Wreck of the Medusa (1816): The Raft and Géricault's Painting

The wreck of the Medusa was one of the most notorious sea disasters of the 19th century. On 2 July 1816 the French frigate Méduse ran aground off the coast of West Africa, and around 150 people were cast adrift on a crude raft; after 13 days only 15 were still alive. The disaster became a political scandal in Restoration France and inspired Théodore Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa, one of the most famous works in the Louvre.

Background: a voyage to Senegal

After Napoleon’s final defeat, the restored Bourbon monarchy of Louis XVIII set about recovering France’s overseas colonies. Under the peace settlements of 1814 and 1815, connected to the Congress of Vienna, Britain agreed to return the trading colony of Senegal, which it had occupied during the wars.

In June 1816 a small flotilla left the Île d’Aix near Rochefort to carry the new governor, Colonel Julien-Désiré Schmaltz, together with officials, soldiers and settlers, to Saint-Louis in Senegal. The flagship was the Méduse, a 40-gun frigate, accompanied by the corvette Écho, the flute Loire and the brig Argus.

The Méduse was commanded by Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, a nobleman who had fled France during the Revolution and had barely served at sea for more than 20 years. His appointment owed much to his royalist loyalty. During the Hundred Days of 1815, many officers who had served Napoleon rallied to him, and after Waterloo the government preferred men it trusted politically.

The grounding

The Méduse sailed fast and soon left the slower ships behind. Chaumareys relied heavily on a passenger, a man named Richefort with no real navigational authority, and ignored warnings from his officers. The ship drifted too close to the coast and onto the Bank of Arguin, a wide area of shallows and sandbanks off what is now Mauritania, well known as a danger to shipping.

On the afternoon of 2 July 1816 the Méduse struck the sandbank. Efforts to refloat her over the following days failed, partly because the crew did not throw heavy cargo and cannons overboard. As a storm damaged the hull, the decision was taken to abandon ship.

The raft

There were about 400 people on board, but the six boats could carry only around 250. The crew built a raft from masts and timbers, roughly 20 metres long and 7 metres wide. On 5 July about 147 people, mostly soldiers and sailors with one woman, crowded onto it, standing in water up to their waists. They had little food: some biscuit, wine and water. Seventeen men chose to stay on the stranded ship.

The boats, carrying the governor, the captain and senior officers, began to tow the raft towards the coast. Within a short time the towlines were released, and the raft was left to drift. Who gave the order, and whether the lines were cut or slipped loose, was disputed bitterly afterwards. For the survivors it felt like a deliberate abandonment.

Thirteen days adrift

The experience on the raft became infamous. On the first night several people were swept away or crushed. On the second night, fuelled by wine and despair, a mutiny broke out among some of the soldiers, and dozens died in fighting or were thrown into the sea. Within days, starving survivors resorted to cannibalism, eating the flesh of the dead.

By the eighth day only around 28 people remained, many badly injured. The strongest decided to throw the weakest and sick into the sea so that the remaining supplies would last longer; 15 people were left. On the morning of 17 July they sighted a ship on the horizon. It was the Argus, which had been sent to search for the wreck. It disappeared from view, then returned a few hours later and rescued them. Several of the 15 died soon after reaching Saint-Louis.

The boats eventually reached the African coast. Governor Schmaltz and Captain Chaumareys, in the larger boats, arrived at Saint-Louis within days. Some groups landed and walked through the desert towards Saint-Louis, enduring heat and thirst. When a vessel finally reached the wreck of the Méduse, more than six weeks after she was abandoned, only three of the 17 men left aboard were still alive.

Scandal in Restoration France

The government at first tried to keep the affair quiet. But in September 1816 an account by the ship’s surgeon, Jean-Baptiste Henri Savigny, appeared in the Paris newspaper Journal des débats. In 1817 Savigny and the engineer Alexandre Corréard, both raft survivors, published a full narrative of the disaster, which ran through several editions and was translated into English.

The story caused a sensation. Liberal critics of the monarchy presented it as proof that the regime rewarded loyalty over competence. Chaumareys was court-martialled at Rochefort in 1817, found guilty of serious failures in command, dismissed from the navy and sentenced to three years in prison. The Minister of the Navy, the Vicomte du Bouchage, also faced heavy criticism. Britain formally returned Saint-Louis to France in January 1817.

Géricault’s painting

The young painter Théodore Géricault decided to make the disaster the subject of a monumental canvas. He interviewed Savigny and Corréard, had a model of the raft built, and studied the sick and dying at a Paris hospital to capture the appearance of suffering. His friend Eugène Delacroix posed for one of the figures.

The Raft of the Medusa, about 4.9 by 7.2 metres, was shown at the Paris Salon of 1819 under the neutral title Scene of a Shipwreck. It shows the moment the survivors first glimpsed the Argus, with a pyramid of bodies rising from the dead in the foreground to a figure waving a cloth at the top. Critics were divided, partly for political reasons, but the painting became a landmark of Romanticism. It was shown to large paying crowds in London in 1820, and the Louvre bought it in 1824, shortly after the artist’s death.

Legacy

The painting changed how artists treated contemporary events. Instead of heroes or kings, Géricault made ordinary, nameless sufferers the subject of a canvas on the scale normally reserved for history painting. Delacroix, Courbet and later painters of social realism learned from its ambition, and its composition has been studied by generations of art students.

The canvas itself has aged badly in places. Géricault used bitumen, a dark tarry pigment popular at the time, which never fully dries and has darkened and cracked over two centuries, making parts of the scene harder to read than when it was first shown.

The story has also lived on in literature, history and film. Savigny and Corréard’s narrative remains in print, and the novelist Julian Barnes devoted a chapter of A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989) to the shipwreck and the painting. Today the phrase “raft of the Medusa” is used in French and English as shorthand for people abandoned by those in charge.

Timeline

• 1816, 17 June: The Méduse and three other ships leave the Île d’Aix for Senegal.
• 1816, 2 July: The Méduse runs aground on the Bank of Arguin.
• 1816, 5 July: The ship is abandoned; about 147 people board the raft, which is soon cut loose.
• 1816, 17 July: The Argus rescues 15 survivors from the raft.
• 1816, September: Savigny’s account appears in the Journal des débats.
• 1817: Savigny and Corréard publish their narrative; Chaumareys is court-martialled.
• 1819, August: Géricault’s painting is shown at the Paris Salon.
• 1824: The Louvre acquires The Raft of the Medusa.

Why it matters

The wreck of the Medusa was a human tragedy caused by incompetence and indifference, and it became a symbol of the failings of the restored Bourbon monarchy that fell in the July Revolution of 1830. Through Géricault’s painting, the suffering of the raft’s passengers became one of the most powerful images in Western art, still used as a byword for abandonment and survival.