La Belle functioned as a supply vessel for the 1684-1687 Gulf Coast colonizing expedition of French explorer Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, carrying the tools, trade goods, arms, and provisions meant to sustain a planned French outpost near the mouth of the Mississippi River. After La Salle's ships missed their intended target and landed instead on the Texas coast, La Belle anchored in Matagorda Bay, where a storm drove it aground and it sank in 1686, stranding the colonists and contributing directly to the collapse of the French colonial venture. The wreck lay buried in bay mud for over three centuries until the Texas Historical Commission located it in 1995 and excavated it within a custom-built steel cofferdam in 1996-1997, recovering the ship's hull timbers along with roughly one and a half to two million artifacts, including cannons, trade beads, tools, and human remains. Today La Belle no longer has an everyday function but instead serves as one of the most significant archaeological research collections in North America: its conserved hull and thousands of associated artifacts are the centerpiece of a permanent exhibit at the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, while related material is displayed at partner museums along the Texas coast as part of the La Salle Odyssey. The site itself remains an ongoing subject of maritime archaeological study documenting seventeenth-century European shipbuilding and colonization.