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On July 2, 1816, the French frigate "Medusa" ran aground off Cap Blanc. There were only 15 survivors due to starvation, riots, suicide, and cannibalism. From the New York Times book review:
"Rocking the Boat
By Florence Williams
Dec. 2, 2007
In 1816, the French minister of the navy wrote a worried letter to King Louis XVIII on the subject of the shipwreck of the frigate Medusa: “I bemoan the fact that the journalists revel in disclosing details of deplorable scenes, the picture of which must never be brought before the eyes of the public.”
Little did the minister know that a young painter, Théodore Géricault, was soon to undertake the greatest achievement of his short life, “The Raft of the Medusa,” painted on a canvas nearly 23 feet long by 16 feet high. It portrayed the survivors at their direst moment, surrounded by corpses and about to be forsaken by a ship in the distance. Exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1819, it won a gold medal and created a sensation throughout Europe.
Today, the painting hangs in the Louvre, and its artistic significance is well known — its intimate depiction of emotional wretchedness helped stimulate the Romantic movement. Less known is that the painting played an intriguing role in volatile Restoration politics, the result of a collaboration between the artist and one of the wreck’s survivors, now enthrallingly recounted in “The Wreck of the Medusa,” by Jonathan Miles. Although marketed as another sea disaster tale (and the wreck is grippingly recounted), the book is as revealing about the powerfully resistant art of two colorful figures in post-Napoleonic France.
The shipwreck was more than just a national embarrassment. Napoleon’s Hundred Days had ended; the Bourbon dynasty had been restored for a second time only a year before it sent a convoy of ships to Senegal to reclaim the colony from the English. The flagship Medusa carried almost 400 people, including settlers, scientists, the new governor of Senegal and a burned-out army regiment that had previously fought for and defended Napoleon. Commanding the ship was a minor aristocrat with little and outdated naval experience, Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, who had been given the post as a reward for his loyalty to the crown.
Political tensions on board between royalists and Bonapartists were palpable, and the fact that Chaumareys was considered a “moth-eaten monarchist who should have been put out to pasture long ago” didn’t help. When he failed to take proper soundings and misjudged an important landmark, the ship ran aground on the notorious Arguin Bank off the African shore.
What followed is among the grisliest of marine tales. Most of the politicians and officers, including the captain, boarded five lifeboats. Most of the rest, crew, soldiers and a few unlucky settlers, were herded onto a makeshift raft, having been promised that they would be towed to safety by the lifeboats. They were, as Miles puts it, “a grab bag of rough, drunken soldiers and sailors, assorted Cap Vert colonists and several officers who were out of favor.” Some took a look at the raft, which was already sinking, and elected to stay with the breached frigate. (When a rescue boat finally found those on the frigate more than 40 days later, only 3 of 17 were still alive.)
After just a few minutes at sea, an officer in the governor’s lifeboat lowered a hatchet and cut the rope that joined it to the raft. The other lifeboats pulled away in what Miles calls a “cowardly evacuation.” The raft was on its own, provisioned with only a few caskets of wine and some soggy biscuits. The men and one woman on board entered one of those mind-numbing episodes of human depravity, madness, fear and brutality that show what the human species is really capable of. The second night, “a rabble of combustible professional killers” went on a rampage. By dawn, 60 people were dead and only one barrel of wine remained. In short order, more murder, suicide, sickness, famine and cannibalism ensued. After 12 days, they sighted the French ship Argus on the horizon, only to watch it disappear. Remarkably, it reappeared two hours later because of a change in the wind. Of the original 147 people aboard, only 15 were left.
One of the embittered survivors, an engineer named Alexandre Corréard, went on to be one of the writers of a popular account of his ordeal that would become a major indictment of the Bourbon regime. He blamed the government for the incompetent leadership of the Medusa, for the lame rescue efforts after the shipwreck and for neglectful treatment of the survivors. After a trial, the captain was convicted at a court-martial but given a light sentence. Corréard, who sought the Légion d’Honneur and a job, was rebuffed. He and Géricault found each other and struck up a mutually beneficial friendship and an effective public relations machine. Corréard even posed for the painting.
Politically allied, Géricault and Corréard were abolitionists at a time when slavery was still an important part of French imperialism. Corréard’s nemesis, the new governor of Senegal, Julien Schmaltz, appeared to be profiting from the illegal slave trade, and Corréard was keen to report it. At a late stage in painting “The Raft of the Medusa,” Géricault added three black figures to the raft, a move Miles calls “daringly, dangerously avant-garde.” As the painting was widely displayed and discussed in France and Britain, it contributed significantly to the abolitionist critique of France.
While the subject of the shipwreck was alluring on a political level, Géricault was drawn to anguish of any kind, particularly class anguish. A morbid chronicler of street life, he sketched an execution, produced drawings of “tortured eroticism” and even kept rotting severed limbs — borrowed from a nearby hospital — in his studio. “Géricault’s subject matter had become man’s inhumanity to man,” Miles writes. He “emerges as the first great visual critic of the industrial revolution.”
At times Miles’s language is overwrought, as when he says Géricault was “fleeing the wreckage of his emotional life” or writes of “the shipwreck of lives caught up in an unrelenting passion.” Géricault had had a torrid affair with his aunt that ended when she became pregnant with his son, who was sent away after birth never to meet his parents. Géricault was probably bipolar, and the affair was just one of his problems. Another was his health; he died at 32 from spinal tuberculosis. The book could have benefited from fewer metaphors and a deeper examination of the painter’s mental anguish. The narrative, however, is brilliantly meted out. Sections alternate among the wreck itself, the tortured and bizarre life of the artist and the political upheavals in France.
In its aftermath, the shipwreck of the Medusa would figure in the machinations of the moderate king and his republican opponents to discredit the ultra-royalists who wanted to recreate the ancien régime. And years later, the wreck of the Medusa, the story of its survivors and the depiction of its raft in art would come to play an important role in furthering liberal causes from the abolition of slavery to the dissolution of the monarchy."
"Rocking the Boat
By Florence Williams
Dec. 2, 2007
In 1816, the French minister of the navy wrote a worried letter to King Louis XVIII on the subject of the shipwreck of the frigate Medusa: “I bemoan the fact that the journalists revel in disclosing details of deplorable scenes, the picture of which must never be brought before the eyes of the public.”
Little did the minister know that a young painter, Théodore Géricault, was soon to undertake the greatest achievement of his short life, “The Raft of the Medusa,” painted on a canvas nearly 23 feet long by 16 feet high. It portrayed the survivors at their direst moment, surrounded by corpses and about to be forsaken by a ship in the distance. Exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1819, it won a gold medal and created a sensation throughout Europe.
Today, the painting hangs in the Louvre, and its artistic significance is well known — its intimate depiction of emotional wretchedness helped stimulate the Romantic movement. Less known is that the painting played an intriguing role in volatile Restoration politics, the result of a collaboration between the artist and one of the wreck’s survivors, now enthrallingly recounted in “The Wreck of the Medusa,” by Jonathan Miles. Although marketed as another sea disaster tale (and the wreck is grippingly recounted), the book is as revealing about the powerfully resistant art of two colorful figures in post-Napoleonic France.
The shipwreck was more than just a national embarrassment. Napoleon’s Hundred Days had ended; the Bourbon dynasty had been restored for a second time only a year before it sent a convoy of ships to Senegal to reclaim the colony from the English. The flagship Medusa carried almost 400 people, including settlers, scientists, the new governor of Senegal and a burned-out army regiment that had previously fought for and defended Napoleon. Commanding the ship was a minor aristocrat with little and outdated naval experience, Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, who had been given the post as a reward for his loyalty to the crown.
Political tensions on board between royalists and Bonapartists were palpable, and the fact that Chaumareys was considered a “moth-eaten monarchist who should have been put out to pasture long ago” didn’t help. When he failed to take proper soundings and misjudged an important landmark, the ship ran aground on the notorious Arguin Bank off the African shore.
What followed is among the grisliest of marine tales. Most of the politicians and officers, including the captain, boarded five lifeboats. Most of the rest, crew, soldiers and a few unlucky settlers, were herded onto a makeshift raft, having been promised that they would be towed to safety by the lifeboats. They were, as Miles puts it, “a grab bag of rough, drunken soldiers and sailors, assorted Cap Vert colonists and several officers who were out of favor.” Some took a look at the raft, which was already sinking, and elected to stay with the breached frigate. (When a rescue boat finally found those on the frigate more than 40 days later, only 3 of 17 were still alive.)
After just a few minutes at sea, an officer in the governor’s lifeboat lowered a hatchet and cut the rope that joined it to the raft. The other lifeboats pulled away in what Miles calls a “cowardly evacuation.” The raft was on its own, provisioned with only a few caskets of wine and some soggy biscuits. The men and one woman on board entered one of those mind-numbing episodes of human depravity, madness, fear and brutality that show what the human species is really capable of. The second night, “a rabble of combustible professional killers” went on a rampage. By dawn, 60 people were dead and only one barrel of wine remained. In short order, more murder, suicide, sickness, famine and cannibalism ensued. After 12 days, they sighted the French ship Argus on the horizon, only to watch it disappear. Remarkably, it reappeared two hours later because of a change in the wind. Of the original 147 people aboard, only 15 were left.
One of the embittered survivors, an engineer named Alexandre Corréard, went on to be one of the writers of a popular account of his ordeal that would become a major indictment of the Bourbon regime. He blamed the government for the incompetent leadership of the Medusa, for the lame rescue efforts after the shipwreck and for neglectful treatment of the survivors. After a trial, the captain was convicted at a court-martial but given a light sentence. Corréard, who sought the Légion d’Honneur and a job, was rebuffed. He and Géricault found each other and struck up a mutually beneficial friendship and an effective public relations machine. Corréard even posed for the painting.
Politically allied, Géricault and Corréard were abolitionists at a time when slavery was still an important part of French imperialism. Corréard’s nemesis, the new governor of Senegal, Julien Schmaltz, appeared to be profiting from the illegal slave trade, and Corréard was keen to report it. At a late stage in painting “The Raft of the Medusa,” Géricault added three black figures to the raft, a move Miles calls “daringly, dangerously avant-garde.” As the painting was widely displayed and discussed in France and Britain, it contributed significantly to the abolitionist critique of France.
While the subject of the shipwreck was alluring on a political level, Géricault was drawn to anguish of any kind, particularly class anguish. A morbid chronicler of street life, he sketched an execution, produced drawings of “tortured eroticism” and even kept rotting severed limbs — borrowed from a nearby hospital — in his studio. “Géricault’s subject matter had become man’s inhumanity to man,” Miles writes. He “emerges as the first great visual critic of the industrial revolution.”
At times Miles’s language is overwrought, as when he says Géricault was “fleeing the wreckage of his emotional life” or writes of “the shipwreck of lives caught up in an unrelenting passion.” Géricault had had a torrid affair with his aunt that ended when she became pregnant with his son, who was sent away after birth never to meet his parents. Géricault was probably bipolar, and the affair was just one of his problems. Another was his health; he died at 32 from spinal tuberculosis. The book could have benefited from fewer metaphors and a deeper examination of the painter’s mental anguish. The narrative, however, is brilliantly meted out. Sections alternate among the wreck itself, the tortured and bizarre life of the artist and the political upheavals in France.
In its aftermath, the shipwreck of the Medusa would figure in the machinations of the moderate king and his republican opponents to discredit the ultra-royalists who wanted to recreate the ancien régime. And years later, the wreck of the Medusa, the story of its survivors and the depiction of its raft in art would come to play an important role in furthering liberal causes from the abolition of slavery to the dissolution of the monarchy."
Rocking the Boat
Posted from nytimes.com
World History
Suicide
Murder
Death
Naval/Maritime History
Posted >1 y ago
Responses: 3
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