In a winter storm in 1686 a 54-foot French frigate carrying a skeleton crew on an exploratory mission off the Texas coast sank in Matagorda Bay, halfway between Galveston and Corpus Christi. For more than 300 years it sat and decomposed, but portions of its keel and hull were mummified in 6 feet of mud. When those diminished but very important remains were raised in 1996, preservationists had an astonishing piece of good luck almost unheard of in the world of shipwreck rescue: Every important plank of wood had been marked with a Roman numeral, like a model in a box. Jim Bruseth, one of the research archaeologists leading the $17 million effort to recover and rebuild the frigate's remains—which are currently in some 600 pieces—calls it a ship kit.
Starting this month Bruseth, along with Peter Fix, assistant director at the Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation at Texas A&M University, will reassemble what's left of the La Belle at the Bullock Texas State History Museum, in Austin. They'll fit the ship's remaining timbers around a carbon-fiber endoskeleton, using dowels in places to shore up the original joints. They'll work outward from the keel the same way the French shipbuilders would have, determining what goes where using historical drawings as well as sketches and photographs of the original find. They'll also use those Roman numerals, instructions from the French designers who planned to have the ship carried to the New World in a storage bay.
Even with that guidance this is no flea-market coffee-table restoration, but at least it will be less risky than what they had to do first. To dry out the sodden pieces, the team soaked them in polyethylene glycol, a waxy derivative of petroleum that slowly displaces water. When gas prices shot up in 2008, driving up the cost of the chemical, they bought an 8 x 40–foot vacuum–freeze dryer—the same kind used in making Lucky Charms—to remove the rest. Throughout the process, the timbers could have warped or shrunk, making reassembly impossible.
It took a long time. The final reconstruction will be completed in November 2015, nearly 20 years after the La Belle was found. "Fortunately, you're not dealing with something like the Mona Lisa," Fix says. "You're dealing with something that's a little bit hardier, and you set about to aesthetically repair it as best as possible." In this case that means using state-of-the-art tools, the most important of which has been in use since the first time the La Belle was built: a hammer.
1684: The La Belle departs from France for the New World.
1686: The La Belle wrecks in Matagorda Bay. 1995 The Texas Historical Commission confirms the find.
1997: Portions of the hull and more than 1 million artifacts are sent to the Conservation Research Laboratory at Texas A&M University.
2001: The La Belle is reassembled for the first time, in water.
2002: The ship is disassembled and placed in polyethylene glycol.
2011: Freeze-drying begins.
2014: The La Belle, now dry, is reassembled for the last time at the museum.