The frigate Méduse sailed for Senegal in June 1816 carrying colonial officials and settlers — and, in command, the Restoration’s patronage at its purest: Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, a royalist émigré who owed his captaincy to loyalty rather than seamanship and had barely stood a deck in twenty years. Ignoring his experienced officers, chasing speed close inshore, he ran the ship onto the notorious Arguin Bank off the Mauritanian coast on 2 July.
The grounding was survivable; the conduct was not. When refloating failed and the ship began to break, the six boats could not carry the four hundred aboard. A raft was hammered together from masts and spars — twenty metres by seven, awash to the knees under load — onto which 147 people were put: soldiers, sailors, a few passengers, one woman. The plan had the boats towing it ashore. Within hours the tow lines were cast off — by whose order was disputed ever after — and the boats, carrying the captain, the governor, and the well-connected, pulled away for the coast.
Thirteen days
The raft had wine, almost no food or water, and no means of steering. The first night’s storm washed dozens away; the second brought mutiny — soldiers broaching the wine and attacking the officers’ end of the raft — and battle that halved the survivors. Then came the arithmetic of thirst and hunger: the wounded and failing slipped or were pushed into the sea, and by the fourth day the living were eating the dead — scenes the survivor-chroniclers, the surgeon Savigny and engineer Corréard, recorded with clinical fury, including the decision on day eight to throw the weakest overboard to stretch the wine. When the brig Argus found the raft by chance on 17 July, 15 of the 147 were alive; five more died soon after ashore.
Chaumareys, who had abandoned even the wreck itself with men still aboard, was court-martialled — and, scandalously gently, sentenced to three years, the verdict protecting the ministry that had appointed him. Savigny and Corréard’s banned-and-bestselling account made the raft a European byword for Bourbon rot.
The painting
The young Théodore Géricault made it eternal. Obsessed, he interviewed survivors, had the raft’s carpenter build him a scale model, filled his studio with morgue limbs to study death’s colours, and in 1819 hung at the Salon a canvas five metres by seven: The Raft of the Medusa — the pyramid of the dead and dying cresting toward a tiny ship on the horizon, hope and horror in one wave. The government understood it perfectly as an indictment and bought it anyway after his death. It hangs in the Louvre, the founding painting of French Romanticism — a shipwreck the state tried to bury, fixed at the scale of history painting forever.