On 2 July 1816 the French frigate Medusa, en route for Senegal, ran aground on the dreaded Arguin sandbank off the west coast of Africa. Incompetent seamanship had landed the vessel there and attempts to refloat the Medusa over the next couple of days proved to be in vain. The decision was therefore taken to press on for St Louis in Senegal, a couple of hundred miles to the south, in various of the ship’s boats and barges but, as they couldn’t carry all the passengers and crew, a large raft was constructed, from spars and timber lashed together, which would be towed behind four of the larger boats.
The raft was substantial — 20 metres long by 7 wide — had a mast with a sail and even a small raised deck at the centre. When the convoy headed off there was a considerable mass of people crowded on board the raft — 146 men and 1 woman.
All this may sound reasonable and relatively resourceful but, as Jonathan Miles makes clear in this fascinating account of the ordeal that was to follow, nothing about the fateful voyage of the Medusa, or the historical context of the shipwreck or the consequences that followed, was simple. For the French, the grounding of the Medusa, and its aftermath, was one of those isolated events in time around which a series of socio-cultural-historical forces circled, intermingled and balefully collided. Napoleon was in exile; Louis XVIII was the new king of France. The captain of the Medusa was an inept sailor, an old Royalist rewarded for his loyalty to the French crown with this commission. The crew was fractious and undisciplined. On board were embittered republicans, men who saw post-Revolutionary France in a state of shocking decline.
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