix said, by burrowing through the ship’s timbers. Archaeologists had to heave fragile, waterlogged wood out of the Gulf, transport it in tanks to labs, and then carefully preserve it.

Mistakes could shrivel and distort the shipwreck, reducing it to as much as 30% of its size. Conservators had to clear out water after hundreds of years sitting soggy under several feet of mud. To do so they used a gigantic freeze drying machine, taking timbers down to -40C (-40F) and then vacuuming out the sublimated water.

“Just like freezer-burning meat in your refrigerator,” Fix said. Then they had to scrub about 8,000ft of timber with hand brushes and chisels, to clear it of coraline growths.

Finally the scientists carefully reconstructed the wreck, which is now on display at Texas State History Museum in Austin.

