The Wreck of the Medusa: The Most Famous Sea Disaster of the Nineteenth Century

by Jonathan Miles and Miles Jonathan

Book Overview

The Wreck of the Medusa is a spellbinding account of the most famous shipwreck before the Titanic, a tragedy that riled a nation and inspired Th odore G ricault's magnificent painting The Raft of the Medusa . In June 1816, the flagship of a French expedition to repossess a colony in Senegal from the British set sail. She never arrived at her destination; her incompetent captain Hugo de Chaumareys, ignoring telltale signs of shallow waters, plowed...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0871139596
• ISBN13: 9780871139597
• Release Date: October 2007
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.23 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

The same today as then

I read this book last year and thoroughly enjoyed every word. The author does a superb job of placing you on the raft and in the middle of the action. The understanding of this event and it's underlying causes is a very important lesson. I was struck, page after page, by the similarities between the incompetence of the French officials in choosing expedition personnel and the Bush administrations handling of the Katrina aftermath. Do yourself a big favor and add this one to your reading list. -Tim- La Mesa, California

Incompetence + cannibalism = fine art

Anyone who has studied art history is probably already familiar with Gericault's famous painting of the Medusa. I was first introduced to the painting in high school and while I remembered that it was inspired by a true and politically important incident, I didn't really know much beyond that. This book explains the event in great detail, but in a way that is very readable and not at all tedious. It also provides an overview of Gericault's life, his experience of creating the painting and public reactions to it. So really, you get a lot out of this book: naval history, 19th century French political history, art history and it has enough depictions of humanity at its worst that one might even classify it as having "true crime" elements. Highly recommended.

Step into a masterpiece

I had the impression to step into the very fabric in the canvas of Gericault's celebrated masterpiece, knowing personally each of the painting's characters. Mile's storytelling is so vivid, down to the last historical detail, that I soon forgot Medusa is not a novel. Compelling, hypnotic, fascinating.

History as a "Ripping Good Yarn"

If you`ve been fortunate enough to visit Paris, there's a good chance you've gone to the Louvre. There you may have found yourself looking at a very large and very striking painting, The Raft of the Medusa, by Theodore Gericault. The painting graphically portrays men dying, dead, and clinging to life on a raft at sea, while frantically signaling to a distant ship on the horizon in the hope of rescue. Was this painting based on a real incident? How did these men come to find themselves there? Why did Gericault paint this horrific work? How did the public react to it? Jonathan Miles in his excellent new book, Medusa: The Shipwreck, The Scandal, The Masterpiece, answers with passion and wit these and more questions about the events that inspired this masterpiece. Compelling though the astonishing acts of heroism, savagery and villainy spawned by this horrific ship wreck are, they're only part of the story. The resulting scandal rippled through 19th Century French and British politics and society for many years. Miles' work is an excellent piece of scholarship that is also a "ripping good yarn" of a wreck at sea and human survival at its rawest. It also a study of a cover-up and justice, both gained and tragically denied. In telling the story behind Gericault's memorable painting, Miles demonstrates how events can influence art, and how art in turn can influence events. Whether you are a Historian, Art Historian or just someone looking for a good book that provides food for thought, Jonathan Miles' vivid account of the Medusa and its fate is well worth a read.

Maritime Disaster, Political Disaster, Artistic Success

One of the many masterpieces within the Louvre is a huge and grim painting of a group of men abandoned on a raft in the middle of the sea, each in a pose of despair, or of the sliver of hope that a ship, seen as a tiny smudge on the ocean's horizon, might notice them. The famous painting, _The Raft of the Medusa_, is an 1819 version of what moviegoers now know as a disaster picture. It is the most famous artifact inspired by a real incident that had occurred three years before, the result of a shipwreck that had caught the imagination of the people of France and was a scandal that affected the restoration government of the time. The stories of the sailors, raft, and survivors have been told before, but Jonathan Miles in _The Wreck of the Medusa: The Most Famous Sea Disaster of the Nineteenth Century_ (Atlantic Monthly Press) has incorporated them into a larger tale of politics, painting, and propaganda. The disaster at sea is inherently fascinating, but it is finished in the first half of the book, the many strands of which Miles has made just as interesting and vital, if not so macabre. The ship _Medusa_ was a French frigate in a convoy bound for the French colony Senegal, carrying Governor Schmaltz, the new leader for the colony and captained by Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, was an old Royalist who was given his commission by the new king Louis XVIII, who with Napoleon in exile was trying to produce a unifying government. De Chaumareys was an incompetent seaman, and the _Medusa_ ran aground on bank west of the Sahara. To handle those fleeing the wreck who could not fit into the boats, the crew made a huge raft, lashing together spars and planks, and giving it a mast and sail. 147 people crowded on board the raft, which was tied to the ship's boats and was supposed to be towed by them as the whole conglomeration made for land. The raft was waterlogged and it held the boats back, so the governor gave the order that the tow rope be cut. For two appalling weeks, the diminishing crew experienced murders, suicides, delirium, hallucinations, mutiny, and cannibalism. The raft was eventually found by another ship in the _Medusa_'s convoy, with only fifteen men barely alive. One of the survivors was Alexandre Corréard, an engineer who went on to co-write the outstanding account of the disaster, along with political blaming for it. One of those susceptible to the romantic horror and the political barbs of the book was Théodore Géricault, who was inspired by the horrors of Corréard's story to depict the lamentable raft and its final crew. To help with research for the painting, he gathered body parts from the nearby morgue, and kept them within his studio. Corréard would come to the study and be unfazed by the stench and the gore, as it was a commemoration of an episode he had actually lived. Géricault painted his new friend into a key role in the painting, and among his other (living) models was also his friend Eugene Delacroix, who could no