The Raft of the Medusa
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Template:PaintingThe Raft of the Medusa is the name applied to an infamous catastrophic shipwreck of the French ship Medusa in 1816 in the Atlantic Ocean off the west coast of Africa. The incident, which led to the demise of 140 crew and passengers, was popularized throughout Europe by account of survivors, leading 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 one of which is by Théodore Géricault and hangs in the Louvre.
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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 Loire, the brig Argus, the Echo and the 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, it ran aground in shallow water off the west coast of Africa on the Arguin Bank.
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. (Not correct: it was Governor Schmaltz's raft 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.
Thirteen days later, when Argus found the raft almost by accident, there were only 15 survivors remaining. Argus took them 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.
Medusas surviving surgeon Henri Savigny submitted his account to the authorities. It was leaked to an anti-Bourbon newspaper, the Journal des debats, 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.
Géricault's depiction
Impressed by accounts of the shipwreck, the 25-year-old artist Théodore Géricault decided to make a painting based of the incident and contacted the writers in 1818. In order to make the painting as realistic as possible, Géricault made sketches of bodies in the morgue of the Hospital Beaujon. His finished painting, however, toned down the horror of the event by depicting the raft at the moment of rescue, with the Argus on the horizon.
Géricault used friends as models, notably the painter Eugène Delacroix as the figure in the foreground with his face to the ground and arms outstretched. The painting, which was 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.
Portrayals in film
- Iradj Azimi. Le Radeau de la Méduse, French film, 1998
- Cast: Jean Yanne (Chaumareys), Philippe Laudenbach (Julien Schmaltz), Claude Jade (Reine Schmaltz), Laurent Terzieff (Théodore Géricault), Daniel Mesguich (Lt. Coudein), Alain Macé (Henri Savigny), Jean Desailly (La Tullaye), Rufus (Soldier musician).
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.
- 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.
Other portrayals in popular culture
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 preserved the humour, having the captain say, "We've been framed, by Jericho!"
References
- Alexander McKee. Wreck of the Medusa, The Tragic Story of the Death Raft (1975)
See also
External links
- Le radeau de la Méduse – Géricault (http://www.artchive.com/artchive/G/gericault/raft_of_the_medusa.jpg.html)de:Das Floß der Medusa
