Little remained but to add up the losses.

Nearly all the expedition provisions were gone, along with all the medicines. Four cannon and their shot, four hundred grenades, and small arms to protect the settlers. Iron, lead, the forge, and the tools. Baggage and personal items, books and trinkets.

The loss of L’Aimable was the deathblow, but La Salle had yet to realize it.

With what goods could be salvaged, La Salle moved inland and constructed a fort he named for the king of France. Fort Saint Louis gave La Salle a base from which to explore. With the few sailors and settlers still loyal, he began his search for the elusive Father of Waters.

But fate was a cruel mistress.

With La Salle’s permission, Captain Beaujeu took all the settlers wanting to leave aboard Joly. In March of 1685, he returned to France. The next year was one of hardship and disappointment for La Salle. His inland expeditions made him realize he was hundreds of miles from the Mississippi River Delta.

After months of hardships, he returned to Fort Saint Louis to regroup. Upon arriving, La Salle received word that Belle had run aground and sunk.

The loss of Belle added fuel to the disillusionment of the remaining settlers and soldiers. The little ship was the only visible lifeline to France. With Belle destroyed, the settlers were little more than stranded visitors in a savage and cruel new world.

It was the final straw.

“I’ll take a few men and set off for Canada,” La Salle told Tonty. “You remain here so I have someone in control.”

“That’s a thirty-five-hundred-mile trip on foot,” Tonty said. “Are you sure?”

“What other choice do we have?” La Salle said. “If we don’t get some supplies soon, we all die. I’ve made it down the Mississippi before.”

Tonty nodded. That had been years before, when La Salle was younger and healthier.

“How many men will you need?” Tonty asked.

“Less than a dozen,” La Salle said, “so we can move quickly.”

“I shall arrange it immediately,” the always-loyal Tonty said.

In March of 1687, La Salle set out, but an old wound would bring death.

Duhout was the pilot of L’Aimable when she ran aground. Those who stayed behind blamed him for the expedition’s failure. Because of that fact it was strange that La Salle allowed him to go along on the trip to Canada. The truth was that the settlers who would remain at Fort Saint Louis didn’t want him around — Duhout had been acting increasingly strange as time passed.

La Salle figured that if he led Duhout to Canada he could wash his hands of him.

But Duhout’s mind was fast fading into madness. He was beset by paranoia and voices in his head — evil thoughts that floated on the wind. At first, Duhout believed La Salle was talking about him behind his back. Within a few days, he thought La Salle was plotting to trade him to the Indians as a slave. By the time they reached the Trinity River, Duhout was sure La Salle was planning to kill him, so he moved first. He killed La Salle and left his body by the river.

The man who had set out to claim a continent died alone and disillusioned. His grave has yet to be found.

Within months of La Salle’s death, Indians attacked Fort Saint Louis. Weakened by disease, the settlers could barely put up a fight, and they were slaughtered. The French plans for a settlement in the New World had been savagely crushed by weather, distance, and discord. When it was all said and done, only a dozen people had survived.

La Salle was a visionary, but, like so many other explorers, his vanity got the best of him. And yet his place in American history is secure. Only Lewis and Clark covered more territory than the aristocrat from France.

How I was beguiled into looking for L’Aimable (pronounced “la amaablea”) is still a mystery to me. In my mind it was not a ship that held great interest. It had great historical significance, to be sure, but there was little romance or tragedy tied to it. Besides, NUMA had never searched for a ship that had been lost for three hundred years. However, like a trout that hasn’t eaten all winter, I took the bait, rounded up a team, and began studying the historical records on La Salle’s fatal expedition.

It all began when Wayne Gronquist, then-president of NUMA, met with Barto Arnold, who was then-director of the Underwater Archeological Research Section of the Texas Antiquities Commission. Arnold had achieved a remarkable accomplishment in recovering La Salle’s smallest ship, Joly, which had grounded inside Matagorda Bay and had been abandoned. Building a cofferdam around the wreck, Arnold and his team recovered hundreds of artifacts from La Salle’s doomed 1685 expedition.

Arnold had conducted a magnetic survey of the area in 1978 and had hoped to initiate a major investigation of the myriad targets he had found. Texas Antiquities did have the funds and came to NUMA. Barnum was right: There’s a sucker born every minute. Caught in an unguarded moment, I succumbed and offered to fund the survey and expedition, never dreaming it would take months and a boatload of currency.

The services of World Geoscience Inc., of Houston, were enlisted for an in-depth aerial magnetic survey using technology that was unavailable to Arnold twenty years earlier. The plan was to conduct a follow-up project to excavate and identify the magnetic anomalies located from the air.

Good old steadfast Ralph Wilbanks, a respected marine surveyor and valued trustee of NUMA, along with marine archaeologist Wes Hall, were called in to execute the survey. Ralph and Wes are the two men who discovered the Confederate submarine Hunley in 1995.

The historical data was accumulated and analyzed by respected historian Gary McKee. Douglas Wheeler, a NUMA trustee and a dedicated shipwreck hunter, generously provided funding for the first survey. Doug’s only return on his investment was a remarkable painting of L’Aimable, by marine artist Richard DeRosset, that hangs in his office.

Contemporary reports on La Salle’s ill-fated expedition were studied. The journals of Henri Joutel described a detailed account of the loss of L‘Aimable. Minet, La Salle’s chief navigator, drew contemporary charts that accurately illustrated Cavallo Pass as it appeared in 1685 and indicated the position of the wreck. Minet’s charts show the wreck of L’Aimable lying on the eastern side of the old channel. The only predicament was that Minet seemed to have trouble measuring distances over water. He had a tendency to overestimate, a common error made by people judging distance over water by eye. Still, it isn’t often that you can be lucky enough to find an eyewitness account that puts you in the ballpark.

The area to be investigated was determined at 4.81 nautical miles north to south and 2.12 nautical miles east to west, more than covering the documented wreck site. By making transparencies of Minet’s charts to scale and then overlaying them with modem charts and aerial photographs, we could see that the shorelines had changed considerably over three hundred years. The southern tip of Matagorda Island has eroded significantly, up to a thousand feet, whereas the Matagorda Peninsula’s erosion has not been as extreme. Though Minet’s channel width seems too wide, it would be logical to assume that he simply misgauged the distance, since most charts from between 1750 and 1965 do not vary by more than a hundred yards.

The major frustrations we faced were the changes in the channel that had occurred over the last thirty-five years. In 1965, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers opened a new shipping channel through the Matagorda Peninsula to the Intracoastal Waterway a few miles northeast of Cavallo Pass. The new channel changed the dynamics of the water flow out of the bay and altered the pass dramatically. These changes made it difficult to make exact comparisons between the modem charts and the older ones.