The Texas State Historical Commission's site on LaSalle's boat and
its excavation is extensive and user-friendly. Includes numerous photo albums, interactivities,
and articles that relate to LaSalle's life and times as well as a teacher section,
"La Salle in the Classroom."
Detailing the preservation of artifacts from LaSalle's boat,
this site contains a section devoted to the specific challenges of restoring long-submerged historical items.
INA's site contains a virtual museum, an extensive collection
of photographs, and a description of current field projects. Back issues of the INA's
quarterly magazine can be downloaded and read with Adobe Acrobat Reader.
BooksThe La Salle Expedition to Texas:
The Journal of Henri Joutel 1684-1687
Austin, Texas: Texas State Historical Association, 1998.
The journal of Henri Joutel, a member of La Salle's
expedition who served for two years as post commander at Fort Saint Louis,
La Salle's ill-fated colony, and, after La Salle's death, eventually made his way up the
Mississippi River to the Great Lakes and finally back to France in 1688.
La Salle:
Explorer of the North American Frontier
by Anka Muhlstein. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1994.
A translation of a French biography of the explorer,
from his birth in Rouen in 1643 to his tragic death in 1687.
La Salle, the Mississippi, and the Gulf
ed. by Robert S. Weddle
College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 1987
This book includes three primary documents
drawn from the explorations of Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle.
One covers both a journey La Salle took down the Mississippi River in
1682 and his voyage to the Gulf of Mexico. Another is a diary from a member
of the Spanish expedition that circumnavigated the Gulf in 1686-87 in search
of La Salle's colony. And the third details life in that colony, known as
Fort-Saint Louis, and includes the only eyewitness account of the massacre that occurred there.
Encyclopedia of Underwater and Maritime Archeology
ed. by James P. Delgado.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
Concise, authoritative, well-illustrated listings
for all the major shipwrecks of the world, from La Belle to Titanic,
from Khufu's boats to Kublai Khan's fleet.
Lost Ships:
The Discovery and Exploration of the Ocean's Sunken Treasures
by Mensun Bound.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.
A profusely illustrated account of three expeditions that
ended in shipwrecks - the Mahdia ship that was carrying the spoils of Sulla's
sack of Athens in the first century B.C.; the Agamemnon, Horatio Nelson's
victorious ship at the battle of Trafalgar; and the Graf Spee, a German warship
scuttled in the River Plate in Uruguay. Bound, a marine archeologist, found and excavated all three.
Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea
by Gary Kinder.
New York: Vintage Books, 1998.
A chronicle of the wreck of the sidewheel steamer
SS Central America, which sank in a hurricane off North Carolina in 1857
while returning from the California gold fields, and its subsequent discovery and
salvage by maverick engineer Tommy Thompson.
Special Thanks
Delphine Allannic-Costa, Musée de la Marine
Jim Bruseth, Texas Historical Commission
John de Bry, Center for Historical Archeology
Bill Pierson, Texas Historical Commission
Credits
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Maureen Dolan, Intern
Kim Ducharme, Senior Designer
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