As of late, naughty Francophones and Francophiles typing the keywords "webcam" and "la belle" into their search engine may be disappointed to come across a jolie demoiselle of a rather unexpected sort. The good folks over at the Bullock Museum, in Austin, have set up a livestream showing the reconstruction of Cavelier de La Salle's ship, La Belle.
The live build of La Belle is broadcast every Wednesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Outside of these hours, they stream very interesting documentary teasers. Check it out here. And don't worry, it is entirely office-appropriate.
La Belle de Cavelier de Lasalle est de retour dans les nouvelles: ici, ici et ici. Le Bullock Museum, à Austin au Texas, vient d'inaugurer son exposition "La Belle: The Ship That Changed History".
Design for "La Macrée". Photo: L'Avantage and Alain Ross.
Shipwrecks, shipwrecks, shipwrecks. Lately, it's been the lost ships of the Franklin expedition of 1848, especially the lost-no-more HMS Erebus. Earlier this year, it was the Empress of Ireland, which sank in the lower St. Lawrence in 1914. And you might recall the ongoing searches for Cavelier de La Salle's Griffon and d'Iberville's Pélican. In case you haven't had enough yet, let me turn you on to the story of L'Aigle. Bet you haven't heard about that one yet.
It was in the news this week because a fouresome of artists are currently working on a monument, entitled "La Macrée", to be built in Rimouski. The local paper, L'Avantage, has the story here. I quite like the preliminary design, show above. The challenge will be to raise the $50,000 necessary for its construction. Money, money, money.
In 1758, following the fall of Louisbourg, France sent a fleet of twelve ships to contribute to Canada's defense against the impending British invasion. The admiral ship, L'Aigle, with three hundred troops on board, was wrecked at a place called Gros Mécatina along the Basse Côte-Nord, aka. the lower north shore of the St. Lawrence. The two ships which Intendant Bigot sent to undertake salvage operations met the same fate. They crashed into each other, actually. Another ship, which may or may not have been called La Macrée, was more sucessful and managed to ferry the survivors to the small settlement of Rimouski where they spent a difficult winter.
This story is particularly interesting, because -- if I may dig a little deeper than L'Avantage's reporter -- it turns out that it is partly grounded in and clouded by oral tradition. Well before traces of this event were found buried in the colonial archives, journalist and politician Jean-Charles Taché collected its echo from old timers in his native Rimouski and published it in the magazine Soirées canadiennes in 1865. Charles Guay's Chronique de Rimouski (1875) republished Taché's text, adding a few other details apparently also drawn from local lore. These accounts quickly get confusing, but Béatrice Chassée does the best job of untangling the facts and reconciling the archival and oral records in her Rimouski et son île (2003, pp. 32-35, available online here). Worth a peek, if you like this sort of stuff.
Incidentally, Joseph-Charles Taché was the nephew of Étienne-Paschal Taché, who presided over the momentous Quebec Conference precisely 150 years ago this week.
Move over, wishful Le Griffon: a bona fide Cavelier de la Salle shipwreck is in the news!
La Belle was part of the explorer's fleet as he sailed to the Gulf of Mexico on an ill-fated search for the mouth of the Mississippi in 1685. The shipsank in Matagorda Bay the following year, and was famously rediscovered and diligently investigated by the Texas Historical Commission between 1995 and 1997. An astounding 700,000 artefacts were recovered. The bottom third of the wooden hull, having been well preserved by the mud on the sea floor, was painstakingly raised and over the last several years has been stabilized in a giant freeze drier on the Riverside Campus of Texas A&M University.
A scale model reconstruction of La Belle
(cover of Jean Boudriot's excellent
monograph on the subject).
Reassemby of the ship was scheduled to begin in October of last year at the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, but the stabilization process took somewhat longer than expected. La Belle was in the news last week because some of its largest portions were finally loaded onto an eighteen-wheeler and transported from the Riverside Campus to the Bullock Museum. Reassembly is set to begin this fall and should be completed around May of next year. This October 25th, the museum will in fact launch a new exhibition, La Belle: The Ship That Changed History, which will feature the public reconstruction of the hull besides the usual artifacts, maps and pictures of the excavation and conservation. A dramatic trailer? Check:
Désolé, chers lecteurs, de ne pas avoir blogué avec plus de régularité ces dernières semaines : l'été, on le sait bien, c'est fait pour jouer! La Nouvelle-France n'a pas pour autant cessé de faire la manchette. Prenons par exemple le cas du Griffon, navire du Cavelier de La Salle qui sombra au fond du lac Michigan pendant son voyage inaugural en 1679.
L'an passé, comme Charlevoix le rapportait ici et ici, Steve Libert et son Great Lakes Exploration Group avaient fait les manchettes en annonçant la découverte d'un site sous-marin d'intérêt. Ayant obtenu la permission d'y entreprendre des fouilles préliminaires, ils avaient prélevé une poutre pour fins d'analyse.
Steve Libert et sa poutre, subissant un scan CT l'an passé.
Photo: John Flesher/AP.
Les plus récents articles du New York Daily News et de Fox News nous apprennent qu'un différend existe entre les "scientifiques" et les autres -- appelons les, avec un peu de cynisme, les "chasseurs de trésors". Libert, le chasseur-de-trésor-en-chef, demeure convaincu. "It's the Griffin." affirme-t-il au reporter, "I'm 99.9% sure it is." Les trois archéologues français qui ont pris part aux fouilles de l'an passé n'en sont cependant pas si sûrs, mais affichent tout de même un certain optimisme. Michel L'Hour, leur chef, se dit "encouragé". Or, l'archéologue en chef de l'état du Michigan, Dean Anderson, affirme pour sa part que "In my opinion, I haven't seen any evidence that suggests that anyone has found wreckage of The Griffon there," Selon lui, il s'agirait plutôt d'un pieux d'amarre de filet de pêche -- rien à voir avec l'exploration française au XVIIe siècle.
Libert espère obtenir l'autorisation de reprendre les fouilles au mois de septembre. C'est à suivre.
On se souviendra des fouilles sous-marines entreprises plus tôt cette année au fond du Lac Michigan à la recherche du Griffon de Cavelier de La Salle. Eh bien, une deuxième bande d'aventuriers est partie cet été en quête d'un autre célèbre navire, le Pélican de Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville.
Le Pélican coule après la bataille du 5 septembre 1697. Gravure publiée dans
l'Histoire de l'Amérique septentrionale de Bacqueville de La Potherie (1722).
Le Pélican, navire de guerre de 44 canon, et son equipage se sont assurés une place dans l'histoire en triomphant seuls contre trois navires anglais à la Baie d'Hudson, près de l'embouchure de la Rivière Hayes, le 5 septembre 1697. L'idée d'en retrouver les traces est louable. Je vous avouerai cependant, en toute franchise, que les recherches entreprises cet été par la Fara Heim Foundation me semblent manquer de sérieux. D'abord, ce projet paraît être un projet secondaire pour cette fondation dont la vocation première est plutôt d'identifier des sites archéologiques témoignant de la présence... des Vikings à la Baie d'Hudson. Vocation qui soit dit en passant n'inspire pas beaucoup confiance, dans la mesure où elle s'oppose à l'orthodoxie des études norroises, selon laquelle ces explorateurs n'auraient pas dépassés le Labrador et la terre de Baffin. La levée de fonds de Fara Heim, entreprise à la dernière minute via le site web Kickstarter, s'est avérée un triste échec, mais les aventuriers ont tout de même décidé de tenter leur chance cette année. J'admire cet esprit d'aventure, mais il m'inquiète un peu : l'équipage de Fara Heim, formé de marins chevronnés et de rêveurs inspirés, ne semble compter aucun archéologue professionel!
Les medias francophones n'ont à ma connaissance pas rapportés la nouvelle et, du côté des anglos, seuls CBC et la Winnipeg Free Press l'ont fait. Les intéressés pourront toutefois suivre les progrès de l'expédition sur son site Facebook.
Photo: David J. Ruck/Great Lakes Exploration Group, via Associated Press.
It's not often that the New York Times publishes a story related to the history of New France. I'm happy to report that the search for La Salle's Griffon has made it into the realm of "all the news that's fit to print". I'm slightly annoyed by the fact that they anglicised the ship's name, but nevermind -- I annoy easily. The article is an excellent summary of the project and its context. A few passages to whet your appetite:
"On Friday [of last week], commercial divers hired by Mr. Libert and his organization, the Great Lakes Exploration Group, began dredging the lake bed adjacent to the beam for the first time. That work continued through Tuesday and has revealed that the beam gets thicker as it goes down, that it was hewed from a tree trunk, that it is at least 20 feet long and that it may well be the bowsprit of a ship — and a very old one at that, based on the 20 feet of compacted sediment it is sitting in."
"Probes used on Monday confirmed that there is a larger object below the beam, which the team of experts hopes and maintains might be a shipwreck — though whether it is the Griffin is not yet known."
Nevermind the controversies currently shaking the Canadian Senate and Prime Minister's Office, nor those swirling like smoke around a certain mayor. This past week the papers have carried two news items about New France's musty tomes and sunken ships! Both are courtesy of Randy Boswell, who teaches journalism at Carleton University but remains on the heritage beat for Postmedia News.
First, it has been announced that the register containing the probable record Samuel de Champlain's baptism will go on display in a few days and until the fall at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. I'm italicising probable here because it seems to me that Boswell's article doesn't reflect accurately enough the uncertainty that persists around this document and Champlain's origins. In the absence of long-vanished records for Brouage, is it safe to confidently conclude that this Chapeleau baptised in La Rochelle is our man? One historian, Éric Thierry, has been quite categorical in his opposition to the interpretation that this is the birth record of the famed explorer. The register, by the way, is not musty at all.
In another piece, Boswell has publicised the launch of an effort by the Great Lakes Exploration Group, a team of American wreck hunters who has received the approval of the governments of Michigan and France, which expects to dive next month to the bottom of Lake Michigan. There they hope to identify the long-sought remains of the Griffon, René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle ship, which sunk during its maiden voyage in 1679. Should we be worried that the effort is being led by a private, for-profit group? I hope not. Time will tell.
