In 1681, French nobleman René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, launched an expedition down the Mississippi River from New France, expecting to find a path to the Pacific Ocean.

[4] On his return to France in 1683, La Salle argued that a small number of Frenchmen could successfully invade New Spain by relying on the help of 15,000 Indians who were angry over Spanish enslavement.

[2] La Salle proposed establishing a colony at the mouth of the Mississippi, providing a base for promoting Christianity among the native peoples as well as a convenient location for attacking Nueva Vizcaya and gaining control of its lucrative silver mines.

[5] After Spain declared war on France in October 1683, Louis agreed to back La Salle,[2] whose official duties now included "confirming the Indians' allegiance to the crown, leading them to the true faith, and maintaining intertribal peace".

[7] Originally, La Belle was built as a kit, with the ship frames assigned to one of four quadrants and numbered sequentially so that the pieces could be assembled later.

[9] In the official order authorizing the building of La Belle, Mallet was listed as the master shipbuilder, and his son-in-law, Pierre Masson, was responsible for the ship design.

[21] Beaujeu, having fulfilled his mission in escorting them, returned to France aboard the Joly in mid-March, leaving La Belle the only ship available to the remaining settlers.

[22] La Salle chose to establish Fort Saint Louis on a bluff overlooking Garcitas Creek, 50 miles (80 km) from their initial campsite.

[25] Several of the men, including the captain of the La Belle, Canil Maraud, died on this expedition from eating prickly pear.

Soon after, the Karankawa killed a small group of the men, including the new captain of La Belle, former pilot Eli Richaud, who had camped on the shore at night.

Within a short amount of time, the La Belle had run aground at the southern end of the bay, approximately a quarter of a mile (400 m) from shore.

Over the next few days they returned to the ship daily to retrieve cargo, managing to salvage some of La Salle's papers and clothes, barrels of flour, casks of wine, glass beads, and other trade items.

Of the 27 people originally assigned to the ship, the only survivors were Tessier, a priest, a military officer, a regular soldier, a servant girl, and a small boy.

[31] The destruction of their last ship left the settlers stranded on the Texas coast, with no hope of any assistance from the French colonies in the Caribbean Sea.

[22] The Spanish authorities learned of La Salle's expedition when a former member of the colony, Denis Thomas, was captured aboard a pirate ship.

In an attempt to save his life, Thomas related that La Salle had planned to establish a colony near the Mississippi River and eventually take over Spanish silver mines.

In the 1970s, Kathleen Gilmore of Southern Methodist University analyzed historical accounts of the La Salle shipwrecks, and gave general guidance as to where they might be found.

Before Minet returned to France aboard the Joly, he had created detailed maps of Matagorda Bay and the pass and had marked the spot where L'Aimable had sunk.

In a magnetometer survey of the area of the bay deemed a high probability to be La Belle's location, the expedition found several more recent shipwrecks.

The most important technological development since the original survey was the advent of the differential GPS positioning system, which made navigation and the relocation of targets considerably easier and more accurate.

This survey lasted the entire month and utilized a Geometrics 866 proton precession magnetometer which identified 39 "magnetic features that required further investigation".

The first team of divers reported feeling musket balls on the seafloor along with loose fragments of wood moving in the current created by the blower.

An illegitimate son of Louis XIV, Vermandois served as Admiral of the French fleet until his death in 1683, meaning the cannon would have been cast no later than 1683, the time when La Salle was preparing for his voyage.

During the 1996 excavations, Texas Historical Commission archaeologists observed direct evidence that one of the four bronze cannons known to have been on La Belle had been removed from the wreckage some time before the 1995 discovery of the wreck, possibly decades earlier.

A much larger team of archaeologists, numbering around 20, had been assembled in the nearby town of Palacios and were charged with the complete excavation of the shipwreck, under the direction of Barto Arnold at first, and then Dr. Jim Bruseth.

Tools and supplies such as a cooper's plane, a shovel, rope, long bars of iron stock, and a barrel of axe heads were also recovered, as were a wide variety of ship's hardware and rigging components.

[39] The hull of the ship and many of the recovered artifacts, including colored glass beads, brass pots, a colander, a ladle, muskets, powder horns, an early explosive device called a fire pot and a bronze cannon with lifting handles shaped like dolphins, are on display at the Bullock Texas State History Museum in the state capital of Austin.

After a several-year negotiation, an agreement was signed on March 31, 2003 which gives official title to the wreck and its artifacts to the Musée national de la Marine in Paris.