Medusa (ship)

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The Raft of the Medusa
Théodore Géricault, 1818–1819
Oil on canvas
491 × 717 cm, 193.3 × 282.3 inches
Musée du Louvre, Paris

The Medusa (original French name: La Méduse) was a French frigate that gained notoriety when it struck the Bank of Arguin off the coast of Senegal in 1816, resulting in the catastrophic evacuation of its company, and one of the most infamous shipwrecks of the Age of Sail.

The incident, which led to the demise of 140 crew and passengers, was popularized throughout Europe by account of survivors and led to a scandal in the French government because of the incompetence of the ship's captain and the feeble rescue effort. It was later the subject of several notable paintings, the most famous of which is Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa, which hangs in the Louvre.

Contents

[edit] History

In 1816 the new Bourbon government of France sent a small fleet to officially receive the British handover of the port of Saint-Louis in Senegal to France. The fleet consisted of four ships; the storeship Loire, the brig Argus, the corvette Echo and the frigate Medusa. Medusa was to carry the passengers, including the appointed French governor of Senegal , Colonel Julien-Désire Schmaltz and his wife Reine Schmaltz. In addition there were a total of 400 passengers, including 160 of the crew.

The French Ministry of the Marine made the mistake of appointing inexperienced Frigate-Captain Hugues Duroy de Chaumereys to lead the fleet. He had mainly worked as a customs officer more than twenty years previously and had worked against Napoleon. His crew did not particularly appreciate him, because they had served with Napoleon during his reign.

The fleet left Port de Rochefort on June 17. Medusa sailed quickly away before the rest of the fleet. On July 17, Captain de Chaumereys ran the ship aground in shallow water off the west coast of Africa.

At first the crew tried to release her by throwing heavy items overboard, but de Chaumereys stopped the effort. Eventually he decided to abandon ship. Because there were only six lifeboats, he made a raft out of masts and crossbeams to carry the rest of the crew. Dignitaries – 250 of them – took the lifeboats and attempted to tow the raft. The raft was too flimsy to keep all the rest (149 men and one woman) afloat. Seventeen men decided to stay on Medusa. The rest were left with no food and water to speak of.

Those in lifeboats soon noticed that the idea of towing the raft was impractical. De Chaumereys decided to cut the rope and leave the rest of the crew to its fate, four miles (6 km) off shore. (According to other sources it was Governor Schmaltz's boat that was first to drop the tow line to the raft.)

On the raft, the situation deteriorated rapidly. Men began to throw wine and flour out of spite and fight among themselves. On the first night 20 men – whites and Africans, soldiers and officers – were killed or committed suicide. Rations dwindled ever more rapidly and on the fourth day some on the raft resorted to cannibalism. On the eighth day, the fittest began throwing the weak and wounded overboard. By that time only fifteen men remained, all of whom survived until their rescue a week later.[1]

The ship Argus took the survivors to Saint-Louis to recover. Five of the survivors, including Jean Charles, the last African crew member, died within days. Three of the seventeen men that had decided to stay on the Medusa were later recovered alive. British naval officers helped the survivors to return to France because aid from the French Minister of the Marine was not forthcoming.

Medusa's surviving surgeon Henri Savigny submitted his account to the authorities. It was leaked to an anti-Bourbon newspaper, the Journal des débats, and appeared on September 13, 1816. The matter became a scandal embroiled in French internal politics and officials tried to cover it up. De Chaumereys was found guilty in the court martial at Port de Rochefort.

Savigny and ship's geographer Alexander Corréard released their own account (Naufrage de la frégate la Méduse) of the incident in 1817. It went through five editions by 1821 and was also published in an English translation.

[edit] Géricault's depiction

Impressed by accounts of the shipwreck, the 25-year-old artist Théodore Géricault decided to make a painting based on the incident and contacted the writers in 1818. In order to make his Raft of the Medusa as realistic as possible, Géricault made sketches of bodies in the morgue of the Hospital Beaujon. The painting depicts a moment recounted by one of the survivors: prior to their rescue, the passengers saw a ship on the horizon, which they tried to signal (it can be seen in the upper right of the painting). It disappeared, and in the words of one of the surviving crew members, "From the delirium of joy, we fell into profound dispondency [sic] and grief".[2] The ship, Argus, reappeared two hours later and rescued those who remained.

Géricault used friends as models, notably the painter Eugène Delacroix as the figure in the foreground with his face turned downward and arms outstretched. The work, which was realized on the epic scale of a history painting, yet based on a current news story, first appeared in the Paris Salon in 1819 and was a sensation. It currently resides in the Louvre.

[edit] Shipwreck site found

In 1980 a French marine archeological expedition led by Jean-Yves Blot located the Medusa shipwreck site off the coast of modern-day Mauritania. The team was based out of the port city of Nouadhibou, approximately 100 miles (160 kilometers) north of the wreck site and used four sailboats as the expedition work vessels. The primary search tool was a one-of-a-kind magnetometer developed by a group at the French Atomic Energy Agency. The search area was defined on the basis of the accounts of the Medusa survivors and more importantly on the records of an 1817 French coastal mapping expedition that found the Medusa's remains still projecting above the waves. The background research proved to be so good that the expedition team located the shipwreck site on the very first day of searching. They then recovered enough artifacts to positively establish the identity of the wreck and to mount an exhibit in the Marine Museum in Paris. Jean-Yves Blot wrote a book titled Chronique d'un Naufrage Ordinaire about the shipwreck and the expedition.

[edit] Portrayals

[edit] Portrayals in film

[edit] Portrayals in literature

  • A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes — a semi-fictional work that attempts to deglaze and satirise popular historical legends. The chapter Shipwreck is devoted to the analysis of this painting. The first half narrates the incidents leading to the shipwreck and the survival of the crew members. The second half of the chapter renders a dark platonic and satirical analysis of the painting itself, and Gericault's "softening" the impact of crude reality in order to preserve the aestheticism of the work.
  • In Watchmen by Alan Moore, one of the parallel storylines involves a shipwrecked man making a raft out of the dead bodies of his shipmates, and being assailed by a shark.
  • The German dramatist Georg Kaiser wrote a play The Raft of the Medusa (Das Floß der Medusa) (1940-1943).
  • The untranslated second volume of Peter Weiss's novel The Aesthetics of Resistance (Die Ästhetik des Widerstands) opens with a detailed historical account of the Medusa and subsequently describes Géricault's painting.
  • The Raft by Arabella Edge, published in 2006, is a fictional account describing how Gericault may have come to his painting. (The American edition, published in 2007 by Simon & Schuster, is titled "The God of Spring.")

[edit] Other portrayals in popular culture

The rock group Great White used this painting as the cover art for their album Sail Away.

The second album by Irish folk-rock group The Pogues, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, uses the famous painting as its album cover, with the faces of the band members replacing those of the men on the raft. Also, on their album Hell's Ditch they pay tribute to the incident with the song "The Wake of the Medusa."

The layout of the scene is copied in the French comic book Astérix Légionnaire (Goscinny/Uderzo, 1967) to depict yet another shipwreck of Astérix's recurring pirate enemies. The captain's comment is the pun, "Je suis médusé" ("I am dumbfounded"). Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge in their English translation replaced this pun with a different joke specifically relating to the painting, having the captain say, "We've been framed, by Jericho!" [1]

In The Adventures of Tintin album The Red Sea Sharks, while the protagonists are escaping on a raft, a wave washes Captain Haddock off. He climbs back on with a jellyfish on his head. Tintin asks him: "Do you think this is some raft of Medusa?" ("medusa" meaning the same as "jellyfish")

French songwriter and poet Georges Brassens alludes to the raft of Medusa in his song Les copains d'abord (1964). The song is a hymn to friendship, symbolized by the crew of a ship named "Les Copains d'Abord" (Friends first), and in the first verse it says that she was not "the raft of Medusa".

Dr. Lecter's mind wanders to Gericault's anatomical studies for The Raft of the Medusa while waiting for Senator Martin to focus on their conversation in the novel The Silence of the Lambs.

[edit] Citations

  1. ^ Riding, Christine: "The Raft of the Medusa in Britain", Crossing the Channel: British and French Painting in the the Age of Romanticism, page 75. Tate Publishing, 2003.
  2. ^ Riding, Christine, page 77, 2003.

[edit] References

  • Alexander McKee. Wreck of the Medusa, The Tragic Story of the Death Raft (1975)
  • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard. Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816, available as a free eBook from Project Gutenberg by clicking here

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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