French frigate Méduse (1810)

''Méduse'' was a 40-gun frigate of the French Navy, launched in 1810. She took part in the Napoleonic Wars during the late stages of the Mauritius campaign of 1809–1811 and in raids in the Caribbean.

In 1816, following the Bourbon Restoration, ''Méduse'' was armed en flûte to ferry French officials to the port of Saint-Louis, in Senegal, to formally re-establish French occupation of the colony under the terms of the First Peace of Paris. Through inept navigation by her captain, Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, who had been given command after the Bourbon Restoration for political reasons and even though he had hardly sailed in 20 years, ''Méduse'' struck the Bank of Arguin off the coast of present-day Mauritania and became a total loss.

Most of the 400 passengers on board evacuated, with 146 men and 1 woman forced to take refuge on an improvised raft towed by the frigate's launches. The towing proved impractical, however, and the boats soon abandoned the raft and its passengers in the open ocean. Without any means of navigating to shore, the situation aboard the raft rapidly turned disastrous. Dozens were washed into the sea by a storm, while others, drunk from wine, rebelled and were killed by officers. When supplies ran low, several of the injured were thrown into the sea, and some of the survivors resorted to the Custom of the Sea, engaging in cannibalism. After 13 days at sea, the raft was discovered with only 15 people still alive.

News of the tragedy stirred considerable public emotion, making ''Méduse'' one of the most infamous shipwrecks of the Age of Sail. Two survivors, a surgeon and an officer, wrote a widely read book about the incident, and the episode was immortalised when Théodore Géricault painted '' The Raft of the Medusa'', which became a notable artwork of French Romanticism.

Service

''Méduse'' was commissioned in Nantes on 26 September 1807.

Napoleonic Wars

In 1811, she was sent off to Java with , in a frigate division under the command of Joseph-François Raoul. On 2 September, the frigates arrived at Surabaya, tailed by the 32-gun frigate HMS ''Bucephalus''. Two days later, another British ship, HMS ''Barracouta'', joined the chase, but lost contact on 8 September. On 12 September, ''Méduse'' and ''Nymphe'' chased ''Bucephalus'', which escaped and broke contact the next day. ''Méduse'' was back in Brest on 22 December 1811. She then continued her service in the Atlantic.

Between 27 and 29 December 1813, the French frigates and ''Méduse'' captured a number of British merchant ships at . The vessels captured were , ''Lady Caroline Barham'', and ''Potsdam'', all three coming from London and bound to Jamaica; ''Flora'', from London to Martinique; ''Brazil Packet'', from Madeira to ; and ''Rosario'' and ''Thetis'', from Cape Verde. The French burnt all the vessels they captured, except ''Prince George''. They put their prisoners into her and sent her off as a cartel to Barbados, which she reached on 10 January 1814.

Bourbon Restoration

With the restoration of the French monarchy in 1814, Louis XVIII decided to restore Royalist and nobility dominance of the senior ranks of both the French Navy and Army. Consequently, Hugues Viscount Duroy de Chaumareys was appointed '' Capitaine de frégate'' and given command of ''Méduse'', even though he had hardly sailed in 20 years.

Course to Senegal

On 17 June 1816, a convoy under the command of Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys on ''Méduse'' departed Rochefort accompanied by the storeship ''Loire'', the brig ''Argus'' and the corvette ''Écho'' to receive the British handover of the port of Saint-Louis in Senegal. ''Méduse'', armed en flûte, carried many passengers, including the appointed French governor of Senegal, Colonel Julien-Désiré Schmaltz, his wife Reine Schmaltz, and his secretary, Joseph Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Griffon du Bellay. ''Méduse''s complement totaled 400, including 160 crew plus a contingent of marine infantrymen intended to serve as the garrison of Saint-Louis. The ship reached the island of Madeira on 27 June.

Schmaltz then wanted to reach Saint-Louis as fast as possible, by the most direct route, although this would take the fleet dangerously close to the shore, where there were many sandbars and reefs. Experienced crews sailed further out. ''Méduse'' was the fastest of the convoy and, disregarding his orders, Captain Chaumareys quickly lost contact with ''Loire'' and ''Argus''. ''Écho'' kept pace and attempted to guide ''Méduse'', but to no avail. ''Écho'' then prudently moved further out to sea.

Chaumareys had decided to involve one of the passengers, Richefort, in the navigation of the frigate. Richefort was a philosopher and a member of the Philanthropic Society of Cape Verde, but had no qualification to guide ships. As it neared the coast of Africa, the course of ''Méduse'' became dangerous. Richefort apparently mistook a large cloud bank on the horizon for Cape Blanco on the African coast, and so underestimated the proximity of the Bank of Arguin off the coast of Mauritania.

On 2 July 1816, now more than off course, ''Méduse'' ran into increasingly shallow water, with both Chaumareys and Richefort ignoring signs such as white breakers and mud in the water. Eventually, Lieutenant Maudet took it upon himself to start taking soundings off the bow, and, measuring only , warned his captain. Realising the danger at last, Chaumareys ordered the ship brought up into the wind, but it was too late, and ''Méduse'' ran aground from the coast. The accident occurred at a spring high tide, which made it difficult to re-float the frigate. The captain refused to jettison the 14 three-tonne cannons and so the ship settled into the bank.

Raft

''Méduse'' was not carrying enough lifeboats to transport all of the passengers to safety in a single trip. Plans were proposed to use the ship's launches to ferry the passengers and crew to shore, away, which was expected to require at least two boat trips. Numerous ideas for lightening ''Méduse'' and immediately coming off the reef were also proposed, in particular that of building a raft on to which the crew could unload her cargo.

A raft measuring long and wide was soon constructed with wood salvaged from the wreck, and was nicknamed "''la Machine''" by the crew. On 5 July, a gale (part of the Custom of the Sea) to survive. On the eighth day, the fittest decided to throw the weak and wounded overboard, leaving just 15 men remaining, all of whom survived another four days until their rescue on 17 July by the brig ''Argus'', which accidentally encountered them.

Aftermath

''Argus'' took the survivors of the raft to Saint-Louis to recover. Five of them, including Jean Charles, the last African crew member, died within days. Chaumareys decided to rescue the gold that was still on board ''Méduse'' and sent out a salvage crew, which discovered that ''Méduse'' was still largely intact. Only three of the 17 men who had decided to stay on ''Méduse'' were still alive 54 days later. British naval officers helped the survivors to return to France because aid from the French Minister of the Marine was not forthcoming.

''Méduse''s surviving surgeon, Henri Savigny, and the governor's secretary submitted their account of the tragedy to the authorities. It was leaked to an anti- Bourbon newspaper, the '' Journal des débats'', and was published on 13 September 1816. The incident quickly became a scandal in French politics and Bourbon officials tried to cover it up. At his court-martial at Port de Rochefort in 1817, Chaumareys was tried on five counts but acquitted of abandoning his squadron, of failing to re-float his ship and of abandoning the raft; however, he was found guilty of incompetent and complacent navigation and of abandoning ''Méduse'' before all her passengers had been taken off. Even though this verdict exposed him to the death penalty, Chaumareys was sentenced to only three years in jail. The court-martial was widely thought to be a "whitewash" and, in 1818, Senegal Governor Schmaltz was forced to resign. The Gouvion de Saint-Cyr Law later ensured that promotions in the French military would thereafter be based on merit.

Savigny and another survivor, the geographer-engineer Alexandre Corréard, subsequently wrote a book with their own account (''Naufrage de la frégate la Méduse'') of the incident, published in 1817. It went through five editions by 1821 and was also published with success in English, German, Dutch, Italian, and Korean translations. A revision of the text in later editions increased the political thrust of the work.

Shipwreck site

In 1980, a French marine archaeological expedition led by Jean-Yves Blot located the ''Méduse'' shipwreck site off the coast of modern-day Mauritania. The primary search tool was a one-of-a-kind magnetometer developed by the CEA.

The search area was defined on the basis of the accounts of survivors of ''Méduse'' and, more importantly, on the records of an 1817 French coastal mapping expedition that found the vessel's remains still projecting above the waves. The background research proved to be so good that the expedition team located the shipwreck site on the first day of searching. They then recovered enough artifacts to identify the wreck positively and to mount an exhibit in the Marine Museum in Paris.

In popular culture

Géricault's painting

Impressed by accounts of the shipwreck, the 25-year-old artist Théodore Géricault decided to create an oil painting based on the incident and contacted the writers in 1818. His work depicts a moment recounted by one of the survivors: prior to their rescue, the passengers saw a ship on the horizon, which they tried to signal. She disappeared, and in the words of one of the surviving crew members, "From the delirium of joy, we fell into profound despondency and grief". The ship ''Argus'' reappeared two hours later and rescued those who remained. The painting, titled '' Le Radeau de la Méduse'' (English: ''The Raft of the Medusa''), is considered an iconic work of the French Romantic movement and Géricault's masterpiece. It is on display in the Louvre.

Film

* '' Le Radeau de la Méduse'' (1994), directed by Iradj Azimi and starring Jean Yanne as Chaumareys, Daniel Mesguich as Coudein, Alain Macé as Henri Savigny, Claude Jade as Reine Schmaltz, Philippe Laudenbach as Julien Schmaltz, Michel Baumann as Alexandre Corréard and Laurent Terzieff

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