The Wreck of the Medusa: The Most Famous Sea Disaster of the Nineteenth Century"The Wreck of the Medusa is a spell-binding account of the most famous L shipwreck before the Titanic. Drawing on contemporaneously published accounts and journals of survivors, historian Jonathan Miles brilliantly reconstructs the ill-fated voyage and the events that inspired Theodore Gericault's magnificent painting The Raft of the Medusa." "On the dawn of July 2, 1816, the French frigate Medusa, bound for the Senegalese port colony of Saint Louis under the command of the incompetent royalist captain Hugo de Chaumareys, hit a famously treacherous reef. In the chaos that ensued, Chaumareys and a privileged few claimed the lifeboats. One hundred forty-seven men and one woman were herded onto a makeshift raft that was to be towed behind the captain's boat, but the towrope was soon severed and the raft set adrift. Those in the lifeboats, landing at different points along the coast of Senegal, trekked two hundred miles through the Sahara without food or water. As horrific as their experiences were, nothing compared to that of those marooned on the raft. Without a compass or many provisions, hit by a vicious storm the first night and exposed to sweltering heat during the following days, the group set upon each other: mayhem, mutiny, and murder ensued. When rescue arrived thirteen days later only fifteen were alive." "Among this handful of survivors from the raft were two men whose written account of the tragedy became an international best seller. The political aftershocks exposed corruption in Restoration France that reached as far as the Bourbon king. The scandal inspired a young artist, Theodore Gericault, whose Scene of Shipwreck won first prize at the Salon of 1819. But with no buyers, it was thirteen years before this iconic depiction of suffering and hope found a permanent home in the Louvre, at which point Gericault was dead." --Book Jacket. |
