Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, January 26, 1999

Simars de Belle-Isle told grisly tale about Attakapas

by Jim Bradshaw

Belle-Isle sailed for Louisiana from La Rochelle, France, on Aug. 14, 1719, aboard the Maréchal d'Estrées. He didn't know it then, but he'd made a poor choice of ships. Its captain and crew were lost for the entire trip. When they met another ship somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, they asked their way to Saint-Domingue, which was to have been their first stop in the New World. They were told they'd passed the island days before.

A pilot named Clavie came aboard the Maréchal then, to help them find their way. He didn't help very much. The Maréchal looked for Louisiana for another 20 days, sailing past the mouth of the Mississippi River without knowing it. The ship sailed nearly to Mexico before the pilots decided to turn around and head back to a bay where they had picked up fresh water some days before.

The ship ran aground in that bay and the captain, in a panic, locked himself in his cabin and refused to come out. Fortunately, the pilot took over the ship and had the crew rock it free by running from one side to the other. Then the captain calmed down and took charge again.

When yellow fever erupted aboard the ship, Belle-Isle and four others went ashore with plans for a week of hunting. They preferred to risk whatever was inland than the contagion aboard the ship. The ship promptly sailed away and left them.

Belle-Isle and his companions--men named Duclos, Legendre, Courbet, and Abain--did not panic. They had swords, guns, ammunition, and a week's worth of sea biscuits. They thought they were within a week's walk of La Balise and that they would be able to kill what they needed for food along the way.

They spent the first night on the shore of the bay and started toward the east in the morning, following the coast. They had easy going for four days, but on the fifth day, they found themselves up to their necks in a swamp. When they tried going inland, they found nothing but more swamp. So they trudged back to the bay they'd started from.

The men found a small boat as they once again neared this bay and guessed it had drifted down the Mississippi River to the Gulf and had been washed ashore. That encouraged them because it meant that the Mississippi River and civilization were not too far away. The five of them spent a day dragging the boat to the mouth of a small river that flowed into the bay, chopping a path with axes as they went. Their sea biscuits ran out but they killed a deer and ate "so much that we nearly died of stomach ache because we had eaten without bread."

The next day, they began rowing upstream. But after eight or nine days of rowing, they found themselves in a small pond. They circled it, looking for another outlet, but had no luck. They drifted back downstream to the bay--living off a few birds they were able to kill and a dead deer they ate "though it was beginning to smell very bad." They finally reached the bay where, several days later, Courbet died of exhaustion and malnutrition.

The four survivors decided to search the open Gulf in their little boat, but Legendre died during the first day. The three who were left finally returned to exactly the spot where they landed originally. Since they knew that there was nothing but swamp to the east, they decided to cross the mouth of the bay and examine its western side. Once across, Belle-Isle and Abain set off along the coast. Duclos was too weak to follow. Abain lasted only a few hours before he gave up and returned to Duclos.

"With extraordinary courage," Belle-Isle boasted years later in his memoirs, " I walked for four days." On the fifth day, his path was blocked by a river too wide cross. He returned with bad news for his friends. He found both of them dead.

"I ate a great deal of (the grass), but the first time I thought I would die," he says. He also found some dry, nearly rotten tree trunks filled with worms. He says he ate the worms.

Two weeks after his companions died, Belle-Isle saw three Indians on an island in the middle of the bay and jumped into his little boat to row over to them. According to Belle-Isle's account, the first Indian to spot him was afraid because he had never seen a white man before. The other two were braver, or maybe greedier. They made him take them to his boat, where they took "our guns, our swords, our silver flatware, my coat, and a few other things." Then they stripped him of his clothes, laughing when he begged them to give back his shirt. Mosquitos forced him to spend the night neck-deep in water.

The next day, the Indians took him to their village, where he was greeted with "terrible screams," making him think he would be killed. Instead, after letting him go hungry for a few days, the Indians gave him boiled roots to eat. Two days later, several pirogues of Indians arrived at the village and were greeted with the same screaming. "I did not know what it meant, yet I understood that it was their way, since they scream from pleasure as well as pain," he wrote.

He spent the summer with these Indians, wandering with them, scrounging for food. The men killed bison and deer when the weather was good; the women dug for roots. In rainy weather, they went hungry "drinking only water and throwing up without effort." They advised Belle Isle to do the same, saying it would be good for him.

The Indians moved to the back part of the bay when winter came. They also began mistreating their captive. His only complaint until then had been his nudity. Now they put him to work, forcing him to carry wood or water. They began slapping him and hitting him with sticks. He began to think about escape.

Using a chicken foot for a pen and ink made from soot, he tried writing letters for help. He thought he had convinced the Indians to take a letter to the nearest white man. When 20 days passed without the messengers returning, he asked about them. His captors laughed. They had sent the letters ahead, but not to white men. They had sent them to the other tribes of the area, as they usually did when they had something interesting to show off.

The Indians took Belle-Isle with him when they went hunting. During one trip they noticed some smoke and followed it to a group of "Toyals," an enemy tribe. They killed one of them and brought his body back to their camp. Belle-Isle says "One man cut off his neck, another his arm, while others skinned him. A few of them savored the raw yellow fat that was there, then they ate all of him."

During this time, by sheer chance, one of Belle-Isles letters was delivered to the French commander Jucherau de Saint- Dénis, who had established a post at Natchitoches. He ordered the Indians to bring Belle-Isle to him and threatened them if they did not.

Belle-Isle reached Natchitoches on Feb. 10, 1721. He was eventually sent to see Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, then governor of the Louisiana colony. Bienville sent Belle-Isle and a group of soldiers under the command of Bernard de la Harpe to find the bay where Belle-Isle had landed and to build a fort there.

The expedition eventually found the bay, which De la Harpe called Baie Saint-Bemard. Some historians think this could have been Vermilion Bay. Most of them think it was Galveston Bay.

Wherever it was, the arrival of the Frenchmen made the Indians nervous. They thought the white men had come to punish them for their treatment of Belle-Isle. The more nervous the Indians got, the more nervous they made the Frenchmen, especially when the Indians invited their visitors ashore, to show them a pile of bones.

After several exploratory trips inland, De la Harpe and his crew sailed away. Belle-Isle never names his captors, nor does he say exactly where he was held. But scholars say a list of Indian words gathered on a return voyage to the Indian village can be identified as Attakapas.

Both De la Harpe and Belle-Isle described the countryside in glowing terms. The Attakapas hunting grounds were made up of "magnificent prairies," says Belle-Isle, who said he saw "forty to fifty leagues of that land which is the most beautiful country in the world." De la Harpe describes the land as "black, light, and ready for the plow from the very edge of the sea."

Bienville doubted the reports. He counseled his directors in France to read them with a grain of salt, "since (De la Harpe's) discourse is based simply on assumptions and desires to succeed in founding an establishment ... could make him overlook possible difficulties."

Bienville abandoned his plan to build a fort at the Indian's bay in December 1721, probably because he was preoccupied with building another place, New Orleans.