Britain and the Medusa Shipwreck

‘The annals of the marine record no example of a shipwreck so terrible as that of the Medusa frigate. Two of the unfortunate crew, who have miraculously escaped from the catastrophe, impose upon themselves the painful and delicate task, of describing all the circumstances which attended it.’

So begins the voyage narrative Naufrage de la frégate la Méduse first published in 1817 by Henri Savigny and Alexandre Corréard, a surgeon and a geographer/engineer respectively on the Medusa. Transporting soldiers and official passengers, including the newly-appointed governor Colonel Julien Schmaltz, to re-establish the French colony at Senegal, the ship ran aground off the west coast of Africa on July 2nd, 1816. As Savigny and Corréard’s tale unfolds, detailing acts of negligence and betrayal, of mutiny, slaughter and cannibalism, it is not difficult to see why news of this shipwreck and its notorious raft should have gripped Europe in the years following the Napoleonic Wars. But the Medusa was more than just another (albeit sensational) maritime disaster. In France it became a cause célèbre, embroiled in the complexities of Bourbon-restoration politics and tensions between the Liberal and Royalist factions, the nation’s fraught colonial ambitions and, as events progressed, with the highly emotive subject of the slave trade.

In the minds of Savigny and Corréard (and posterity), responsibility for the catastrophe that claimed over 150 lives lay with the Medusa’s captain, Hugues Deroys de Chaumareys, an aristocrat recently returned from exile, and by extension the Minister of the Marine, vicomte Dubouchage, who appointed him. Determined to exclude naval officers who had served under Napoleon, Dubouchage made his selection on the basis of de Chaumareys’ aristocratic pedigree and pro-Bourbon sympathies, and not on his merits as a sea captain. At the time the Medusa set sail in June 1816, de Chaumareys had not served on board a French ship for twenty years. His incompetence, both in terms of seamanship and leadership, led to the grounding of the Medusa and encouraged the panic that swept those on board. After attempts to re-float the stricken vessel, the decision was made to abandon her. Approximately 250 people made their disorganised way onto six lifeboats leaving the rest, the vast majority of whom were ordinary soldiers with a handful of low-ranking officers and civilians, to a makeshift raft. This, it was agreed, would be towed to safety. In the haste to get to shore, the tow-ropes were (according to Savigny and Corréard) deliberately untied, leaving 149 men and one woman stranded. With few provisions and no navigational equipment, the situation on the raft rapidly deteriorated. Outbreaks of mutiny and acts of mindless violence occurred from the second day, and by the fourth, all survivors were practising cannibalism. On the eighth day, in order to extend the remaining provisions, the fittest among the survivors elected to throw the badly injured and dying overboard. The final fifteen men survived for another five days until their rescue by the Argus brig, a ship in the Medusa convoy. Five died shortly afterwards, leaving ten survivors of the original group. Among these were Savigny and Corréard.

Back in France, Savigny submitted an account of the disaster to the French authorities, which was leaked to the anti-Bourbon broadsheet, Journal des débats (September 13th, 1816). The Medusa débâcle was now a national scandal. Given the events before, during and after the shipwreck, which implicated everyone from Dubouchage to de Chaumareys and Schmaltz and the higher-ranking officers, it is not surprising that an official cover-up was attempted, including a lenient prison sentence for de Chaumareys. In view of the atrocities committed on the raft, not even the survivors were immune. Indeed a scramble ensued on all sides to save face, apportion blame and win the public relations battle. Without employment and hope of reparation from the government, Savigny and Corréard collaborated on an extended narrative, which became a best seller (there were five French editions printed between 1817 and 1821). At precisely the same time, the young artist Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) was searching for a contentious contemporary subject to monumentalise on canvas. By early 1818 he had made the acquaintance of Savigny and Corréard. And it was their emotive account of the shipwreck that inspired his painting.

At the Paris Salon of 1819, the French authorities and public were confronted with Géricault’s epic The Raft of the Medusa. What were they to make of it? Clearly the artist aimed to be confrontational, both in political and artistic terms. And predictably art critical responses in the French press largely followed political affiliations, the painting provoking either revulsion or admiration according to respective Bourbon or Liberal sympathies. However, the reaction overall might be described as one of bafflement. Géricault had, after all, elected to transform a contemporary subject, an ignoble and contentious one at that, into an essay in grand history painting. Gone indeed was the panegyrical imagery of the Revolution and Empire by the artists Jacques-Louis David and Antoine-Jean Gros. Ostensibly sympathetic to those on the raft, and by extension to Savigny and Corréard’s cause, the painting shows the survivors descrying a ship barely visible on the horizon. Géricault had executed composition drawings for a number of scenes, including the bloody mutiny against the officers, cannibalism and the final rescue. But it was the first sighting of the Argus, prior to rescue, that he decided upon. In the Medusa narrative, the passage concludes:

For about half an hour, we were suspended between hope and fear; some thought they saw the ship become larger, and others affirmed that its course carried it from us: those latter were the only ones whose eyes were not fascinated by hope, for the brig disappeared. From the delirium of joy, we fell into profound dispondency [sic] and grief.

As one British reviewer deftly remarked, Géricault had ‘selected a time when the ruin of the raft may be said to be complete’. Here was a disturbing image indeed. Seemingly bereft of a hero or cause, it visualised at best, the fallacy of hope and pointless suffering, and at worst, the basic human instinct to survive, which had superseded all moral considerations and plunged civilised man into barbarism. In fact, as numerous art historical studies testify, Géricault’s painting defies a single reading. Whether interpreted today as a cruel parody of heroic art, as a shipwreck cast as Biblical deluge, or as a political allegory of the French nation, for the majority of Géricault’s contemporaries The Raft of the Medusa was tied inextricably to the specific shipwreck that inspired it. And no one involved in that sorry event emerged unscathed. Except, perhaps, the British.

Interestingly, it is the British involvement in and reaction to the Medusa story which has been largely overlooked, scholarship having focused until recently on the press reviews of Géricault’s painting when it was exhibited to great acclaim in London, at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, from June to December 1820. Even then, on the basis that the direct consequences of the shipwreck were relevant only in France, an assumption has been made that for a British audience The Raft of the Medusa was devoid of ‘political implications’ and thus appreciated as a subject negotiated as ‘high art’. How could the British be neutral on this subject? The disaster occurred only a year after the Allied victory at Waterloo and Napoleon’s exile to St Helena, and when British troops still occupied areas of northern France. And in a broader context, Britons were predisposed to take a particular interest in the subject of the Medusa, firstly, as a self-consciously maritime people, secondly, in terms of the perceived supremacy of the British navy, and thirdly, in view of the long-standing imperial rivalry with France, the pursuit of dominion having been fiercely contested, whether in war or peacetime, for over a century.

Franco-British military and colonial rivalry is an underlying theme of Savigny and Corréard’s narrative. Senegal itself had changed hands between the two nations on a number of occasions from the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) onwards before its final allocation to France in the peace treaties of 1814 and 1815. Savigny and Corréard even set out the history of the colony with the British, who seized control in 1809, cast as usurpers. It was thus a British governor and garrison waiting in 1816 for the arrival of the Medusa and her convoy for the official handover of the colony. Indeed the courtesy and compassion shown by the British officers towards the raft survivors recovering in hospital at St Louis, the French colonial capital of Senegal, in particular that of Major Peddy and Captain Campbell (who were about to embark on an ill-fated expedition into Africa), were noted by Savigny and Corréard with faintly disguised astonishment. In addition to offering provisions and money for the passage home, none of which were forthcoming from Schmaltz, Peddy advised Corréard to go to London, not Paris, predicting that he would receive no assistance from the Minister of the Marine. Corréard did not take this advice, electing instead to give his fellow countrymen the opportunity to redeem themselves. Alas they did not. And the Medusa narrative bitterly notes the accuracy of the Englishman’s prophecy.

Clearly Savigny and Corréard’s work is a complex and on occasion contradictory document. Writing for a French audience, the authors sought primarily to apportion blame for the shipwreck, first and foremost to de Chaumareys but also to Schmaltz and other French officers, and absolve themselves from the horrific events on the raft. Indeed the authors’ lengthy description of the conduct of the British, the age-old enemies, was calculated to maximise French embarrassment by casting the appalling behaviour of de Chaumareys and Schmaltz into even sharper relief. But Savigny and Corréard also sought to present themselves as true patriots, who rail against ‘the afflicting dependence, under which [France] is bowed down by enemies jealous of our glory and our power’, and who seek to expose the corrupt policies of the Restoration government (it may also have rankled that the new government’s structure was loosely based on the British system), which are the cause of their personal suffering and an insult to the nation. Hence the narrative plays on comparing and contrasting the Napoleonic and Bourbon regimes, on past glory and present defeat, on meritocracy and the rule of privilege. After making the decision to ‘await death in a manner worthy of Frenchman’, the last fifteen survivors drew ‘comparisons between the hardships [the officers present] had undergone in their glorious campaigns, and the distresses we endured upon our raft.’ And Franco-British rivalry looms large in the ensuing discussion of Napoleonic battles, ‘when the French valour showed itself in all its lustre’ (Nelson’s defeat at Teneriffe, in 1797, ‘by a handful of French’ is discussed earlier in the narrative). In this context the narrative locates the Medusa shipwreck, and by extension Géricault’s painting, within the so-called Napoleonic Legend, which, in projecting a highly romanticised vision of the recent past, imbued the present with an overwhelming sense of loss and uncertainty. Géricault’s friend, the artist Horace Vernet (1789-1863), who had briefly fought for the National Guard in 1814, specialised in such imagery during his early career as an artist. His ‘The Soldier-Labourer’, which shows a Napoleonic War veteran reflecting on his glorious past and dishonourable present, so similar in sentiment to the Medusa narrative, was one of seven paintings rejected from the Paris Salon of 1822 because they were deemed to be anti-Bourbon.

But perhaps the most significant criticism to be levelled at the Restoration government by Corréard was on the subject of the slave trade, which had been abolished in British colonies since 1807. Although abolition was a condition imposed by the British for transferring Senegal into French hands, Schmaltz had allowed the slave trade to resume clandestinely after he had taken formal charge of the colony in January 1817. The enlarged second edition of the Medusa narrative, which was published in April 1818 in French and English, contains an impassioned argument by Corréard for the future of France’s colonial ambitions in Africa based on the abolition of slavery. Thus Schmaltz was doubly damned in Corréard’s eyes, because of his callous behaviour during and after the Medusa shipwreck, and because of his involvement in the heinous slave trade. Significantly Corréard attempts to make the ending of the trade a point of national pride by specifically highlighting British criticism of its continuation in French colonies:

Let there be no grounds for hearing in the English Parliament, voices boldly impeaching our good faith, attacking the national honour, and possitively [sic] asserting that France maintains in her African possessions the system of the slave trade in the same manner as she did before she consented to its abolition.

Géricault was working on his ideas for The Raft of the Medusa at the time of the second edition of the Medusa narrative. And he shared Corréard’s abolitionist sympathies, a fact that is often quoted when interpreting the prominence of the black figure hailing the distant ship in the painting (the figure is generally thought to represent Jean Charles, a black soldier and raft survivor). The ordinary soldiers abandoned on the raft were in fact multi-racial, and comprised Frenchmen, Italians, Spaniards, Moors and Africans. Géricault’s painting utilises the raft victims’ racial diversity to dramatic effect, contrasting black and white among the pile of bodies. But the selection of a black man, whom many in France at the time would dismiss as representative of a sub-class, for the apex of the composition was a loaded and highly controversial decision. This has led art historians to interpret the painting as a quasi-manifesto for Corréard’s views, with the signalling black figure as a symbol of hope. Given this abolitionist agenda the historian Albert Boime (1990) has suggested that the exhibition of Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa in London in 1820 was timed specifically to coincide with British anti-slavery agitation.

Clearly there was much to interest the British on the subject of the Medusa shipwreck. And the interest was indeed immediate. Within days of the story breaking in Paris, The Times published a translation of Savigny’s report, describing the disaster as ‘lamentable’ and ‘inexplicable’. Other newspapers followed suit. In April 1818, the English translation of Savigny and Corréard’s narrative was available in London and later that year an abridged version and a pamphlet appeared in Dublin and London respectively. While the British press and public had sympathy for the sufferings of their fellow human beings, they were equally gripped by the authors’ gruesome revelations. The London pamphlet, for example, clearly capitalising on the contemporary appetite for any account of maritime disaster, introduced the Medusa story as ‘a mass of human suffering’, with survivors ‘feeding on the Dead Bodies of their Unhappy Comrades’. As was freely acknowledged, seafaring was an exceptionally dangerous profession and thus ripe for adventure, disaster and controversy. For the armchair traveller, man voyaging into the unknown, distanced from regulating social structures, and struggling with the sublime forces of Nature, had all the potential menace and horror of gothic fiction. Not surprisingly, shipwreck amounted to a national obsession, with the storm-tossed ship as one of the defining motifs of the period, experienced second hand through countless voyage narratives and informed fiction from Daniel Defoe’s enduringly popular Robinson Crusoe (1719) and William Falconer’s The Shipwreck (1762) to Byron’s grisly shipwreck passage in Don Juan (1819). And given the opportunity for sublime spectacle, shipwreck was a main-stay of visual culture. From Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg’s first performance of the Eidophusikon (an animated stage-set) in 1781, ‘Storm at sea and Shipwreck’ was to feature as strongly in theatre productions and commercial shows as it did at the Royal Academy annual exhibition.

But as numerous press reports and shipwreck narratives attested, there were examples of mutiny and violence on British ships, including those of the Royal Navy. Cannibalism, too, was a genuine possibility irrespective of nationality and additionally terrifying because the force of circumstance, which made eating human flesh a reality, was beyond the control of the shipwrecked. And yet, to succumb was considered an abomination. Whether reading the Medusa narrative’s unrelenting sequence of anarchy, violence and cannibalism or staring at Géricault’s evocation of a living hell, with human beings literally stripped to reveal (to quote Edmund Burke, 1790) ‘the defects of [mankind’s] naked, shivering nature’, Britons must have imagined that the horrifying spectre of the French Revolution and the Terror had risen again, with Gillray’s frenzied sans-culottes, feasting on the flesh of their victims.

Was it the fate of all civilised men, in circumstances similar to that of the Medusa, to commit such atrocities? With this chilling question in mind, attempts were made in Britain to turn the exposure to moral and physical danger at sea to patriotic advantage. Because as the antiquarian John Graham Dalyell commented in his popular Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea (1812), such exposure ‘materially contributes to the formation of character’. Thus British sailors, fortified by courage and endurance, ‘are invariably the first in matters of the most daring enterprise.’ In this context, Savigny and Corréard’s narrative was a gift to patriotic sentiment because it showcased the lack of discipline and moral fibre promoted as alien to native seafarers. Not surprisingly, British commentators, such as Patrick Maxwell in Perils and Captivity of 1827, cheerfully subscribed to the authors’ description of the Medusa story as the darkest page in maritime history. After all, as a French catastrophe, there was no need for soul-searching on the part of the British. And, as if to ram the truth home, the conduct of Major Peddy and other British officers at St Louis was focused upon as ‘a beautiful relief’ to the ‘selfishness and brutality’ otherwise demonstrated by Frenchmen.

But if the conduct of the French alone were enough for the British to get their teeth into, the opportunity to compare and contrast national character via the Medusa shipwreck was given an even greater boost, because at precisely the same time in 1816 a potentially similar drama was unfolding for a British navy ship, the Alceste. Returning from China, carrying the British ambassador, Lord Amherst, the ship ran aground on an uncharted reef off the Straits of Gaspar between the Indonesian Islands of Bangka and the Belitung Islands. A raft was made for supplies, not people. And despite the ensuing dangers, including attacks from the Malays, order was maintained and everyone survived. In the same year as the first edition of Savingy and Corréard’s narrative, A Narrative of a Voyage in H.M.S. Alceste was published by the ship’s surgeon, John MacLeod. From start to finish, the book celebrates the British character in adversity. ‘Under all the depressing circumstances attending shipwreck’, MacLeod enthused, ‘of hunger, thirst, and fatigue; and menaced by a ruthless foe; it was glorious to see the British spirit staunch and unsubdued’, the shipwrecked saved from ‘all the horrors of anarchy and confusion’ by the ‘personal example’ of Lord Amherst and above all the exemplary leadership of the ship’s captain, Murray Maxwell. What a contrast to Savigny and Corréard’s bitter recriminations. It was for this reason, according to the Dublin edition, that the Medusa narrative had a greater claim to public attention in Britain, because it provided ‘a comparison highly creditable to the British Navy’, demonstrating ‘the superiority of that profession to which we owe so much of our wealth, our glory, and our peace.’ This sentiment was by no means unique. In 1818 the Edinburgh Review published a long article discussing both McLeod’s narrative and the Medusa narrative. ‘Never’ the author opined, ‘was there a contrast so striking, as in the conduct of the English and French sailors. On the one side, all is great and calm, and dignified. On the other, page rises above page, and event towers above event, in horror and depravity.’ According to the writer, what saved the British was ‘courage, discipline and order’. What destroyed the French was the lack of all three. Indeed the British on the Alceste and the French on the Medusa were bound to act in the way that they did because of their national character. As the author observes:

No nation is so enthusiastically fond of glory, so essentially enterprising, ambitious and warlike, as the French. But the impetuosity of their courage exposes them to reverses, in which they are much depressed and as abject, as in prosperity they are arrogant and headstrong.

The courage of the British, on the other hand, ‘is neither so buoyant in prosperity, nor so dejected in reverses’:

It is, like all our other qualities, accompanied by reflexion [sic]; and where the valour of a Frenchman begins to fail, the courage of an Englishman rises, from the resources he finds within his mind and heart. He is circumspect while the tempest only threatens; but intrepid when it bursts upon him. He requires no motive, but danger, to be brave; and his fortitude does not abandon him, even when his courage can be of no avail.

These national characteristics were played out in William Moncrieff’s The Shipwreck of the Medusa: Or, The Fatal Raft, which opened at London’s Royal Coburg Theatre (now the Old Vic) on May 29th, 1820. Unlike Géricault’s painting, Moncrieff’s popular play was created specifically to entertain the British public, making his treatment of the Medusa shipwreck especially significant. Clearly he aimed to capitalise on the sensationalism and familiarity of the disaster but mediated through the popular conventions of melodrama. Thus the subject was converted into a domestic (that is localised, not generalised) drama, replete with villain-crossed lovers (necessitating the inclusion of a disguised heroine) musical accompaniment and spectacular stage scenery. But the whole was given a patriotic agenda by the introduction of a heroic British sailor, Jack Gallant (the boatswain on the Medusa) the character based on the jolly, honest, jargon-speaking sailors of popular fiction. Jack Gallant’s role in the play was to act as a reminder of both the superiority of native seamanship and the honourable, fearless character of the British sailor previously discussed. But more specifically, he acted as a corrective to the societal chaos of Savigny and Corréard’s narrative. Thus as a British sailor, Jack ‘never flinches from his duty in the hour of trial’. When the issue of cannibalism arises, Jack rallies the survivors to die rather than commit such an atrocity. And when all hope appears to have vanished, Jack elects to scuttle the raft, to save them from a lingering death, with the stirring words, ‘I have done all a British sailor should, and now, good-bye friends, good-bye old England; and the great commander have mercy on us all,’ at which point the rescue ship appears in the distance. Thus by providence and British pluck, disaster was averted. Evidently the play gratified existing notions of national character. But it also acted as an antidote to the irredeemable suffering and despair of Savigny and Corréard’s narrative, and by extension Géricault’s painting. Those haunted by the human tragedy of the Medusa could thus take comfort in the knowledge that had a British sailor been on board, the story may have been very different indeed.

Christine Riding was a co-curator of ‘Constable to Delacroix: British Art and the French Romantics’, a 2003 exhibition at Tate Britain.