Théodore Géricault 1791-1824 "Le Radeau de la Méduse" 1819 - Canvas (H. : 4,91 m, W. : 7,16 m) Musée du Louvre - Paris

Named for the hideous gorgon of Greek mythology, "La Méduse" was originally built as a 44-gun frigate.
With the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, she was converted to a troop transport, and 30 of her guns were removed.
On June 16th, 1816, "La Méduse" sailed as flagship of a four-ship convoy dispatched to establish a garrison in Senegal, which had been repatriated to France as part of the peace settlement negotiated after the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo and after the return of the Bourbon monarchy to the French throne.
The captain of the convoy, Viscount Hughes de Chaumareys, was a royalist with no previous command experience. Pressured for a quick passage by the new governor of Senegal, Colonel Julien-Désiré Schmaltz, de Chaumareys disregarded the Naval Ministry's orders first by sailing ahead of his squadron and then by crossing the treacherous and poorly charted Arguin Bank off the coast of West Africa.

On the afternoon of July 2nd, sailing in good weather, "La Méduse" ran aground roughly 50 kilometers off the coast of the Sahara Desert and 250 miles north of Saint-Louis, Senegal.
Chaumareys's efforts to refloat the ship failed because he refused to jettison any of her fourteen 3-ton cannon. A gale on July 5th only worsened the ship's plight.
Chaumareys proceeded to abandon ship, but rather than ferry the passengers ashore systematically, he allowed everyone to clamber pele-mele into the ship's six boats. These could only accommodate about half the ship's complement, and 150 people, mostly soldiers and sailors, were ordered onto a raft, hastily thrown together from spars, planks, barrels, and loose rigging, and poorly provisioned.
Chaumareys and Schmaltz planned to tow the raft, but it was so sluggish that they soon abandoned it.
Those in the boats eventually made it to Saint-Louis.

Conditions on the overloaded raft were terrible to start with and worsened fast. Over a two-week period, drowning, starvation, burning heat, violent mutiny, and widespread cannibalism reduced the original complement to 15, including the ship's doctor, J. B. Henri Savigny, and geographical engineer Alexandre Corréard.
On July 17th, the delirious survivors were rescued by the French ship "Argus".
Seven weeks after the shipwreck, four more men were found aboard the "La Méduse", the last of 17 men who had chosen to remain with the ship.

News of the catastrophe quickly reached Paris. Savigny and Corréard's account condemning Chaumareys and Schmaltz for their incompetence, callousness, and cowardice achieved wide circulation at home and abroad.
Bonapartists seized on the tragedy to embarrass the Naval Ministry's nepotistic command structure and to attack the monarchy.
Chaumareys was tried on five counts but acquitted of abandoning his squadron, of failing to refloat his ship and save her cargo of gold, and of abandoning the raft.
He was found guilty of incompetent and complacent navigation and of abandoning "La Méduse" before all her passengers were off.
The last verdict carried the death penalty, but Chaumareys was sentenced to only three years in jail. The trial was widely denounced as a whitewash and confirmation of Bourbon corruption, and by 1818, public opinion had forced the resignation of Governor Schmaltz and the unprecedented passage of the Gouvion de Saint-Cyr law legislating for the first time a meritocracy in the French military.

Perhaps the best-known legacy of the "La Méduse" shipwreck, though, was a painting by Théodore Géricault, first exhibited at the Paris Salon in September 1819.
Popularly known as "The Raft of the La Méduse" the painting is entitled simply "Scene of Shipwreck" and portrays the survivors at the moment of their seeing salvation on the horizon in the form of the "Argus". In 1980, the remains of the ship itself were identified by divers on the Arguin Bank some 50 kilometers off the coast of Mauritania.